Stephanie Coontz's A Strange Stirring

Although The Feminine Mystique is often hailed as the harbinger text of third-wave feminism, Stephanie Coontz is quick in the opening lines of her A Strange Stirring to revoke the piece of its grandiose status, instead affectionately remembering it as a “brilliant artifact— and not a timeless classic.” Published in 2011, Coontz’s A Strange Stirring was written in the challenge of the previously held notion that the feminist movement of the 50s and 60s had come about due to a national “dissatisfaction in domestic life” resulting from the “personal inadequacy” woman had felt during the previous decades. Her challenge to ideas that founded the basis of Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique feed her writing as she takes an equally controversial stance to Friedan’s book, raising the question of the validity of Feminine Mystique and its impact on the feminist movement when the piece itself neglected to narrate the struggle of women outside the wealthy and white bubble that could afford to read Friedan's book.
Currently a professor of history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, Coontz has made it her life's work to analyze the way society moves. Her studies and literature, chronicle the history of American families, marriage, and
She describes an article published in the Saturday Evening Post in which the typical American woman of the 60s is described, she goes into great detail quoting specific phrases from the article, building up suspense and the world surrounding a piece of literature that she would then spend nine chapters eloquently tearing apart piece by piece. It is here in this first paragraph that it is quickly grasped by the reader that though a grudging respect for Betty Friedan undercuts Coontz’s words there is much that she disagrees