For many housewives feminism threatened identity more than it promised opportunity

Evidence

Morgan’s message appealed to women invested in defending “traditional womanhood” against the feminist challenge. In 1963, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had invited a generation of women to examine “the problem that has no name,” prompting many housewives to reconsider their circumscribed lives. But for many women stuck in unsatisfying marriages and leading unfulfilling lives, the Total Woman curriculum offered a more viable paradigm of hope and change. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 149

Categorization

• QUESTION: Du Mez frames 1960s-70s feminism as genuinely failing to reach housewives without employable skills — worth probing whether her sympathetic framing here undercuts or strengthens her overall continuity thesis.
• DEEPTHINKING: This anticipates the full paradox of the book’s argument: women who had the least to gain from the existing system still defended it most fiercely, because feminism’s promised alternative denigrated their actual identity.
• XREF: connects to: Housewifery offers women freedom only as a negative, empty form. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1369; Women leaving domesticity were branded masculine by those resisting change — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 661