![]() For the most part, Friedan controls her passion and directs it towards clear-eyed and persuasive arguments against the glorification of housewifery. She offers up chilling case studies and heartbreaking testimonies of women infantilised, suppressed and made suicidal by the misery of "occupation: housewife". In the most immoderate passage of her seminal 1963 book, she writes: "The women who grow up wanting to be 'just a housewife', are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own deaths in the concentration camps." This comparison may be absurd, but given Friedan's findings, it is at least partly understandable. Yet to Betty Friedan the "life-restricting, future-denying" cult of the housewife that gripped the US was about as funny as the Holocaust. ![]() I n her present incarnation, the 1950s housewife is a bit of a joke: a self-ironising, Cath Kidston-clad figure of kitsch domesticity. ![]()
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