Which excerpt from betty friedan’s the feminine mystique contains underlined keywords that reflect mainstream society’s view of a woman’s role in the 1950s and ’60s? the problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of american women. they were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents. some women, in their forties and fifties, still remembered painfully giving up those dreams, but most of the younger women no longer even thought about them. all they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.