“I feel empty somehow… incomplete… I feel like I don't exist.” A sense of numbness was not uncommon for many women living in the suburban world of the 1950s. Confined by a strong emphasis on family and gender roles, women acted as wives and mothers, but did not live as individuals; always being the mother of one's child, or the wife of one's husband, has led these women to lose their sense of self. Prisoners of their own lives, the suburban housewives experienced an identity crisis that robbed them of the desire to become whoever they wanted to be and forced them to become what they were expected to be. The traditional housewife was not the only woman to find herself in prison during the mid-20th century, as Japanese Americans had been sent to prison camps for national security reasons ten years earlier, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s had resulted in large-scale arrests. Each prison, both mental and physical, offered different challenges to the women inside. The purpose of this essay is to argue that although women of each period faced different challenges and different circumstances, by embracing their unique identities they freed themselves from the grip of prison and were able to live as individuals with fulfilling lives. Americans faced discrimination based on association, becoming war hostages in their own country after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II. In Looking Like the Enemy, Mary Matsuda Gruenewald shares her experiences as a young Japanese-American taken with her family to several internment camps during the war. Gruenewald shares one of these experiences as he tells us how his family is assigned a number to take the place... center of paper... rd/St. Martin's, 2009. Friedan, Betty. The feminine mystique. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. Gruenewald, Mary Matsuda. Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Captivity in Japanese-American Internment Camps. Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 2005. Nicholas, Denise. "A great romantic idea." In Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, 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 to Express My Discontent.” In Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, 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.