[From the Sunday Times (UK), February 24, 2013].

Fifty years ago last week, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, igniting an impassioned debate over her claim that millions of housewives were desperately unhappy, suffering from “the problem that has no name”.

Women did seem to be floundering in the 1950s and early 1960s. Doctors puzzled over an epidemic of “housewife’s fatigue” and numerous American women dropped out of university. Newsweek magazine reported that US women were gripped with a malaise that was “deep, pervasive and impervious” to any known remedy — although many psychiatrists were sure that tranquillisers could help. In Europe, too, observers worried whether women could settle back into domesticity after the Second World War....