“I feel empty somehow… incomplete… I feel like I don't exist. » A feeling of numbness was not uncommon among many women living in the suburbs of the 1950s. Confined by a strong emphasis on family and sexual roles, women acted as wives and mothers, but did not live as individuals; Always being the mother of their child or the wife of their husband has led these women to lose their sense of self. Prisoners of their own lives, suburban housewives experienced an identity crisis that robbed them of the desire to become who they wanted to be and forced them to become who they were meant to be. The traditional housewife was not the only woman to find herself in prison in the mid-20th century, since a decade earlier, Japanese Americans had been sent to prison camps for the sake of safety national, and the civil rights movement of the sixties resulted in mass arrests. Each prison, whether mental or physical, presented different challenges to the women who stayed there. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that although women in each period faced different challenges and varied circumstances, by embracing their unique identity, they broke free from the grip of their prison and were able to live as individuals with fulfilling lives. Americans experienced discrimination based on association, becoming hostages of war in their own country after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States' entry into World War II. In Looking Like the Enemy, Mary Matsuda Gruenewald shares her experiences as a young Japanese American girl taken with her family to various internment camps throughout the war. Gruenewald shares one of these experiences as he tells us how his family is given a number to take the spot...... middle of paper ...... rd/St. Martin's, 2009. Friedan, Betty. The feminine mystique. New York: WW Norton & Company, 2001. Gruenewald, Mary Matsuda. Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese-American Internment Camps. Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 2005. Nicholas, Denise. “A great romantic notion.” In Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts of SNCC Women, Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Smith Young, and Dorothy M. Zellner, 257-265. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010. White, Annette J. “Finding a Form for Expressing My Discontent.” In Hands on the Plow of Freedom: Personal Testimonies of SNCC Women, Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Smith Young, and Dorothy M. Zellner, 100-115. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010.