In the book she makes many claims about changes in the ways things women were socialized between the 30s and 50s. She makes claims about changes in the way advertisers portrayed women and changes in the way women were taught to think about careers. I often wonder if this has been scrutinized heavily and if it has (from a historical perspective) what the conclusions of that scrutiny were?
I don't have an intuition about whether she is right or wrong, but I do know that people often have nostalgia for times past as a 'golden age'.
I'm asking this question here because I'm writing an academic paper that is (only tangentially) related to this book and was wondering what people on this sub thought of her. This might seem a question better for /r/AskSocialScience, but I feel more comfortable that this sub will provide better answers as well as answers to specific historical claims.
Also, here's a wiki link to the page on this book, which summarizes here major claims.
If you have JSTOR, I would recommend looking up Joanne Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946- 1958,” The Journal of American History 79, no. 4 (March 1, 1993): 1455–82, doi:10.2307/2080212. Not only is it an excellent article, but you can mine the footnotes for more scholarship (albeit a bit outdated - 1993 is over twenty years ago!).
In short, the first part of understanding the claims that Betty Friedan stakes is understanding that she universalized the experience of a quite small, though growing, part of the population: the white, privileged, middle-class housewife. Her narrative is patently untrue for women of color, women who had to work because of low socio-economic status, and many underprivileged others.
In short, many historians agree that she created a straw-man argument in order to support her hypothesis. I can't do a number-by-number fact checking of the book for you, but I can say that it is not her data that made a splash, but her philosophical argument. This argument is definitely more important historically for what it sparked than for any reality it uncovered. In fact, Joanne Meyerowitz concludes that it was a culminating product of the culture of the times even as it indicted a straw-man culture:
The postwar mass culture embraced the same central contradiction--the tension between domestic ideals and individual achievement--that Betty Friedan addressed in The Feminine Mystique. In this sense, I argue, Friedan drew on mass culture as much as she countered it. The success of her book stemmed in part form her compelling elaboration of familiar themes, not new insights.