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"It is not easy to put into words a feeling and a problem that women find harder to talk about than almost anything \u2014 including sex. It is in fact such a complex and elusive problem that \u2014 as prevalent as it is \u2014 there is not as yet a psychological term to describe it. Essentially, this feeling or problem is a strange stirring, a dissatisfied groping, a yearning, a search that is going on in the minds of women. This is not easy to put into words because those women who struggle with it struggle alone, afraid to admit that they are asking themselves the silent question &amp;quot;Is this all?&amp;quot; as they make the beds, shop for groceries and new curtains, eat peanut-butter sandwiches with the children, chauffeur Cub Scouts and Brownies to and from meetings, or lie beside their husbands at night.  There are no words for this search in the millions of words written for women about women these past 20 years in columns, articles, and books by experts that tell us that our role as women is to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. The voices of tradition and the voices of Freudian sophistication tell us that we can desire no greater destiny than to glory in our role as women, in our own femininity. They tell us how to catch a man and keep him; how to breast-feed children and handle toilet training, sibling rivalry, adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, cook Grandmother&amp;#039;s bread and gourmet snails, build a swimming pool with our own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine, and make marriage more exciting; how to keep our husbands from dying young and our sons from growing into delinquents. They tell us \u2014 the psychologists and psychoanalysts and sociologists who keep tracing the neuroses of child and man back to mother \u2014 that all our frustrations were caused by education and emancipation, the striving for independence and equality with men, which made American women unfeminine. They tell us that the truly feminine woman turns her back on the careers, the higher education, the political rights, the opportunity to shape the major decisions of society for which the old-fashioned feminists fought.  Now a thousand expert voices pay tribute to our devotion from earliest girlhood to finding the husband and bearing the children who will give us happiness. They tell us to pity the &amp;quot;neurotic,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;unfeminine,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;unhappy&amp;quot; women who once wanted to be poets or physicists or Presidents, or whatever they had it in them to be. For a woman to have such aspirations, interests, goals of her own, the experts keep telling us, impairs not only her ability to love her husband and children but her ability to achieve her own sexual fulfillment.  How can a woman shut her ears to all the voices of the experts and listen instead to the voice inside herself that tells her something else? This is the question women are asking themselves and seeking to answer all over the country. I know, because in the past few years I have interviewed thousands of them. Sometimes a woman says, &amp;quot;I feel empty, somehow,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;useless,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;incomplete,&amp;quot; or she says it is &amp;quot;as if I do not exist.&amp;quot;  Sometimes she goes to a doctor with symptoms she cannot describe: &amp;quot;I have a tired feeling&amp;quot; ... &amp;quot;I get so angry with the children it scares me&amp;quot; ... &amp;quot;I feel like crying without any reason.&amp;quot; She may spend years on the analyst&amp;#039;s couch, working out her &amp;quot;adjustment to the feminine role,&amp;quot; her blocks to &amp;quot;fulfillment as a wife and mother.&amp;quot; And an inner voice may say, &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s not it.&amp;quot; A woman may live half her lifetime before she has the courage to listen to that voice and know that it is not enough to be a wife and mother, because she is a human being herself. She can&amp;#039;t live through her husband and children. They are separate selves. She has to find her own fulfillment first.  It is such a simple truth \u2014 but each woman who has struggled through to discover it for herself is pioneering on the front edge of woman&amp;#039;s evolution. For never before in history have women been able to ask the simple questions, &amp;quot;Who am I? What do I want?&amp;quot; But once a woman faces the question &amp;quot;Who am I?&amp;quot; \u2014 as women are doing today without much help from the experts and against the cry of &amp;quot;take it easy,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;don&amp;#039;t be different,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;be a part of the crowd&amp;quot; \u2014 she finds her own answer. It is both harder and easier for a woman to find the answer that is right for her \u2014 because she has no model to follow in this search, no clearly planned career pattern, no organization. She has to ask herself the right questions even to start her search.  The pattern of woman&amp;#039;s search for self-fulfillment is so new that experts, blinded by the clear-cut male labels of &amp;quot;education,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;career,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;family,&amp;quot; sometimes don&amp;#039;t recognize it at all. A woman doesn&amp;#039;t have to seek fulfillment by established routes, for why should a woman&amp;#039;s pattern be the same as a man&amp;#039;s? Or why should it be like that of any other woman? But every woman who makes the search helps another get started. Every woman helps to paint the new picture of femininity that all women need and only women themselves can paint. No woman knows where her search for self-fulfillment will take her. No woman starts that search today without struggle, conflict, and taking her courage in her hands.  Maybe growth does not come without conflict. When every woman learns to listen without fear to the voice inside her instead of smothering it, it may lead \u2014 perhaps even more surely than rockets into space \u2014 to the next step in human evolution. This could come about when women begin to use the education, the freedom, the labor-saving appliances, the added years of life which have become available to them in recent decades.  Who knows what women can be when they finally are free to become themselves? Who knows what women&amp;#039;s intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love? Who knows what sons and daughters will become, when their mothers&amp;#039; fulfillment makes girls so sure they want to be feminine that they no longer have to look like Marilyn Monroe to prove it, and makes boys so unafraid of women they don&amp;#039;t have to worry about their masculinity? Who knows of the possibilities of love, when men and women share not only children, home, and garden, not only the fulfillment of their biological role, but the separate, human knowledge of separate human beings? How Readers Reacted A sampling of how GH subscribers responded to Friedan&amp;#039;s article in 1960: &amp;quot;I actually wept when I read it.... My own turning point came two weeks ago when I decided to start studying to be a doctor. These next four years, until my children are in school most of the day, are going to be very difficult, and I don&amp;#039;t know if I can do it \u2014 but at least I can try. Wish me luck!&amp;quot;  \u2014Mrs. Michael J. O&amp;#039;Neill, West Redding, CT &amp;quot;My deepest thanks. I am so sick of being told I should want to be &amp;quot;feminine&amp;quot; and enjoy the easy life my husband labors to give me. I don&amp;#039;t want an easy life built on somebody&amp;#039;s sweat. I want to be treated as somebody in my own right \u2014 because I am.&amp;quot;  \u2014Irene Saylor, New York City &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m sick and tired of reading what women think. So Betty Friedan talked to hundreds of women? Well, she did not talk to me. What&amp;#039;s so terrible about housework? At least you can do it without even thinking. Try thinking about something else when your boss is dictating a letter to you. At home I&amp;#039;m my own boss.&amp;quot;  \u2014Mrs. George M. Roesler, Jr. Victoria, TX &amp;quot;It struck at the very heart of something that has caused me many hours of discontented soul-searching.... It&amp;#039;s good to know that I&amp;#039;m not an unrealistic, never-satisfied child in wanting something more, when I already have a wonderful husband and baby girl. But now, the really difficult job is mine \u2014 that of finding me.&amp;quot;  \u2014Mrs. Joanne E. Shoestock, Drexel Hill, PA "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/career/advice/a18890/1960-betty-friedan-article/>