The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of

Betty Friedan, with the voice of a prophetess rising from the silence of countless homes, declared: “The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.” These words are not gentle—they are a thunderclap against the heavens. She spoke of a prison without chains, a grave without soil, a silence enforced not by swords but by expectation. The feminine mystique, that gilded illusion that a woman’s destiny is only wifehood, motherhood, and servitude to the hearth, was to her a suffocating shroud, wrapping living women in the garments of death while their hearts still beat.

This mystique was born in the mid-20th century, a time when prosperity masked despair. Advertisements showed smiling housewives with gleaming kitchens, magazines praised the angel of the home, and the world declared the role of women complete. Yet behind those painted smiles lay hunger—for education, for work, for freedom of the soul. Friedan tore away the veil and revealed the truth: that millions of women lived lives of quiet desperation, their dreams buried beneath polished floors and ironed linens. To live without the chance to grow is to be buried alive, and she named that truth boldly.

History itself offers us the story of Nora Helmer, the heroine of Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House. Though fictional, she embodies the same suffocation. Treated as a child, adored as a decoration, she slowly realizes her life is not her own. At last, she slams the door on her marriage and steps into the unknown night, choosing the peril of freedom over the gilded cage of submission. Nora’s act, like Friedan’s words, was a call to awaken—to rise from the living grave of tradition and claim the air of life.

But Friedan’s declaration was not only condemnation; it was also a spark. Her book, The Feminine Mystique, set aflame the second wave of feminism, igniting movements across campuses, workplaces, and streets. Women began to see themselves not as failures for wanting more, but as pioneers breaking free from centuries of burial. They demanded education, equal pay, reproductive rights—each demand a strike of the shovel against the soil that had entombed them.

Therefore, O inheritors of freedom, let Friedan’s words echo in your hearts. Beware the illusions that imprison while promising happiness. Beware the voices that dress chains in ribbons and call them destiny. Remember always: to deny the soul its growth is to bury it alive, but to claim the right to live fully is to rise from the grave into the light. For woman is not mystique—she is strength, she is thought, she is flame.