what did the american dream mean to women libing in 1950s and 1960s america?

What did the American Dream mean to women living in 1950s and 1960s America?

In 1957 Betty Friedan, a wife and mother of three trained as a clinical psychologist and working as a freelance writer, started carrying out research into the lives of the American housewife. Friedan felt that for American wives and mothers at the time; “there was a strange discrepancy between the reality of [their]lives as women and the image to which [they] were trying to conform” and she came to call this image the “feminine mystique”. Her research revolved around her search for the origins of this mystique and its effects on women, and involved her interviewing, in depth, women at “crucial points in their life cycle”. Friedan strongly believed that “woman, as a man, has the power to choose, and to make her own heaven or hell” but it would appear that women at the time did not realise this as they were not infact making their own decisions. Betty Friedans research therefore raises th...