Betty Friedan

B etty Friedan, the feminist crusader and author whose first book, The Feminine Mystique , ignited the contemporary women’s movement in 1963, died in February 2006, on her 85th birthday. 

Bettye Naomi Goldstein was born on February 4, 1921, in Peoria, Illinois. Her father, Harry, was an immigrant from Russia who parlayed a street-corner collar-button business into a prosperous downtown jewelry store. Her mother, Miriam, had been the editor of the women’s page of the local newspaper before giving up her job for marriage and children. 

Betty received her bachelor’s degree in 1942—by that time she had dropped the final “e”—and accepted a fellowship to the University of California, Berkeley, for graduate work in psychology. At Berkeley, she studied with psychologist Erik Erikson, among others. She won a second fellowship that would allow her to continue studying for a doctorate. After finishing her studies, she moved to Greenwich Village in New York city. 

There, Friedan worked as an editor at the Federated Press, a small news service that provided stories to labor newspapers nationwide. In 1946, she took a job as a reporter with UE News , the weekly publication of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. 

In 1947 she married Carl Friedan. They started a family and moved to Rockland County, New York. 

In 1966 Friedan helped found the National Organization for Women (NOW), serving as its first president. In 1969 she co-founded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, now known as NARAL Pro-Choice America. With Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and others, she founded the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971. 

Though in later years, some feminists dismissed Friedan’s work as outmoded, a great many aspects of modern life that seem routine today—from unisex help wanted ads to women in politics, medicine, the clergy, and the military—are the direct result of the hard-won advances she helped women attain. 

Friedan trained as a psychologist, but never pursued a career in the field. When she wrote The Feminine Mystique , she was a suburban housewife and mother who supplemented her husband’s income by writing freelance articles for women’s magazines. 

The Feminine Mystique began as a survey Friedan conducted in 1957 for the 15th reunion of her graduating class at Smith. It was intended to refute a prevailing postwar myth: that higher education kept women from adapting to their roles as wives and mothers. Judging from her own capable life, Friedan expected her classmates to describe theirs as similarly well adjusted. But what she discovered in the women’s responses was something far more complex and more troubling—a “nameless, aching dissatisfaction” that she would famously call “the problem that has no name.” 

Drawing on history, psychology, sociology, and economics, Friedan charted a gradual metamorphosis of the American woman from the independent, career-minded “new woman” of the 1920s and 1930s into the vacant, aproned housewife of the postwar years 

With its impassioned analysis of the issues that affected women’s lives in the decades after World War II—including enforced domesticity, limited career prospects, and the campaign for legalized abortion— The Feminine Mystique is widely regarded as one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century. Friedan’s other books include It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement (Random House, 1976); The Second Stage (Summit, 1981); and The Fountain of Age (Simon & Schuster, 1993). 

The recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, she has been a visiting professor at universities around the country, among them Columbia, Temple, and the University of Southern California. In recent years, Friedan was associated with the Institute for Women and Work at Cornell University. 

The new society Friedan proposed, founded on the notion that men and women were created equal, represented such a drastic upending of prevailing norms that over the years, she would be forced to explain her position again and again. “Some people think I’m saying, ‘Women of the world unite—you have nothing to lose but your men,’” she told Life magazine in 1963. “It’s not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners.”