When I went to college all those years ago history was simple. There was a straight line from the Greeks through the Founders to contemporary America. Progress! And mostly good. Not anymore. In college or grad school and certainly in the current course in my doctorate program the lesson is that Western Civilization has lots of ‘splainin to do. Even the Enlightenment wasn’t all that enlightened with featured thinkers who were racist slavers and had a new admiration for science that accepted crackpot theories as truths.

In my current class we’re concentrating on all the sins — colonialism, racism, sexism. You can add a lot of slamming of capitalism as well. As part of the course, each student must make a class presentation related to that week’s topic of disdain. I, of course, choose sexism

Now everyone in the class is younger than me, including the very pleasant Professor, even though they’re all at least in their mid- 30s. When we read several of the French critics of colonialism, she spoke about how they were influenced by France’s painful giving up its colony in Algeria in 1960. Oddly enough I was in Paris at the time, just out of college, and living with my dashing British journalist boyfriend, later my husband, who was often sent to Algiers or Oran to cover the story.

I remembered the riots in the streets when the colonists enraged by being abandoned by De Gaulle would roar Algeria Francaise and confront the police outside the Elysee Palace. The cops, les flics, did not carry guns but their capes were lined with lead, and they would hit the demonstrators across their faces, bloodying them. Amazing, my professor said, when I shared my memories. Amazing, that I was there. Amazing, I’m sure she was also thinking I was so old and a student in her class.

To study sexism, we read Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir, of course, and then bell hooks (who no, does not capitalize her name) and Joan Butler. (Wikipedia uses they as Butler’s pronoun.) But I made my presentation on Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique. For, unfortunately, criticism of the book can be part of gender studies, while the importance of the book and Betty, brilliant, difficult, explosive Betty are often ignored.

The Feminine Mystique was published in February 1963. Only a couple of months before in December 1962 George Gallup, America’s leading pollster at the time had done a survey of American women. The poll, according to Gallup, wasn’t intended to examine “the extremes” among American women. “Old maids, divorced women, childless women, working mothers certainly existed in America but they were of concern mainly to sociologists, because they are unusual and exist in a society not geared to them,” Gallup stated. Rather the aim of the poll was to portray how “most” American women felt about their lives. According to Gallup, “American housewives are content because they know precisely why they’re here on earth … Practically every one of the 1,813 married women in this survey said that the chief purpose of her life was to be either a good mother or a good wife.” Although Gallup acknowledged many women also said, “it takes more than motherhood to make a woman completely happy; it also takes a man.” Gallup’s buoyant conclusion was “the typical American female is serene, secure and happy.”

Now Betty based The Feminine Mystique on her own instincts and a survey she did of less than 200 of her Smith classmates for their 15th college reunion. And Betty found these women not so happy. Instead, she claimed they were suffering from what she called “the problem that has no name” bored, unfulfilled and frustrated about the narrowness of their “happy housewives’” lives.

The book was an immediate bestseller that sold millions of copies and started second-wave feminism in America and around the world. Makes you wonder why we have ever trusted pollsters or been so easily convinced by data.

Still the book now, has many important feminist critics. They complain it was only about and for upper middle class White suburban women. Betty even though she had been a journalist for union papers and was certainly a Democrat was quite conservative herself. She was concerned about lesbians becoming too important in the women’s movement. Although she was divorced and had an unhappy marriage, she didn’t like man bashing. She was jealous of younger, prettier, far more telegenic Gloria Steinem who was becoming a feminist leader around the same time. And whenever Betty held a meeting at her large Upper West Side Manhattan apartment there was always a maid or two cleaning up in the background.

I knew Betty. I admired her. For Ladies’ Home Journal I bought excerpts from her later books though they were never as popular as The Feminist Mystique. She always was a contrarian. At the Women’s Conference in Beijing in 1995 a big dinner was held in her honor. Lots of food which she liked. Lots of attention which she liked. But when she got up to speak, the mother of second stage feminism said. “You know, I feel sorry for men these days. They’re having a hard time.” It was what nobody expected. That was Betty.

What did my classmates think of The Feminine Mystique? Not much. In fact, the whole class about sexism was kind of a bust. There was a lot more enthusiasm for bashing the British Empire about colonialism. The men said almost nothing. Though one wondered if there was any sexism in the animal kingdom. Only one woman had a read a copy, a gift from her grandmother.

The Professor asked us all to read two Guardian articles about how tradwives were trending among Gen Zs. The articles noted that the young women who wanted to be tradwives wished they didn’t have to go to work and envied the leisure time and lack of stress they believed women once had. Currently a book about a tradwife influencer is on the Times best seller list.

My class made me realize what the constrained life was like for millions of women before Betty’s bombshell of a book was no longer even a memory. Even odder, for some it had become a dream.