Treating

Betty Friedan was an enormously influential writer and activist, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is considered by many as a milestone in kicking off second wave feminism. Most famously, Friedan outlined what she considered “the problem without a name”: "The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries … she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — 'Is this all?'"

In chapter 5, Friedan offers a harsh critique on Freudian psychoanalysis on which medication prescribed to "dysfunctional" U.S. middle-class housewives was based; this part of her book framed feminists’ distance to many forms of psychotherapy for some time. Combined with Friedan’s critique on media representations like in women’s magazines The Feminine Mystique poses the most influential challenge to the project of normalizing women along the therapeutic gospel.