Hmm …

… Some Words from Sylvia Plath and Betty Friedan's Forgotten Sister - The Atlantic.

The sentiments in Johnson's essay echoed—or slightly prefigured—many of those captured in Betty Friedan’s explosive The Feminine Mystique, which was published more than five years later. But the same year Johnson’s essay appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Friedan, who was about a decade older, visited former classmates of her alma mater (also Smith College) for a 15th reunion survey. As she had suspected, when she peered beneath the suburban patina, Friedan found rampant, wordless dissatisfaction. Then, she referred to this unhappiness as “the problem that has no name.” It doesn’t take much to see the overlaps between Friedan’s writing and Johnson’s. Early in the The Feminine Mystique, Friedan laments how women “were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents.”

My mother, having finished eighth grade at age 13, was immediately found work in a factory. She would work in factories for the next half-century. She once asked mewhy so many women had come think that having a job was liberating. She would have liked nothing more than to have been "just" a housewife.