Friedan, Betty (1921–2006)

Betty Friedan, author and activist, helped found the feminist movement. She was born in Peoria, Illinois, on February 4, 1921. A formidable character, even as child, she was earthy, strongly opinionated, easily frustrated, and had a notoriously bad temper. After graduating summa cum laude from Smith, Friedan gathered fellowships and a scholarship to pursue graduate study in psychology. In March 1943, she won the prestigious Abraham Rosenberg Research Fellowship, the largest grant available at the University of California at Berkeley and one sufficient enough to last through the end of doctoral studies. Her boyfriend reminded her that he would never win such an award and pushed her to sublimate her wishes to his by refusing the fellowship. She did so. Moving to New York City in 1943, she found work as a labor journalist with the left-wing Federated Press and married Carl Friedan. In 1946, the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers hired her away as a reporter for their official organ, the UE News. Pregnant with her second child in 1952, the union fired Friedan.

Friedan's experiences of sex-based discrimination combined in 1957 to lay the groundwork for 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. Friedan felt guilty that she had not lived up to the glorious future forecast for her, and she sought a reason as to why so many of the best and brightest women of her generation felt dissatisfied. She gathered masses of information and realized that she had been asking the wrong question. Rather than disprove the popular notion that education had failed to train women for lives as wives and mothers, Friedan now began to argue that domesticity did not suit all women. With a focus on white, middle-class suburban women, Friedan provided a coherent explanation for the routine belittlement that women had experienced all their lives. She argued that the feminine mystique required women to renounce their brains and deny their senses, retreat to a childlike state, and immolate themselves on the altar of their family's needs to find satisfaction in life. The book became an instant bestseller.

In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan had argued that cultural attitudes were ephemeral and that women could be a force for change. Partly as a result of the book, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) received a flood of job discrimination complaints from women. The EEOC simply ignored women's problems, continuing to permit such practices as categorizing help-wanted advertisements by sex. Activists planning a civil rights organization for women invited Friedan to the 1966 conference of state women's commissions. Famous and fearless, she looked like the perfect choice for president of the new group, particularly when she described the organization's goals as to take the actions needed to bring women into the mainstream of American society—now, equality for women, in fully equal partnership with men. Membership of the National Organization for Women reached 1,200 by the end of 1966.

Unable to work well with others, Friedan found herself shunted aside as other women rose to the fore-front of the feminist movement. By the 1980s, she had virtually disappeared as a factor in organized feminism, although she continued to publish. She died on February 4, 2006.

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