More recently, other scholars have pointed out that readers encountering “The Feminine Mystique” through the excerpts that appeared in women’s magazines might not have heard an entirely empowering message. In “Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America” (2010), the historian Rebecca Jo Plant argued that to many readers, the book seemed less like a progressive rallying cry than a continuation of the housewife-bashing of books like Philip Wylie’s 1942 best seller, “Generation of Vipers,” which blamed over-involved mothers for all manner of social ills.

For all she got right, Ms. Plant wrote, “Friedan missed — indeed, she contributed to — the frustrations many women felt due to a cultural climate that constantly denigrated mothers and homemakers.”

Still, few historians quarrel with the idea that the book galvanized women, including some who would hardly seem like natural political allies of a writer who (as the historian Daniel Horowitz revealed in his 1998 biography, to Friedan’s displeasure) cut her teeth as a reporter for radical newspapers and had a file with the F.B.I.

Stephanie Coontz, a historian at Evergreen State College and the author of “A Strange Stirring,” a 2011 study of the impact of “The Feminine Mystique,” describes finding some surprising testimonials from readers preserved in the Friedan papers at Harvard.

“I found letters from Mormon women, Baptists — the kind of women who wouldn’t agree with Friedan on lots of political issues, but knew they had been relegated to second-class citizenship,” Ms. Coontz said in an interview.

Some women, however, may have been mobilized in directions that ran counter to Friedan’s intentions. The historian Jessica Weiss, in a 2012 paper called “Fraud of Femininity” (a reference to the title of an excerpt from “The Feminine Mystique” published in McCall’s), traced the book’s impact on conservative women, who saw the embrace of domesticity not as a backward-looking defense of tradition but “a positive, proactive means of countering social disintegration” and national decline. (Ms. Weiss noted that nearly 90 percent of the women who wrote to McCall’s in response to a second excerpt from the book were critical of Friedan.)