1. Although women had been agitating for equal rights in our society for generations, somehow The Feminine Mystique stuck a major chord and spurred women into high gear. What was it about this book that so motivated women of the postwar era to begin to break the rules and tear down the restrictions placed around them?
2. As we saw, in the 19th and early part of the 20th century, this was often the only way American women could publicly express themselves—by building strength in numbers and letting their needs be shown through marches, demonstrations, petitions, and endless organizing and agitation.
American women could do this: First Amendment rights have allowed women–even when they couldn’t vote or had no official political voice–to make their demands heard, even at great bodily harm, as we saw when we looked at the “Night of Terror” during the suffrage campaign.
