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Primary source: Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 1963.
Caption: Founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW), Betty Friedan wrote this influential treatise critiquing the loneliness and dissatisfaction felt by many suburban housewives in postwar America.
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[. . . ]
The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—"she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—"Is this all?"
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Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963), 15.
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