Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan (born February 4, 1921, Peoria, Illinois, U.S.—died February 4, 2006, Washington, D.C.) was an American feminist best known for her book The Feminine Mystique (1963), which explores the causes of the frustrations of modern women in traditional roles.

Bettye Goldstein graduated in 1942 from Smith College with a degree in psychology and, after a year of graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, settled in New York City. She worked at various jobs until 1947, when she married Carl Friedan (divorced 1969). For 10 years thereafter she lived as a housewife and mother in the suburbs of New York while doing freelance work for a number of magazines. In 1957 a questionnaire that she circulated among her Smith classmates suggested to her that a great many of them were, like her, deeply dissatisfied with their lives. She planned and undertook an extensive series of studies on the topic—formulating more detailed questionnaires, conducting interviews, discussing her results with psychologists and other students of behaviour—and finally organized her findings, illuminated by her personal experiences, in her 1963 landmark book, The Feminine Mystique.

The book was an immediate and controversial best seller and was translated into a number of foreign languages. Its title was a term she coined to describe “the problem that has no name”—that is, a feeling of personal worthlessness resulting from the acceptance of a designated role that requires a woman’s intellectual, economic, and emotional reliance on her husband. Friedan’s central thesis was that women as a class suffered a variety of more or less subtle forms of discrimination but were in particular the victims of a pervasive system of delusions and false values under which they were urged to find personal fulfillment, even identity, vicariously through the husbands and children to whom they were expected to cheerfully devote their lives. This restricted role of wife-mother, whose spurious glorification by advertisers and others was suggested by the title of the book, led almost inevitably to a sense of unreality or general spiritual malaise in the absence of genuine, creative, self-defining work.

In October 1966 Friedan cofounded the National Organization for Women (NOW), a civil rights group dedicated to achieving equality of opportunity for women. As president of NOW, she directed campaigns to end sex-classified employment notices, for greater representation of women in government, for child-care centres for working mothers, and for legalized abortion and other reforms. Although it was later occasionally eclipsed by younger and more-radical groups, NOW remained the largest and probably the most effective organization in the women’s movement. Friedan stepped down from the presidency in March 1970 but continued to be active in the work that had sprung largely from her pioneering efforts, helping to organize the Women’s Strike for Equality—held on August 26, 1970, the 50th anniversary of woman suffrage—and leading in the campaign for ratification of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. A founding member of the National Women’s Political Caucus (1971), she said it was organized “to make policy, not coffee.” In 1973 she became director of the First Women’s Bank and Trust Company.

In 1976 Friedan published It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement and in 1981 The Second Stage, an assessment of the status of the women’s movement. The Fountain of Age (1993) addresses the psychology of old age and urged a revision of society’s view that aging means loss and depletion. Friedan’s other books included the memoir Life So Far (2000). See also feminism; Sidebar: Betty Friedan: The Quality of Life.