“American women in the Cold War were encouraged to go back to the home and conform to this idea of a good life: a house in the suburbs, a providing husband, and kids, with the freedom, of course, of choosing among a wide variety of products at the supermarket. The feeling of emptiness and the unfulfilling nature of this kind of life was commented upon by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, published in the same year as The Bell Jar. Friedan termed it «the problem that has no name», a question that is problematized by Plath in The Bell Jar as not only consisting on being able to opt for a job or not, but on something much more difficult to solve and deeply ingrained in their psyches, to the point of causing mental distress.”
Parra Fernández, Laura de la. “‘We are all Mad here’: Sylvia Plath’s the Bell Jar as a Political Novel.” Revista De Filología Románica, vol. 33, 2016, pp. 164-165
