Olympia, Wash. ONE of the most enduring myths about feminism is that 50 years ago women who stayed home full time with their children enjoyed higher social status and more satisfying lives than they do today. All this changed, the story goes, when Betty Friedan published her 1963 best seller, ''The Feminine Mystique,'' which denigrated stay-at-home...
A STRANGE STIRRING ''The Feminine Mystique'' and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s By Stephanie Coontz 222 pp. Basic Books. $25.95. Halfway through ''A Strange Stirring,'' the social historian Stephanie Coontz -- parsing the reception of ''The Feminine Mystique,'' Betty Friedan's 1963 examination of middle-class female repression and despair...

BAD GIRLS GO EVERYWHERE The Life of Helen Gurley Brown By Jennifer Scanlon Illustrated. 270 pp. Oxford University Press. $27.95 In 1991, in the wake of the Clarence Thomas hearings, Helen Gurley Brown, nearing the end of her 32-year tenure as the editor of Cosmopolitan, that great invitation to fanny-pinching, was asked whether any of the women on...