Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique hit bookshelves the same year the commission released its report. Friedan had been active in the union movement and was by this time a mother in the new suburban landscape of postwar America. In her book, Friedan labeled the “problem that has no name,” and in doing so helped many white middle-class American women come to see their dissatisfaction as housewives not as something “wrong with [their] marriage, or [themselves],” but instead as a social problem experienced by millions of American women.

The world was never the same after the United States leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 with atomic bombs. Not only had perhaps 180,000 civilians been killed, the nature of warfare was forever changed.

etween 1929 and 1932, international trade dropped from $36billion to only $12 billion. American exports fell by 78 percent. Com-bined with overproduction and declining domestic consumption, the tar-iff exacerbated the world’s economic collapse.

“Change is in the very air Americans breathe, and consumer changesare the very bricks out of which we are building our new kind of civi-lization,” announced marketing expert and home economist ChristineFrederick in her influential 1929 monograph, Selling Mrs. Consumer.

Women reacted to the war preparations by joining several militaryand civilian organizations. Their enrollment and actions in these orga-nizations proved to be a pioneering effort for American women in war.

Big business, whether in meatpacking, railroads, telegraph lines, oil, orsteel, posed new problems for the American legal system.