Reading List

Authors Like Betty Friedan

In 1957, fifteen years after she graduated from Smith College, Betty Friedan sent a questionnaire to her old classmates asking how their education and their lives had turned out. She had been a labour journalist at UE News until 1952, when she was let go while pregnant with her second child, and was by then a freelancer writing for women's magazines in the suburbs of New York. The answers she got — from educated women with husbands, children and houses who could not say why they were unhappy — became “the problem that has no name”, and in 1963 W.W. Norton published them as The Feminine Mystique. It sold more than three million copies and is usually credited with starting the second wave of American feminism. Three years later she co-founded the National Organization for Women and became its first president; she died in Washington on her 85th birthday, 4 February 2006. Readers come to Friedan for that book's mix of reporting and anger: interviews, magazine clippings and expert advice laid side by side until the pattern becomes impossible to miss. The writers below share either her subject — what a society expects of women and what it costs them — or her method: an argument built from evidence about ordinary lives, written for a general reader.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Second-wave feminism · Women, work and family · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Betty Friedan, start with Simone de Beauvoir, whose The Second Sex made the argument a decade earlier and at five times the length. Kate Millett and Germaine Greer are the bestsellers that followed in 1970, bell hooks is the critic who showed whom Friedan left out, and Susan Faludi picks up the story in the 1980s. To see what the book actually did to the women who read it, there is Stephanie Coontz.

10 authors like Betty Friedan

01
The argument before her

Simone de Beauvoir

French · b. 1908 · Philosopher and novelist · Prix Goncourt 1954

De Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908 and became one of the central figures of French existentialism. The Second Sex (1949), first published in English in 1953, examines how women have been made into the “other” through biology, history, myth and everyday life. Her novel The Mandarins, about Paris intellectuals after the war, won the Prix Goncourt in 1954.

The theory behind The Feminine Mystique, written fourteen years earlier. Where Friedan works from interviews and women's magazines, de Beauvoir works from philosophy and history, but the chapters on the married woman and the mother describe the same trap. She is longer, denser and more radical; Friedan is the version an American housewife could read in a week.

— Lisanne

Every book by Simone de Beauvoir →

02
The next big book

Kate Millett

American · b. 1934 · Writer and artist

Millett was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and wrote Sexual Politics (1970) as her doctoral thesis at Columbia University; it reads D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer as evidence of how power between the sexes works, and made her famous enough for Time to put her on its cover that year. She later wrote the memoirs Flying (1974) and The Loony-Bin Trip (1990). She died in Paris in 2017.

Where Friedan diagnosed the suburbs, Millett went after the whole culture: the novels, the family and the idea that the relation between men and women is political at all. Her book is more academic and more confrontational, and her public coming out as bisexual in 1970 put her on the other side of the arguments Friedan was having inside NOW. Read the two together to see how fast the movement changed between 1963 and 1970.

— Lisanne
Every book by Kate Millett →
03
The same year, from Britain

Germaine Greer

Australian · b. 1939 · Writer and academic

Greer was born in Melbourne and published The Female Eunuch in 1970, an international bestseller arguing that women have been cut off from their own energy and desire and must take their liberation rather than wait for it to be granted. She returned to the subject in The Whole Woman (1999). In 2015 some 3,000 students campaigned against a lecture she was due to give at Cardiff University after she said transgender women are not women; she gave it under security.

The louder, funnier, more sexual answer to Friedan. Both books address the woman who did everything she was told and still feels cheated, but Greer has no patience for reform through organisations and wants a revolution in how women live in their bodies. Friedan is the better reporter; Greer is the better provocateur.

— Lisanne
04
The movement's other face

Gloria Steinem

American · b. 1934 · Journalist and activist

Steinem made her name as a magazine journalist, most famously with “A Bunny's Tale” (1963), written after eleven days undercover at the New York Playboy Club, and co-founded Ms. magazine, launched on its own in 1972. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983) collects her essays; My Life on the Road (2015) is her memoir of decades of travelling and organising. She died at home in New York in September 2026, aged 92.

The other best-known name of American second-wave feminism, and the contrast is the point: Friedan was the founder and organiser, Steinem the journalist and spokeswoman, and the two were openly at odds for years. Steinem's essays are shorter and wittier and reach the women Friedan's book did not speak to. Start with the essay collection.

— Lisanne

Every book by Gloria Steinem →

05
The critique you need

bell hooks

American · b. 1952 · Writer and cultural critic

Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Kentucky, hooks wrote more than thirty books on race, gender and class, from Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981) to Feminism Is for Everybody and All About Love (both 2000). Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984) opens by calling The Feminine Mystique “a limited one dimensional perspective on women's reality”, written for college-educated, married, middle- and upper-class white women.

The essential second book after Friedan, because it starts with her. hooks takes “the problem that has no name” seriously and then asks who was cleaning the house while the housewife looked for meaningful work. Her prose is plainer than Friedan's and the argument wider: class and race are not footnotes to it.

— Lisanne

Every book by bell hooks →

06
Motherhood as an institution

Adrienne Rich

American · b. 1929 · Poet and essayist · National Book Award 1974

Rich began as a formal, prize-winning young poet and moved through the 1960s into open feminist argument. Diving into the Wreck shared the National Book Award in 1974; she refused to accept it alone and took it with Audre Lorde and Alice Walker on behalf of women whose voices went unheard. Of Woman Born (1976) is her prose book on motherhood as experience and as institution.

Friedan wrote about the housewife from the outside, as a reporter; Rich wrote about the mother from the inside, as one. Of Woman Born separates the experience of having children from the institution built around it, which is the distinction The Feminine Mystique keeps reaching for. Read it for the same anger in a more exact and more personal form.

— Lisanne

Every book by Adrienne Rich →

07
Against the experts

Barbara Ehrenreich

American · b. 1941 · Journalist and essayist

With Deirdre English, Ehrenreich wrote For Her Own Good (1978), a history of the doctors, psychologists and household scientists who told American women how to live. For Nickel and Dimed (2001) she spent three months in minimum-wage jobs, including waitress, hotel housekeeper and Wal-Mart associate, to find out whether a person could live on that pay. She won the Erasmus Prize in 2018 and died in 2022.

For Her Own Good is the history behind one of Friedan's best chapters, the one on the Freudians and functionalists who sold women domesticity as fulfilment. Ehrenreich shares her method — let the experts' own words convict them — and her impatience, with better jokes. Nickel and Dimed then goes where Friedan did not: to the women working for wages all along.

— Lisanne

Every book by Barbara Ehrenreich →

08
What happened when women went to work

Arlie Russell Hochschild

American · b. 1940 · Sociologist

Hochschild was born in Boston and taught sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. The Managed Heart (1983) introduced the idea of emotional labour; The Second Shift (1989) followed working couples to see who did the housework and childcare once both partners had jobs. Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), about Tea Party supporters in Louisiana, was a finalist for the National Book Award.

The Feminine Mystique told women that work outside the home was the way out; The Second Shift is the report a generation later on what happened when they took it. Hochschild uses the same kind of evidence Friedan did — long interviews in people's own homes — and finds the problem had moved rather than gone away.

— Lisanne
09
The 1980s sequel

Susan Faludi

American · b. 1959 · Journalist · Pulitzer 1991

Faludi was born in Queens, New York, and won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism for a Wall Street Journal report on the leveraged buyout of Safeway. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. In the Darkroom (2016), about her father's transition late in life, won the Kirkus Prize.

The closest thing to a sequel to The Feminine Mystique. Faludi does for the 1980s what Friedan did for the 1950s: gathers the magazine stories, films, statistics and expert pronouncements and shows them pushing women back towards home. She is a more careful journalist, checking the numbers the media repeated, and the book reads as a direct descendant.

— Lisanne
Every book by Susan Faludi →
10
The book about the book

Stephanie Coontz

American · b. 1944 · Historian

Coontz is a historian of marriage and the family who taught at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. The Way We Never Were (1992) takes apart the nostalgia for the 1950s family; Marriage, a History (2005) traces how marriage for love replaced marriage for property. For A Strange Stirring (2011), named after a phrase in Friedan's opening chapter, she interviewed almost two hundred people who read The Feminine Mystique when it came out.

The best companion to Friedan, and the fairest. Coontz shows what the book did for the women who read it in 1963 — many said it made them feel they were not alone — and also what it got wrong or left out, especially working-class women and women of colour. Read it straight after The Feminine Mystique.

— Lisanne

Where to start if you loved Betty Friedan

If you want the theory behind it, read Simone de Beauvoir.

The Second Sex, starting with the chapters on the married woman and the mother.

If you want the critique, read bell hooks.

Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center opens with Friedan, and goes further.

If you want the sequel, read Susan Faludi.

Backlash: the same method, applied to the 1980s.

If you want the book's own story, read Stephanie Coontz.

A Strange Stirring: what The Feminine Mystique did to the women who read it.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Betty Friedan

Who should I read if I love Betty Friedan?

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex is the book that made the argument first. Kate Millett's Sexual Politics and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, both from 1970, are the bestsellers that followed. bell hooks's Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center is the essential critique, Susan Faludi's Backlash the closest thing to a sequel, and Stephanie Coontz's A Strange Stirring a history of the book itself.

What books are like The Feminine Mystique?

Susan Faludi's Backlash (1991) uses the same method on the 1980s. Arlie Russell Hochschild's The Second Shift (1989) looks at what happened when women went to work and still did the housework. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English's For Her Own Good (1978) is a history of the experts who told women how to live. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) is the older, more philosophical treatment of the same subject.

What is “the problem that has no name”?

It is Friedan's phrase, from the first chapter of The Feminine Mystique, for the dissatisfaction of educated American housewives in the 1950s who had the home, husband and children they were told would fulfil them and still felt empty. She first noticed it in the answers to a questionnaire she sent to her Smith College classmates for their 15th reunion in 1957.

Why is The Feminine Mystique criticised?

Mainly because it speaks for a narrow group: college-educated, married, middle-class white women. bell hooks made this argument in 1984, and the historian Stephanie Coontz repeats it in A Strange Stirring (2011) while still crediting the book's effect on its readers. Friedan was also criticised for her hostility to lesbians in the movement; in 1969, as president of NOW, she called them a “lavender menace”.

Was Betty Friedan really just a suburban housewife?

Not quite. Before the book she had spent years as a labour journalist, at Federated Press and then UE News, and she was working as a freelance magazine writer while raising her children. The historian Daniel Horowitz argued that her feminism began in that left-wing labour journalism of the 1940s rather than in the suburbs of the 1950s; Friedan disputed his reading.

Did Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem get along?

Not well. Both were leading figures in the American women's movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, but Friedan, who had founded NOW, and Steinem, who became the movement's best-known public face through journalism and Ms. magazine, disagreed over strategy and were publicly at odds for years.

What should I read after The Feminine Mystique today?

For a current writer in the same line, Rebecca Traister's All the Single Ladies (2016), on the rise of unmarried women in America, and Good and Mad (2018), on women's anger as a political force, both combine history and reporting the way Friedan did. For the history of the book, read Stephanie Coontz's A Strange Stirring.

Footnotes

  1. Betty Friedan — Wikipedia
  2. Stirring Up 'The Feminine Mystique' 47 Years Later — NPR
  3. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center — Wikipedia
  4. Pioneering author and second-wave feminist Kate Millett dies — Windy City Times
  5. Germaine Greer — EBSCO Research Starters
  6. Susan Faludi — Wikipedia
  7. Arlie Russell Hochschild — Wikipedia
  8. Gloria Steinem, feminist icon and journalist, dies at 92 — ABC7 New York

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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