Friedan, Betty

Accomplished Author

In addition to her relentless work as a feminist activist, she published a number of books both about her life and her theoretical insights and activist work. She wrote these books to legitimate her work and to continue conversations with her many opponents. In 1976, she published It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement. In response to the transitions of the women's movement, she published The Second Stage (1981), where she queried where the women's movement needed to move in the future. Since the publication of The Feminine Mystique, women had made huge transitions out of the home and into the public sphere.

However, in addition to these major transitions, women's work had largely doubled in that women were still expected to do the vast majority of work in the home while also honing a career outside of the home. Essentially, men's positions both in and outside of the home had not shifted very much, while the positions of women shifted drastically, resulting in a superwoman syndrome. Unlike radical feminists at this time, Friedan contended that rather than completely removing family from women's lives, family needed to be rethought, positioning men and women in far more equal roles as parents. Interestingly, Friedan often conceived family in a highly heterosexual way, thus offering a rethinking of a particular kind of family. For example, given the many debates around gay marriage and lesbian, gay, and queer families, her rethinking would only account for heterosexual families.

Approximately 10 years later and in an effort to better understand the “mystique of age,” she published The Fountain of Age. In this project, she used the same methods for conducting research on The Feminine Mystique: collecting, organizing, and analyzing scientific studies, anecdotal evidence, interviews with active seniors like herself, personal experiences, and popular culture images and constructions of old age. She found American society was dealing with another mystique that was far more pervasive than the feminine mystique, because it was an idea that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Further, she noted how those who were constructed as old were feminized, often described as weak and helpless. Her solution, she claimed, was to shift the ideas surrounding old age or shift the paradigm, both on an individual and collective level. However, as Friedan was often criticized in her feminist activism, her liberal arguments often failed to account for the structural dimensions of social life and inequality.

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