In 1963, the year she published “The Feminine Mystique,” Betty Friedan was living in Grand View-on-Hudson, New York, in an eleven-room house overlooking the river, with her husband, Carl, and their three children. Carl was an advertising executive; Betty was a summa-cum-laude graduate of Smith who had been working for more than ten years as a successful freelance magazine writer. The Friedans had household help three or four days a week, which allowed Betty to travel for her research and to commute into the city.

Betty Friedan’s book gave American housewives a shock of recognition. Illustration by BARRY BLITT

Friedan was, in other words, the kind of woman she wrote her book about. She was white and well educated; she had a financially dependable husband and a big house in a crime-free neighborhood; and she enjoyed the leisure to write, or do anything else she liked. The only expectations were that she manage the care of her healthy and well-adjusted children and be responsible for the domestic needs of her husband. By any material measure, and relative to the aspirations of most people, she was one of the most privileged human beings on the planet.

It is easy now to explain what was wrong with that existence—put simply: no matter how much she wanted, how hard she tried, or how qualified she was, Betty’s life could never be Carl’s—but it was not so easy to explain it when Friedan was writing her book. Apart from the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, there were no laws against gender discrimination as such. The word “sexism,” in its current meaning, did not exist. The most brilliant thing about Friedan’s very brilliant book was her decision to call what was wrong with the lives of apparently comfortable and economically secure women “the problem that has no name”—and then to give it a name.

“The Feminine Mystique” came out in the middle of a four-month newspaper strike in New York City, and it had to get the public’s attention at first without the benefits of newspaper advertisements or reviews. (Eventually, the Times ran a three-paragraph, rather skeptical assessment.) But the book was excerpted in McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal, magazines whose combined readership was a staggering thirty-six million, and its publisher, W. W. Norton, was astute enough to sense that it might have a blockbuster on its hands. It hired a publicist who arranged a book tour, then an unusual promotional tool, and it gave the book a dust jacket that was the color of a fire truck. “The Feminine Mystique” ended up spending six weeks on the Times best-seller list. The first paperback printing sold 1.4 million copies.

For many women, and not a few men, the publication of Friedan’s book was one of those events which seem, in retrospect, to have divided the sixties from the fifties as the day from the night. Friedan herself went on to become one of the most powerful figures in the women’s movement. From 1966 to 1970, she served as the first president of the National Organization for Women, which she named and helped to create; she conceived the highly effective Women’s Strike for Equality; and, together with Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and others, she founded the National Women’s Political Caucus. By the time of her death, in 2006, more than three million copies of “The Feminine Mystique” had been sold.

By all accounts, Friedan was not a person inclined to share the credit. (Some men have been known to be this way as well.) The implication that she had diagnosed a condition no one else had even managed to identify—that the problem she wrote about had no name until she named it—was a pretty open invitation to revisionism. Thirty years later, the revisionists arrived. In 1993, Joanne Meyerowitz, a historian who is now at Yale, showed that Friedan’s claim that mass-circulation magazines in the nineteen-fifties represented women in submissive and domestic roles was oversimplified. The record was mixed: there were also many depictions of women as active and independent.

A few years later, the historian Daniel Horowitz, who taught at Smith, published a book revealing that Friedan’s feminism had its origins not in her frustrations as a suburban housewife, which is how she always chose to present it, but in her long history of associations with left-wing causes, a history that Friedan tried hard to suppress. (Horowitz, a wholly sympathetic biographer, heard that Friedan accused him privately of Red-baiting.) Friedan campaigned on behalf of the rights of working women when she was still a student at Smith, where she supported unionizing the maids, and she continued to do so, after she left college, as a writer, first for the left-wing Federated Press, and then for the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, at one time believed to be the largest Communist-led union in the United States.

In 1999, the political scientist Alan Wolfe pointed out that much of the scholarship Friedan relied on in her diagnosis of the feminine mystique—work by Margaret Mead, Alfred Kinsey, and Bruno Bettelheim—has since turned out to be suspect. And a biography of Friedan by Judith Hennessee, published the same year, presented evidence suggesting that she was not a particularly coöperative spouse or attentive mother—a judgment uncontradicted by either her husband (whom she accused of physically abusing her and whom she divorced, in 1969) or her children. “She hates men,” Carl told a reporter after the divorce. “Let’s face it, they all do—all those activists in the women’s lib movement.”

Other writers, over the years, have criticized “The Feminine Mystique” for ignoring working-class and nonwhite women, for promoting a psychology of self-help rather than a program of legal reform, and for slighting the contributions of previous books on the situation of women, including Elizabeth Hawes’s “Why Women Cry” (1943), Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” (published in English in 1953), Mirra Komarovsky’s “Women in the Modern World” (1953), and Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein’s “Women’s Two Roles” (1956)—all of them well known to Friedan.

Still, even Friedan’s critics (apart from those who think that the women’s movement was a bad idea altogether) agree that “The Feminine Mystique” was a book that helped to change the world, or at least the way a lot of people saw the world, and it almost certainly could not have done so if Friedan had been completely open about her political background and motivations. She may have exaggerated her originality as well, but she succeeded where no other feminist writer had. She touched the lives of ordinary readers.

There is a lot of cultural and psychological analysis in “The Feminine Mystique.” It takes on subjects from advertising targeted at women (“the sexual sell”) to Freud and the concept of penis envy. But the core of the book’s appeal was emotional: this is what it felt like to be an American housewife in 1963. Why it felt that way, what forces had trapped women inside what Friedan called (in an uncharacteristically extreme analogy) “the comfortable concentration camp,” might be debated. But, whatever the book’s merits as cultural history, an enormous number of women recognized themselves in its pages, and many wrote Friedan grateful letters describing the book’s effect on them: “I feel, today, as though I had been filled with helium and turned loose!” “Like light bulbs going off again and again.” “I understood what I was feeling and felt validated!!”

Stephanie Coontz’s useful revisiting of Friedan’s book, “A Strange Stirring: ‘The Feminine Mystique’ and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s” (Basic; $25.95), includes some excerpts from these letters. But Coontz also undertook her own survey—of a hundred and eighty-eight women and men today, who recall the first time they read “The Feminine Mystique.” Coontz’s female respondents seem to have had no trouble reliving the experience, and they echo the readers who wrote to Friedan almost fifty years ago: “ ‘The Feminine Mystique’ left me breathless.” “I finally realized I wasn’t crazy.” “It literally changed (and perhaps saved) my life.” “Something clicked.” “It slammed me in the face.” “A bolt of lightning.” “A revelation.” “A bombshell.”

The persistent characterization of “The Feminine Mystique” as some kind of bolt from the blue is part of a big historical mystery. Why did a women’s movement take so long to develop in the United States after 1945? “Our society is a veritable crazy quilt of contradictory practices and beliefs,” Komarovsky wrote, about gender roles, in 1953, and, as the revisionists have demonstrated, if you pick out the right data you can identify trends in the direction of gender equality in the nineteen-fifties. The number of women enrolled in college nearly doubled in that decade, for example, and the employment rate for women rose four times as fast as it did for men. At some point, presumably, the increasing numbers of women in the educational and vocational pipelines would have produced pressure to get rid of gender discrimination. Coontz concludes that a women’s movement “would have happened with or without Betty Friedan.”

That may be so, but it’s a counterfactual assertion. When Friedan was writing her book, the issue of gender equality was barely on the public’s radar screen. On the contrary: it was almost taken for granted that the proper goal for intelligent women was marriage—even by the presidents of women’s colleges. Coontz quotes the president of Radcliffe suggesting that if a Radcliffe graduate was really lucky she might end up marrying a Harvard man. Friedan quoted the president of Mills College citing with approval the remark “Women should be educated so that they can argue with their husbands.”

By the late nineteen-fifties, seventy-five per cent of the women who worked were in female-only, mainly service jobs. In the higher-status professions, women were virtually invisible. Seventy-eight per cent of college faculty were men; ninety-five per cent of physicians were men; ninety-seven per cent of lawyers were men; and more than ninety-seven per cent of United States senators, members of Congress, and ambassadors were men. Male-only institutions, from Harvard and Yale to the National Press Club, where invited female reporters had to sit in the balcony and were not allowed to ask questions during speeches, were prevalent.

The popular understanding was that the only reason for a marriageable woman to take a job was to find a husband. This was the premise of Rona Jaffe’s bestselling novel “The Best of Everything” (1958), and it was essentially the counsel offered by Helen Gurley Brown in her mega-best-seller “Sex and the Single Girl” (1962)—a book that sold two million copies in three weeks. If that was why women worked, it made perfect economic sense: because of the disparity in pay and career opportunity between men and women, virtually the only way a woman could improve her economic situation was to marry.

The strangest part of it—this was one of Friedan’s main points—was that, by many of these measures, women were worse off in 1963 than they had been in 1945, or even in 1920. In 1920, fifteen per cent of Ph.D.s were awarded to women; in 1963, it was eleven per cent. (Today, it is just over fifty per cent.) Forty-seven per cent of college students were women in 1920; in 1963, thirty-eight per cent were women. (Today, fifty-seven per cent of college students are female. Come on, guys! You can do it!) The median age at first marriage was dropping: almost half of all women who got married in 1963 were teen-agers. And the birth rate for third and fourth children was rising: between 1940 and 1960, the birth rate for fourth children tripled.

Demographically, it looked like a snowball effect. When sixteen million veterans, ninety-eight per cent of whom were men, came home, in 1945, two predictable things happened: the proportion of men in the workforce increased, as men returned to (or were given) jobs that had been done by women during the war; and there was a big spike in the birth rate. But what should have been a correction became a trend. Fifteen years later, the birth rate was still high, and although many women came back to work in the nineteen-fifties, segregation by gender in employment was greater than it had been in 1900, and was more sharply delineated than segregation by race. Classified job ads in the Times were segregated by gender, a practice that didn’t end until 1968.

A quasi-official ideology grew up to justify the new normal. “You may be hitched to one of these creatures we call ‘Western man,’ ” Adlai Stevenson advised the Smith Class of 1955, “and I think part of your job is to keep him Western, to keep him truly purposeful, to keep him whole.” Stevenson had, he affably confessed, “very little experience as a wife or mother”; but he believed that the housewife’s task was a worthy one, since “we will defeat totalitarian, authoritarian ideas only by better ideas.” The wife is there to implant those ideas in her working husband. It seems almost a kind of magical thinking that caused people to believe that keeping capable, highly educated people at home—actually de-incentivizing them from entering the workforce—was a good way to win the Cold War. Whatever fairy dust was doing this to people, in the end it took a book to break the spell.

Or, maybe, two books. Coontz says that Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” “did not get much of a hearing in the mainstream press” when the English translation came out, in 1953. (It was published in France in 1949.) This is inaccurate. “The Second Sex” was reviewed, with great admiration, in the Sunday Times by one of the most prestigious social scientists in the country, Clyde Kluckhohn; it was named one of the year’s best books by the paper’s chief critic, Orville Prescott (no iconoclast); and it spent five weeks on the best-seller list, almost as long as “The Feminine Mystique” did ten years later.

But it was received as, in Prescott’s words, “very French.” Kluckhohn said something that might have meant much the same thing: “too intellectualistic.” “The Second Sex” does not seem to have spoken to American women in the personal way that Friedan’s book did. Of course, Beauvoir was one-half of a world-famous open marriage, and she was therefore not a model for most American women, even the most frustrated. Friedan must have taken this into account when she undertook to present herself as just an ordinary overeducated suburban housewife—“one of us.”

For Friedan did study “The Second Sex” closely. Horowitz reports that Friedan’s reading notes indicate a great interest in the book’s existentialism, and that is almost certainly the key to her own book. The fundamental argument of “The Feminine Mystique,” and of the second-wave feminism to which it gave rise, is that there is no such thing as women’s essential nature. The belief that women are biologically destined to be domestic and subordinate is just a construct, created by psychologists and social scientists, and used as an ex-post-facto justification for inequality. The popularized version of this bad science, the stuff that gets said at commencement exercises and on television sitcoms and around the water cooler about the way women “really are,” is the “mystique.”

But why a book? Why not a court case, or a boycott, as in the case of the civil-rights movement—something that challenged existing law? There were plenty of laws enforcing the second-tier status of women in 1963. Why was a long and semi-scholarly study by a magazine writer the catalyst for a social change that might have got under way years before? The answer may have something to do not with the status of women but with the status of books. In the early nineteen-sixties, books, for some reason, were bombs.

Books were always an important force in the women’s movement, possibly because the book was a medium that women had relatively unobstructed access to as authors and as readers. Kate Millett’s “Sexual Politics,” Germaine Greer’s “The Female Eunuch,” Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s “Madwoman in the Attic,” and Susan Faludi’s “Backlash” all had an effect on the public conversation about gender and women’s rights. And many best-selling books since the nineteen-sixties have galvanized (or polarized) opinion—from the leftish “The Greening of America,” in 1970, to the rightish “The Closing of the American Mind,” in 1987. But books that led directly to political change have been rare.

“The Feminine Mystique” came out around the same time as four other books that had an unusually immediate impact on public policy. Jane Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” was published in 1961. It has been credited with, in the long run, changing urban-renewal policies in the United States; in the short run, it helped bring an end to the career of New York City’s “master builder,” Robert Moses.

In 1962, Rachel Carson published “Silent Spring.” It became a No. 1 best-seller, and is often said to have started the movement that led to the ban on DDT and, ultimately, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” came out the same year. It got the attention of the Kennedy Administration, and the discussions it provoked in Washington became the basis for Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. And, in 1965, Ralph Nader published “Unsafe at Any Speed.” It helped lead to the passage, the following year, of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which for the first time made the government the regulator of auto safety.

In all these cases, it can be said (and in most of them it has been said) that the changes the books are associated with would have happened anyway. As Coontz puts it, about Friedan, “Books don’t become best sellers because they are ahead of their time.” But people like to be able to point to a book as the cause for a new frame of mind, possibly for the same reason that people prefer anecdotes to statistical evidence. A book personalizes an issue. It has an Erin Brockovich effect: it puts a face on the problem; it sets up a David-and-Goliath drama.

It’s not irrelevant, therefore, that three of these books were written by women, outsiders almost by definition in the early nineteen-sixties, and the others were by men largely unknown to the general public. Harrington was a socialist, who, to his subsequent regret, and much like Friedan, chose to elide that fact when he wrote his book. He was invited to Washington to advise on the poverty program, but left in disgust. Nader was a staff consultant to the Labor Department when he wrote “Unsafe at Any Speed.” But after General Motors launched a vindictive and ill-conceived investigation of him he was cast as a lone man against the System—a role that, as it turned out, suited his personality completely. People don’t like the System.