The Feminine Mystique

The Feminine Mystique is the title of a book written by Betty Friedan who also founded The National Organization for Women (NOW) to help US women gain equal rights. She describes the 'feminine mystique' as the heightened awareness of the expectations of women and how each woman has to fit a certain role as a little girl, an uneducated and unemployed teenager, and finally as a wife and mother who is to happily clean the …

…appear to be so little a threat at the moment that it is hardly ever mentioned... Whatever its potentiality in sexual politics, female homosexuality is currently so dead an issue that while male homosexuality gains a grudging tolerance, in women the event is observed in scorn or in silence (pt. 3, ch. 8).' There seems to be no distinction made between homosexual men and homosexual women in the media and this causes another form of separation.