The 100 best nonfiction books: No 18 – The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963)

The book that ignited second-wave feminism captured the frustration of a generation of middle-class American housewives by daring to ask ‘is this all?’

Betty Friedan, the godmother of the postwar US women’s movement, was an accidental feminist. “Until I started writing [The Feminine Mystique]” she confessed in 1973, “I wasn’t even conscious of the woman problem.” Friedan had begun her research into “the problem that has no name” – a catchy homage to “the love that dare not speak its name” of Oscar Wilde’s fin-de-siècle disgrace – as part of her work for a questionnaire of her former college classmates on their 15th reunion in 1957, thinking that she would “disprove the current notion that education had fitted us ill for our role as women”.

Few books in this series have enjoyed such a direct and immediate influence on their readership

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