Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan (born 1921) was a women's rights activist, author of The Feminine Mystique, and a founding member of the National Organization for Women, the National Abortion Rights Action League, and the National Women's Political Caucus.

Betty Friedan appeared suddenly in the national limelight with the publication of her first book, The Feminine Mystique, in 1963. It became a national best seller and propelled Friedan to a leadership position in the burgeoning movement for women's liberation. In that book Friedan identified a condition she claimed women suffered as the result of a widely accepted ideology that placed them first and foremost in the home. Attacking the notion that "biology is destiny," which ordained that women should devote their lives to being wives and mothers at the expense of other pursuits, Friedan called upon women to shed their domestic confines and discover other meaningful endeavors.

Friedan was herself well situated to know the effects of the "feminine mystique." She was born Betty Naomi Goldstein in 1921 in Peoria, Illinois, the daughter of Jewish parents. Her father was a jeweler, and her mother had to give up her job on a newspaper when she married. The loss of that potential career affected her mother deeply, and she urged young Betty to pursue the career in journalism that she was never able to achieve. The daughter went on to graduate summa cum laude from Smith College in 1942. She then received a research fellowship to study psychology as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. Like her mother, she did some work as a journalist, but unlike her mother she did not end her career to build a family. She married Carl Friedan in 1947, and during the years that she was raising their three children she continued her freelance writing. After her husband established his own advertising agency they moved to the suburbs, where Friedan experienced what she later termed the "feminine mystique" first hand. Although she continued to write she felt stifled in her domestic role.

In 1957 Friedan put together an intensive questionnaire to send to her college classmates from Smith 15 years after graduation. She obtained detailed, open-ended replies from 200 women, revealing a great deal of dissatisfaction with their lives. Like Friedan herself, they tried to conform to the prevailing expectations of wives and mothers while harboring frustrated desires for something more out of life. Friedan wrote an article based on her findings, but the editors of the women's magazines with whom she had previously worked refused to publish the piece. Those refusals only spurred her on. She decided to investigate the problem on a much larger scale and publish a book. The result of her effort was The Feminine Mystique, which became an instant success, selling over three million copies.

Friedan began her book by describing what she called "the problem that has no name." In words that touched a sensitive nerve in thousands of middle-class American women, she wrote, "the problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material … she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—'Is this all?"'

With the publication of The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan rose to national prominence. Three years later in 1966 she helped found the first major organization established since the 1920s devoted to women's rights, the National Organization for Women (NOW), and became its first president. Under Friedan's leadership NOW worked for political reforms to secure women's legal equality. The organization was successful in achieving a number of important gains for women. It worked for the enforcement of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of sex. As a result of the organization's efforts, the Equal Opportunities Commission ruled that airlines could not fire female flight attendants because they married or reached the age of 35, nor could employment opportunities be advertised according to male or female categories.

NOW also lobbied for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which had remained dormant since it was first introduced in Congress by Alice Paul in 1923. In addition, the organization called for federally funded day care centers to be established "on the same basis as parks, libraries and public schools." NOW also worked to achieve the legalization of abortion and the preservation of abortion rights. Friedan was among the founders of the National Abortion Rights Action League in 1969. Finally in 1973 the Supreme Court legalized abortions. Deaths of women resulting from abortions dropped by 60 percent.

In 1970 Friedan was one of the most forceful opponents of President Nixon's nomination of G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court. She argued before the Senate Judiciary Committee that in 1969 Carswell defied the Civil Rights Act by ruling in favor of the right of employers to deny jobs to women with children. That same year, at the annual meeting of NOW, she called for a Women's Strike for Equality, which was held on August 26—the 50th anniversary of the day women gained the right to vote. Women across the country commemorated the day with demonstrations, marches, and speeches in 40 major cities. Friedan led a parade of over 10,000 down Fifth Avenue in New York City.

The following year Friedan was among the feminist leaders who formed the National Women's Political Caucus. During the next several years she moved away from central leadership in the movement to concentrate on writing and teaching. She wrote a regular column for McCall's magazine and taught at several colleges and universities, including Temple University, Yale University, Queens College, and the New School for Social Research.

Friedan became an influential spokeswoman for the women's movement nationally as well as internationally. In 1974 she had an audience with Pope Paul VI in which she urged the Catholic Church to "come to terms with the full personhood of women."

As the women's movement grew and new leaders emerged with different concerns, Friedan's centrality in the movement dwindled. Nevertheless, she remained an out-spoken feminist leader for many years. In 1977 she participated in the National Conference of Women in Houston, Texas, and called for an end to divisions and a new coalition of women. Her writing, teaching, and speaking continued throughout these years, as her ideas concerning the feminist movement evolved. In 1976 she published It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement, which was followed by her 1981 book, The Second Stage. In that publication Friedan called for a shift in the feminist movement, one that would address the needs of families and would allow both men and women to break from the sex-role stereotypes of the past.

In 1993, Friedan released The Fountain of Age, in which she began to explore the rights of the elderly and aging, just as she had once become attuned to women's issues. Friedan's focus is not on mere economics, but rather on helping the elderly find fulfillment in their latter years. In The New York Times she said, "Once you break through the mystique of age and that view of the aged as objects of care and as problems for society, you can look at the reality of the new years of human life open to us."

In 1996 new scholarship arose about Friedan's life when Daniel Horowitz published a controversial article in American Quarterly. Horowitz, who teaches at Friedan's alma mater, Smith University, draws a link between Friedan's feminism and her undergraduate years at Smith during the 1940s. Horowitz presents a new outlook on the work of Friedan, who has often said her feminism first emerged during the 1960s; in his article, Horowitz makes a strong case that it can be traced to the 1940s. But regardless of the time that Friedan's feminism first surfaced, she remains a significant influence on societal expectations and equality for women.

Further Reading

Betty Friedan's own writings are the best source of information on her life and work. She wrote extensively in popular magazines and was interviewed numerous times after 1963. She published four books: The Feminine Mystique (1963), It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement (1976), and The Second Stage (1981), and The Fountain of Age (1993). □

FRIEDAN, BETTY 1921-

Author, women's rights activist

Pioneer for Women

Betty Friedan was at the center of the growing women's movement in the 1960s, as the author of one of the most influential books on American women's lives (The Feminine Mystique, 1963) and also as one of the founders of the National Organization for Women (NOW). She was the most visible champion of women's rights at the time, even though by the end of the decade more-radical feminist groups had already begun to think of her as old-fashioned.

Stifled Aspirations

The eldest of three children, Friedan had a comfortable childhood until the Depression hit; as her parents struggled to support the family she watched her mother lash out at her father in "impotent rage." She determined that she would find the fulfillment for herself that her mother never did. In 1943, as a summa cum laude graduate from Smith College, Friedan made a decision that ran against her career aspirations: she turned down a fellowship to study psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, because her boyfriend warned her that it could end their relationship.

The Move to the Suburbs

That relationship ended anyway, and Friedan moved to New York City and began work at a labor news service. Within a few years she found herself nearly alone. Her friends had all begun to marry and move to the suburbs, as many young people did at the end of World War II. Afraid of loneliness, she met and married Carl Friedan, and in 1949 they had their first child. Friedan took a year's maternity leave. She returned to her job a little reluctantly, but when she became pregnant with a second child she was fired. Leaving New York, she and her husband found a home in the suburbs, and Friedan prepared to settle into a full-time career as a mother.

Freelance Writer

Before long Friedan began to feel frustration about her role, however: "Carl's vision of a wife was one who stayed home and cooked and played with the children. And one who didn't compete. I was not that wife." She attempted to find some fulfillment outside of the home by taking up journalism again, writing freelance articles for magazines. Her early articles were frequently about women as wives and mothers and appeared in magazine's such as Cosmopolitan("Millionaire's Wife," September 1956) and Parents("Day Camp in the Driveway," May 1957). When she tried to sell stories about women who were living outside of traditional roles, she was told that such profiles were not really what American women wanted to read.

Women's Regret

In 1957 Friedan considered with interest the responses to a questionnaire her fellow Smith alumnae had filled out as their fifteenth class reunion approached. She had planned to use the survey results as the basis of an article for McCall's. Ninety-seven percent of the women who responded were married, and 89 per-cent of them were housewives. They claimed to be happy with their homes and family, but many of them expressed regret that they had not put their education to serious use. Depressed by her findings and by the lack of ambition she discovered among the Smith students about to graduate, Friedan wrote an article she called "The Togetherness Woman"; but because of its pessimistic tone, McCall's decided not to run it. Other women's magazines turned it down, as well, or agreed to run it only with substantial revisions. "Only the most neurotic housewife would identify with this," an editor for Redbook told her.

Writing The Feminine Mystique.

Friedan was inspired by the success of Vance Packard, whose The Hidden Persuaders, a book about hidden messages in advertising, started out as an article he could not get published. Friedan began to think of "The Togetherness Woman" as a full-length book. She had little trouble selling the idea to a book publisher: while magazines might avoid controversy rather than risk offending advertisers, the books that frequently sell best are the most controversial. Over the next five years she worked on the project, accumulating overwhelming evidence of discontent among American women. The results of her research were published as The Feminine Mystique.

Questioning Woman's Role

The American society Friedan portrayed in the book bombards its women members with messages that they are worthy only as wifes or mothers, that they can be completely fulfilled through serving the other people in their families. She quoted Newsweek from 1960: "A young mother with a beautiful family, charm, talent and brains is apt to dismiss her role apologetically. …A good education, it seems, has given this paragon among women an understanding of the value of everything except her own worth." Even when it acknowledged the problem, the mainstream press took at face value women's insistence that their families were most important to them: as The New York Times observed, "All admit to being deeply frustrated at times by the lack of privacy, the physical burden, the routine of family life, the confinement of it. However, none would give up her home and family if she had the choice to make again." The effect of such statements, however, was to make the woman who might have made a different choice feel as if there was something wrong with her.

Expanding Possibilities for Women

Friedan exposed the lie of the "feminine mystique," that family and a career are not both possible for a woman. Housework should not be seen as a career, she argued, but as "something that must be done as quickly and efficiently as possible …to save time that can be used in more creative ways." For the women Friedan had talked to, a role in society outside the home did not distance them from their families but helped them feel more truly alive—and consequently, made life at home more bearable. "If we continue to produce millions of young mothers who stop their growth and education short of identity, without a strong core of human values to pass on to their children," she concluded, "we are committing, quite simply, genocide."

Leading the Movement

After the publication of The Feminine Mystique Friedan found herself in the middle of a growing movement for women's rights, dedicated to addressing seriously the very problems her book discussed. In 1966, covering the Third National Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women as a journalist, Friedan discussed with other women the idea of an organization like the NAACP to protect women's rights. Friedan wrote on a napkin the basis of the group: "to take the actions necessary to bring women into the main-stream of American society, now, full equality for women, in fully equal partnership with men, NOW. The National Organization for Women." NOW elected Friedan as its first president at its organizing meeting in October 1966.

Fighting Sex Discrimination

NOW took an aggressively political stand on matters such as divorce-law re-form, child care for working women, and equal pay in the professions. One of its first major victories came in 1967, when the group persuaded President Lyndon Johnson to include sex discrimination as a basis for affirmative action. NOW also pressured the EEOC to enforce the sex-discrimination prohibition called for by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. By the end of 1967 the group had more than one thousand members. Over the next several years NOW became more liberal, taking up abortion rights as another cause and defending Valerie Solanis, the actress who shot Andy Warhol, as a feminist revolutionary. For Friedan the support of Solanis was too radical, and many younger, more militant feminists left the group to pursue their own agendas. Friedan permanently lost faith with the more liberal members of NOW when she referred to radical lesbians as a "lavender menace" which threatened to undermine the organization. Although Friedan was still a very visible member of the women's liberation movement, it had quickly grown beyond her leadership.

Sources:

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963);

David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villlard, 1993);

Rosalind Rosenberg, Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century (New York: Hill &Wang, 1992).

Betty Friedan

Born: February 4, 1921
Peoria, Illinois
American women's rights activist, author, and organization founder

Betty Friedan is a leader of the feminist (women's rights) movement, author of The Feminine Mystique, and a founding member of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the National Abortion Rights Action League (an organization that supports a woman's right to end a pregnancy), and the National Women's Political Caucus. She helped spark the women's movement in the 1960s.

Following her mother's advice

Betty Naomi Goldstein was born on February 4, 1921 in Peoria, Illinois, the first of Harry and Miriam (Horwitz) Goldstein's three children. Her father worked his way up to become the owner of a jewelry store; her mother had to give up her job on a newspaper when she married. The loss of that career affected her mother deeply, and she urged young Betty to pursue the career in journalism that she herself was never able to achieve.

Betty went on to graduate from Smith College in 1942. She then studied psychology as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. Like her mother, she did some work as a journalist, but unlike her mother she did not end her career to build a family. She married Carl Friedan in 1947, and during the years that she was raising their three children she continued to write articles. After her husband established his own advertising agency, the family moved to the suburbs. Although she continued to write, she felt unfulfilled by her role as wife and mother.

Others feel the same way

In 1957 Friedan put together a list of questions to send to her Smith College classmates fifteen years after graduation. She received detailed replies from two hundred women, many of which revealed that these women were also unhappy with their lives. Friedan wrote an article based on her findings, but the editors of the women's magazines with whom she had previously worked refused to publish it. Those refusals only made her more determined to share her findings with the world. She decided to investigate the problem on a much larger scale and publish a book. The result of her effort was The Feminine Mystique, which became an instant success, selling over three million copies.

Friedan began her book by describing what she called "the problem that has no name." In words that touched a nerve in thousands of middle-class American women, she wrote, "the problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning [that is, a longing] that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries … she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—'Is this all?'" Attacking the notion that "biology is destiny," under which women were expected to devote their lives to being wives and mothers and give up all other pursuits, Friedan called upon women to do whatever it took to discover other meaningful activities.

Organizing for change

In 1966, three years after the book's publication, Friedan helped found the first major organization established since the 1920s devoted to women's rights. The organization was called the National Organization for Women (NOW), and Freidan became its first president. Under Friedan's leadership NOW worked for political reforms to secure legal equality for women. The organization was successful in achieving a number of important gains. It worked for the enforcement of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prevented employers from discriminating (denying opportunities to or providing unequal treatment to) against workers on the basis of sex. As a result of the organization's efforts, the Equal Opportunities Commission ruled that airlines could not fire female flight attendants because they married or reached the age of thirty-five and that job opportunities could not be advertised as only for male or female applicants.

NOW also lobbied for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which had been introduced in Congress by Alice Paul (1885–1977) in 1923 but had never passed. In addition, the organization called for government-funded day-care centers to be established "on the same basis as parks, libraries and public schools." NOW also worked to make abortion (a woman's right to end a pregnancy) legal and to preserve abortion rights. Friedan was among the founders of the National Abortion Rights Action League in 1969. Finally, in 1973, the Supreme Court legalized abortion.

In 1970 President Richard Nixon (1913–1994) chose G. Harrold Carswell (1919–) to sit on the Supreme Court. Friedan made a strong stand against the president's choice. She argued that Carswell had defied the Civil Rights Act by ruling that employers had the right to deny jobs to women who had children. Carswell's appointment did not go through. That same year, at the annual meeting of NOW, Friedan called for a Women's Strike for Equality, which was held on August 26—the fiftieth anniversary of the day women gained the right to vote. Women across the country marked the day with demonstrations, marches, and speeches in forty major cities. Friedan led a parade of over ten thousand down Fifth Avenue in New York City. The following year Friedan was among the leaders who formed the National Women's Political Caucus.

Still an important voice for women

As the women's movement grew and new leaders emerged with different concerns, Friedan's popularity decreased. Still, she remained an outspoken leader for many years. In 1974 she had an audience with Pope Paul VI in which she urged the Catholic Church to "come to terms with the full personhood of women." In 1977 she participated in the National Conference of Women in Houston, Texas, calling for an end to divisions in the movement and the creation of a new coalition (alliance) of women. Friedan continued writing, teaching, and speaking throughout these years. In 1976 she published It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement, which was followed by her 1981 book, The Second Stage. In that publication Friedan called for a shift in the feminist movement, one that would address the needs of families and would allow both men and women to break free of the roles they had been pressured to fill in the past.

Friedan remains an important voice in women's struggle for equality. Also, in 1993, she wrote The Fountain of Age, turning her attention to the rights of the elderly and aging. In the New York Times she said, "Once you break through the mystique [air of mystery] of age and that view of the aged as objects of care and as problems for society, you can look at the reality of the new years of human life open to us." Betty Friedan's genuine interest in helping others improve and enjoy their lives is as strong today as it was when she first began writing.

For More Information

Blau, Justine. Betty Friedan. New York: Chelsea House, 1990.

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton, 1963.

Friedan, Betty. It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement. New York: Random House, 1976.

Friedan, Betty. Life So Far. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Friedan, Betty. The Second Stage. New York: Summit Books, 1981.

Hennessee, Judith Adler. Betty Friedan: Her Life. New York: Random House, 1999.

Friedan, Betty 1921-2006

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Betty Friedan was a catalyst in the development of the women’s movement in the United States in the 1960s. In 1963 her book The Feminine Mystique was published, and it provided a clarion call to women—especially suburban housewives—to move beyond their lives in the home and to actively pursue careers as well as social and political equality. Several decades later, the book had sold more than three million copies.

The daughter of a Russian immigrant who owned a successful jewelry store in Peoria, Illinois, and a mother who gave up a newspaper career to raise her children, Bettye (as she was named at birth) attended Smith College, graduating with honors in 1942. After earning her bachelor’s degree, she dropped the “e” in her first name and attended the University of California, Berkeley, to pursue a graduate degree in psychology. She left the university in response to pressure from a boyfriend, eventually moving to New York, where she began writing for labor newspapers. She married Carl Friedan in 1947 (they divorced in 1969), and they moved to the suburbs of New York City, where she raised three children (Daniel, Emily, and Jonathan).

In preparation for her fifteenth college reunion, Friedan surveyed her classmates and discovered a vague but poignant dissatisfaction with their seemingly pleasant suburban lives. She extended her survey to alumna of other women’s colleges and also interviewed numerous women; the results of her investigation provided the basis for The Feminine Mystique. The book galvanized women across the nation, particularly white women, and Friedan entered the national spotlight as an assertive spokeswoman. In 1966 she was one of the founders of the National Organization for Women (NOW), serving as its first president, a position she held until 1970. NOW provided women with a national platform to discuss their concerns, to advocate for political rights, and to engage in social and political activism. In 1969 Friedan was one of the founders of NARAL Pro-Choice America, an organization that advocates for abortion rights, and in 1971 she helped to found the National Women’s Political Caucus.

Friedan authored six subsequent books, the last of which was a memoir. In her later books, she began to advocate for a broad movement for the working class, people of color, and gays and lesbians. She was a visiting professor at Columbia University, Temple University, and the University of Southern California. In the years just before her death, she worked with the Institute for Women and Work at Cornell University.

The Feminine Mystique remains a highly influential book, although much of its argument, focused on conditions in the 1960s, is now the source for more recent forms of feminism, and thus it is ironically both essential reading and dated. While her unflagging efforts on behalf of women focused attention on gender disparities, she achieved notoriety in the women’s movement by calling lesbian feminists “the lavender menace” because they provided an easy target for critics who prophesied the demise of the family. Although The Feminine Mystique was focused on the conditions of suburban mothers, one of her cofounders of the National Women’s Political Caucus, Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977), was a key African American activist in the long and bitter struggle for civil rights in Mississippi and political recognition in the national Democratic Party.

The first extensively organized effort for women’s rights occurred in the 1800s and early 1900s when women fought for the right to vote. Betty Friedan was an architect of the second organized effort in the 1960s.

SEE ALSO Feminism; Feminism, Second Wave; Suburbs; Women and Politics; Women’s Liberation; Women’s Movement

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Friedan, Betty. 2000. Life So Far. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Hennessee, Judith Adler. 1999. Betty Friedan: Her Life. New York: Random House.

Horowitz, Daniel. 1998. Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, The Cold War, and Modern Feminism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Philo A. Hutcheson

Betty Naomi Friedan , 1921–2006, American social reformer and feminist, b. Peoria, Ill. as Bettye Goldstein, educated at Smith College (B.A., 1942) and the Univ. of California at Berkeley. A suburban housewife and sometime writer, she published The Feminine Mystique (1963), attacking the then-popular notion that women could find fulfillment only as wives, childbearers, and homemakers. Widely read and extremely influential, the book played an important role in the creation of the modern feminist movement. In 1966 Friedan helped found the National Organization for Women and served as its president until 1970. She also helped organize the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws in 1969 and the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971. In The Second Stage (1981), she argued that feminists must reclaim the family and bring more men into the movement by addressing child care, parental leave, and flexible work schedules. In The Fountain of Age (1993) Friedan criticized "the age mystique" and society's frequently patronizing treatment of the elderly; she advocated new, positive roles for older citizens.

Bibliography: See her It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement (1976) and her memoir Life So Far (2000); biography by J. Hennessee (1999); study by S. Coontz (2010).

Friedan, Betty (b. 4 Feb. 1921). US feminist Born in Peoria, Illinois, her first book, The Feminine Mystique (1963), is seen as marking the beginning of the second wave of feminism in America (Women's movement). A suburban mother of three who had graduated from Smith University some twenty years before, Friedan's frustrations and insights struck a chord with women across the USA. The book criticized what Friedan saw as a concerted campaign, since the end of World War II, to convince American women that they could only achieve happiness through marriage and motherhood. It was this ‘happy homemaker’ ideology that was the ‘feminine mystique’. In contrast to Simone de Beauvoir in France, Friedan was highly practical. She founded the National Organisation of Women in 1966, and was its first president until 1970. Two of her subsequent books deal with feminism and the women's movement, It Changed My Life (1976) and The Second Stage (1981). She has won numerous awards, including the Eleanor Roosevelt Leadership Award in 1989.

Friedan, Betty (1921–2006), born in Illinois, graduated from Smith College (1942), and has been a leader of feminist activities. Her major writing, The Feminine Mystique (1963), was followed by It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement (1976) and The Second Stage (1981), calling for a restructuring of institutions and therefore of power for women. The Fountain of Age (1993) is both a celebration of wisdom and acceptance in aging and a condemnation of American's treatment of the elderly, male and female. Life So Far (2000) is a memoir.

Friedan, Betty (1921– ) US feminist writer. Through her best-selling book, The Feminine Mystique (1963), she prompted women to examine their roles in society. She was a founder and first president (1966–70) of the National Organization for Women (NOW). The Second Stage (1981) called for new directions in the women's movement.

Friedan, Betty. See Feminine Mystique, The.