Entraînement à la Grammaire Anglaise à Distance

It was a simple question: “Is this all?” Those words, in the opening of “The Feminine Mystique,” published on this day in 1963, helped begin the women's liberation movement. The “mystique” that Betty Friedan wrote about defined women by their relation to men as wives, mothers and homemakers. When (1) she wrote (2) the book, Ms. Friedan was a suburban housewife and mother who penned freelance articles for women's magazines. (3) She had become disillusioned by the conventional wisdom that all women needed to be happy was a husband, a home and a family. The overwhelming response to her 400-page work moved her to help create the National Organization for Women in 1966. “The Feminine Mystique” grew out of (4) a survey that (5) Ms. Friedan conducted among her Smith College classmates at their 15-year reunion in 1957. Many described feeling dissatisfied — an affliction she later famously described as “the problem that has no name.” Based on the results, she proposed an article (6) to several women's magazines arguing that women should be educated to be individuals, not housewives. It was roundly rejected as out of line with the magazines' image of womanhood. But years later, the ideas evolved into a charter document for a social transformation that's still unfolding.