Question

Read the excerpt from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. But the actual unhappiness of the American housewife was suddenly being reported—from The New York Times and Newsweek to Good Housekeeping and CBS television (“The Trapped Housewife”), although almost everybody who talked about it found some superficial reason to dismiss it. Which best describes the connotation of the word “superficial” in the excerpt?

Answer 1

I don't see the specific choices, but maybe this will help...

The connotation (feeling of the word beyond the literal definition) here is negative. It is something silly or absurd/unjustified.

Answer 2

The Feminine Mystique, written by Betty Friedan, came to be published in 1963, at the epitome of the women´s fight for the right to vote and to be seen as something more than a simple breeder and housewife. In fact, Friedan, a psychologist, begins an ardous task of interviewing women in the United States around the 1950´s and 1960´s because she starts noticing that unlike the image being painted in the media of the happy woman who is a mother and housewife vs the unhappy woman who has a career, the reality is totally different. Her research comes together as an article that she wishes to publish, but nobody does, so in the end, she makes it into a book. One of the purposes of the information and results gathered in this book is to show the level of superficiality with which the media and society at large portray the happy woman of their time, implying that no woman who wants to pursue a career over marriage is happy. So, the superficiliaty that Friedan mentions here in her excerpt makes allusion to the frivolous way in which society received her findings on the true matter of unhappiness in married women who are also housewifes.