Betty Friedan and "The Feminine Mystique": An example of rhetorical exclusion

One of the key catalytic feminist works of our time is The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. Although acclaimed as a well researched artifact designed to help "American women" recognize and understand how and why they were being manipulated via a social phenomenon Friedan terms a "feminine mystique," upon close examination of this work we find that the preponderance of inductive examples Friedan uses to persuade her implied audience excluded another audience, specifically black women. The effect of this "rhetorical exclusion" (and other means of segregation) has been the disaffection of most black women from the contemporary women's movement. This study, therefore, provides a critical analysis of specific inductive examples found within The Feminine Mystique, demonstrates how such examples affected both Friedan's implied and excluded audiences, and suggests how such forms of "rhetorical exclusion" can be avoided in the future.