Betty Friedan's remarkable book of narrative feminist sociology and mass-market fiction lit crit, The Feminine Mystique was published as excerpts in '62 and finally as a book in 1963. But she was gathering the materials for it thoughout the second half of the 50s, and was doing a lot of the writing and final research in '60 and '61. Here are just a few of the many books and articles published in 1960 that she consulted:
1. the 75th anniversary issue of Good Housekeeping, May
2. "Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped," Redbook of September
3. Noel Clad, "Men Against Women," Good Housekeeping, January
4. Mary Ann Guitar, "College Marriage Courses--Fun or Fraud?" Mademoiselle's February issue
5. Margaret Mead's "New Look at Early Marriages," interview given to US News & World Report, June 6
6. "The Woman and Brains (continued)" in the New York Times Magazine of January 17, outraged responses written to the magazine in response to an article by Marya Mannes called "Female Intelligence--Who Wants It?" that had been published in the January 1 issue
7. Benjamin Spock, "Russian Children Don't Whine, Squabble, or Break Things--Why?" in Ladies Home Journal's October issue
8. April's transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, which featured Nanette Scofield's study of the changing roles of women in suburbia
9. Richard and Katherine Gordon's The Split Level Trap, written with Max Gunther
10. an article on the social psychiatry of the mobile suburb, also by the Gordons, published in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry vol 6, number 1
Is '60 the moment when the end of the end of the Old Left had been reached and the New Left began to emerge? Is it the final ascendancy, in certain scenes at least, of poetic postmodernity? Surely the publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry that year suggests this, but then again--once again--we look back on "New" here and see continuity. The rhetoric of the Kennedy-Nixon contest made much less of a dent than everyone (at the time as well as since) claimed, so one wonders why were such great claims made? 
Had we come to expect "1960" to be truly ubiquitously modern in a way that the 1950s really were not--not quite? And what specifically does "modern" mean in the Kennedyesque talk then and now about the torch being passed to a new generation, etc.? The First Lady really meant "modernist" when Camelotians said "modern." What about the others across the new young cultural leadership? I've been surprised by how frequently the 
"Beat movement" was covered in 1960 in the mainstream press. I was expecting a fair measure but I've found tonnage. 1960 was the year when the figure of the beat was beginning to find acceptance, although still 80% of these stories are mocking, rebels-without-cause condescension. For anyone whose analysis made an impact nationally, do these antipolitical adolescents count as part of the "new young cultural leadership"? No, but rather than the two being opposites, they fall along a Continuum of the New American. Now that's a change for '60.
