Feminine Mystique Published: Friedan Reawakens Feminism
Betty Friedan interviewed suburban housewives for five years before writing The Feminine Mystique. They described their lives as comfortable prisons. One called it "the problem that has no name." The book sold three million copies in three years. Women started meeting in living rooms to talk about what they'd been told not to discuss: ambition, anger, wanting more than motherhood. Within a decade, Title IX passed and abortion became legal. It started with asking women what they actually felt.
February 19, 1963
63 years ago
Key Figures & Places
What Else Happened on February 19
Septimius Severus and Clodius Albinus each brought 150,000 men to Lugdunum in 197 AD. The battle lasted two days. At one point, Severus's flank collapsed and he…
Constantius II banned pagan worship in 356, but he couldn't ban the temples themselves. Too many. Too expensive to destroy. So Romans kept visiting them — not t…
Constantius II ordered every pagan temple in the Roman Empire shut in 356. Not destroyed — closed. The difference mattered. Priests couldn't perform sacrifices.…
Boniface III waited eight months to become pope. The longest gap between popes in the church's first thousand years. He needed approval from Constantinople — th…
Sigismund III became the only person to rule both Sweden and Poland simultaneously. He'd inherited Poland through his mother in 1587, then Sweden through his fa…
Huaynaputina erupted with such force in 1600 that it ejected enough ash to bury nearby villages and trigger a global volcanic winter. The resulting drop in temp…
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