Betty Friedan

Bettye Naomi Goldstein was born on February 4, 1921, in Peoria, Illinois, the eldest of three children in a Jewish family ^[1]. Her father, Harry Goldstein, was an immigrant from Russia who built a jewelry business in downtown Peoria. Her mother, Miriam Horwitz Goldstein, had written for the society pages of a local newspaper before her marriage, then gave up the work to keep house, a sacrifice her daughter later described as a source of lasting frustration in the household ^[2].

Growing up in Peoria, Friedan felt the sting of exclusion early. Jewish families were barred from the local country club, and she was passed over by high school sororities, experiences she later credited with sharpening her sense of injustice ^[2]. She was an outstanding student, founding a literary magazine at Peoria High School and graduating as one of the top students in her class.

In 1938 she entered Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she edited the campus newspaper and pushed its coverage toward political questions, including labor rights and the war in Europe. She graduated summa cum laude in 1942 with a degree in psychology ^[1]. A fellowship took her to the University of California, Berkeley, for graduate work in psychology under scholars including Erik Erikson, but she turned down a larger doctoral fellowship and left academic life after a year, a decision she revisited often in later writing ^[3].

After Berkeley, Goldstein moved to New York and worked through the 1940s as a labor journalist, first for the Federated Press and then for the UE News, the paper of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America ^[3]. The union press covered strikes, workplace discrimination, and the situation of women workers, and historians have traced some of her later feminist arguments to this reporting, a connection documented in Daniel Horowitz's study of her early career ^[3].

In 1947 she married Carl Friedan, a theater producer who later worked in advertising. The couple had three children: Daniel, Jonathan, and Emily. Betty Friedan lost one newspaper job while pregnant, an experience she cited afterward as an example of the routine dismissal of expectant mothers in that era ^[2]. The family settled in the New York suburbs, eventually in Rockland County, and she supported the household budget by writing freelance articles for women's magazines such as McCall's and Ladies' Home Journal ^[1].

The turning point came in 1957, when she prepared a questionnaire for the fifteenth reunion of her Smith College class. The responses suggested that many educated women in comfortable suburban homes felt a vague, unnamed dissatisfaction with lives centered entirely on husbands, children, and housework ^[4]. When magazines declined to publish her findings as she wrote them, she expanded the project into a book. That decision reshaped her life and, in time, American public debate.

The Feminine Mystique, published by W. W. Norton in February 1963, argued that postwar American culture, from advertising to popular psychology to women's magazines, promoted an ideal of fulfilled domesticity that left many housewives feeling empty and without identity ^[4]. Friedan called this ideology the feminine mystique and named the discontent it produced "the problem that has no name." She urged women to seek education and meaningful paid work alongside family life.

The book became a bestseller, with sales eventually counted in the millions across many printings and translations ^[1]. Readers wrote to Friedan in large numbers describing recognition of their own situations, and the book is widely credited by historians with helping to ignite the second wave of American feminism, the surge of activism on employment, law, and reproductive rights that ran through the 1960s and 1970s ^[5].

The work also drew criticism, both at publication and later. Some reviewers rejected its argument outright, while later feminist scholars, including bell hooks, observed that the book spoke mainly to the concerns of white, middle class, college educated women and paid little attention to working class women and women of color, many of whom had always held jobs out of necessity ^[5]. Friedan herself acknowledged some of these limits in later years, and the debate over the book's scope remains part of any full account of the Betty Friedan biography.

In June 1966, during a national conference of state commissions on the status of women in Washington, D.C., Friedan and a group of colleagues grew frustrated that the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was not enforcing the sex discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In response they founded the National Organization for Women, and Friedan wrote the opening of its statement of purpose, which called for women's full participation in American society in equal partnership with men ^[6]. She served as NOW's first president from 1966 to 1970.

Under her leadership NOW pressed the EEOC to bar sex segregated job advertisements, campaigned for enforcement of equal pay, and supported the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1969 Friedan helped found the organization that became NARAL, an advocacy group for the repeal of abortion laws ^[1]. The following year, on August 26, 1970, the fiftieth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, she was a central organizer of the Women's Strike for Equality, a nationwide day of marches and demonstrations that drew tens of thousands of participants in New York City alone and signaled the movement's arrival as a mass force ^[6].

In 1971 she joined Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and Shirley Chisholm in founding the National Women's Political Caucus, which worked to elect women and feminist candidates to public office ^[1]. Her record of building durable institutions, rather than any single protest, sits at the center of most assessments of Betty Friedan achievements.

Her years at the movement's front were not free of conflict. Friedan clashed with younger radical feminists over strategy and tone, and she initially resisted a visible role for lesbian activists within NOW, using a dismissive phrase, "lavender menace," that provoked lasting anger. She later moderated that position and in 1977, at the National Women's Conference in Houston, seconded a resolution supporting lesbian rights ^[2].

Friedan and her husband Carl divorced in 1969 after a marriage she described as turbulent. She never remarried, dividing her later years among New York, Washington, D.C., and Sag Harbor on Long Island, and she remained close to her three children and, in time, a large circle of grandchildren ^[2].

She kept writing steadily. It Changed My Life, a collection of essays and movement documents, appeared in 1976. The Second Stage (1981) argued that the movement needed to address family life and men's roles rather than treat career achievement as the whole of liberation, a position that drew fire from some feminists who read it as a retreat ^[1]. In 1993 she published The Fountain of Age, a long study contesting American stereotypes of old age and decline, and in 2000 she released a memoir, Life So Far ^[7].

Alongside her books she taught and lectured widely, holding visiting positions at institutions including New York University, the University of Southern California, and Cornell University, and she remained a visible commentator on women's issues into her final decade ^[1]. Betty Friedan died of congestive heart failure at her home in Washington, D.C., on February 4, 2006, her 85th birthday ^[7].

Few American books of the twentieth century can claim the direct social effect attributed to The Feminine Mystique. Obituaries and later histories alike treat its publication in 1963 as a starting gun for the second wave of feminism, and the organizations Friedan helped create, NOW above all, continued to shape law and policy on employment discrimination, reproductive rights, and political representation long after she left their leadership ^[7]. Among widely cited Betty Friedan facts is that NOW grew from a founding group of a few dozen people in 1966 into the largest feminist membership organization in the United States ^[6].

Her papers are held at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard University, where they remain a primary resource for historians of the movement ^[8]. Scholars continue to argue about her: about the reach and blind spots of her most famous book, about her combative style, and about the relationship between her labor journalism of the 1940s and the feminism she voiced in the 1960s ^[3].

What is not in dispute is the scale of the change she helped set in motion. In the space of a decade after 1963, sex discrimination in hiring became illegal and contested in court, credit and educational barriers began to fall, and the assumption that a woman's life would be defined solely by marriage and motherhood lost its hold on public expectation. Friedan liked to say that the movement had changed life not only for women but for men and children too, and the ordinary texture of American work and family life in the decades since bears out how far the argument traveled ^[7].