In the mid-twentieth century, women in the United States were expected to have one job: to start a family and satisfy their needs. Betty Friedan’s scathing exposé shattered this happy housewife myth and revealed the deep sense of malaise among women living in that time. In Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique, she exposed the secret of the widespread suffering of women, which had been suppressed for years in fear of social judgment.
In the Feminine Mystique, Friedan’s use of heavy repetition screams in the face of her audience to make sure her voice is heard. She intentionally makes her audience visualize the daily routine of a woman by continuously repeating the chores they have to complete on a daily basis. The following lines “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,” display the daily routines of most housewives and the limit to their responsibilities created by society to coop them inside the house like domesticated animals. In the lines, Friedan omits the use of any conjunctions to create a feeling of breathlessness that can be physically felt by most of the women in the audience because, during that time, they all shared those experiences. Friedan continues to build emphasis on the limits of women by writing out a list of what is expected of them, “Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with siblings’ rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hand.” In the list, Friedan repeats what has been told to women for the majority of their lives and make them realize all the suggestions they received to become a better woman was not for them but for their husbands and children. Women in the audience who have daughters will watch them grow knowing that the only thing they can aspire to be is a good housewife. Foreseeing the future young girls will grow up to live if this oppressive society continues to reign will strike fear into the heart and mind of the audience and push them to make a change in their own lifetime.
One of the strongest strategies Friedan uses to emphasize the alienation of a woman’s desire to be more than a housewife is her powerful choice of words. The first words she writes are “the problem lay buried” to create a sense of fear and agitation that many women felt when they yearned for careers and not just marriage and motherhood. Friedan was aware the women in her audience were muzzled by the sexist values of society and in order to assure them they were not alone she spoke the “unspoken” truth of aspiration that existed in them. Friedan evokes sympathy in her audience by writing out vivid scenarios packed with emotional triggers. She states “In a New York hospital, a woman had a nervous breakdown when she found she could not breastfeed her baby.” The women in Freidan’s audience were raised in an environment where the best women were known to be the best mothers and therefore they can relate to the fear of the mother who could not breastfeed her child. For Friedan, visual imagery is a powerful tool in her argument because it involves the experiences of other women that many of the audience members can sympathize with.
Another strategy Friedan uses is logos. She appeals to the logic of her audience by including an abundance of statistics. She boldly states “Fourteen million girls were engaged by 17. The proportion of women attending college in comparison with men dropped from 47 percent in 1920 to 35 percent in 1958. By the mid-fifties, 60 percent dropped out of college to marry, or because they were afraid too much education would be a marriage bar.” Stacking on evidence to highlight the significant decline of educated women proves the severity of the issue. As the rate of young married women increase and the rate of educated women decrease, women will become more susceptible to subordination in the future. In order for women to prevent society from turning back time to when women were completely oppressed, Friedan is trying to make them realize change is crucial and the audience can make it happen.

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