American feminist pioneer and organizer, lecturer and writer, the author of “The Feminine Mystique,” which became a best-seller, translated into 13 languages. She founded and was acting president of the “National Organization of Women,” (N.O.W.) 1966-1970, seeking equal rights in work and pay.
Betty Friedan was born Betty Naomi Goldstein, the daughter of an immigrant jeweler and a newspaper editor. Issues of equality and positional power were continual themes in her life. Her mother quit her job as editor of the local newspaper’s women’s pages to become a housewife. She was aware of the toll this took on her mother, and the impact it had on her family. As an adult, after becoming pregnant, Friedan herself was fired from a job.
A strong student, Betty skipped second grade and went on to become the high school valedictorian. Crisscrossing the United States, she attended Smith College in Massachusetts, where she served as editor of the college newspaper, and graduated summa cum laude in 1942. She did graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley, but turned down a psychology fellowship, not to outsmart a boyfriend. Later, she returned to the east coast, and lived in New York and Washington.
Not a physically attractive woman, her focus was on humanistic psychology, politics and social justice. After college, she married Carl Friedan in 1947, and worked as a free-lance writer while raising their three children. During the ’40s and ’50s, Friedan was a deeply committed radical activist. A brilliant, energetic reporter for union newspapers, she was intensely engaged in the leftist politics of the time.
By the time she stopped working in 1952, pregnant with her second child, McCarthyism had chased underground much of this visionary women’s movement. The rest was smothered by anti-female union policies and longstanding misogyny among male leaders on the left. Friedan retreated to the suburbs and began writing about family and work for women’s magazines, doing what her mother had not done. And, she came out swinging.
Women in labor unions were fighting for equal pay, maternity leaves and higher minimum wages; other progressive women agitated for government-sponsored day care, national health insurance and an end to racial discrimination. She later said: “I decided I was going to be fulfilled as a housewife, but I could not suppress the itch to write, and I did it in the morning, like secret drinking.”
Feminist pioneer and organizer, lecturer and writer, she authored The Feminine Mystique in 1963, which became a best-seller and was translated into 13 languages. This book exposed the “desperate housewives” of 1950s America, women imprisoned in suburbia with little to do. She came to believe that “the only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.”
On the heels of the Civil Rights Movement, she helped to found the National Organization for Women in 1966, the largest and most effective group for women’s rights, and served as its first president.
She was divorced May 1969 after 22 years in a marriage that had become physically abusive. After her divorce, she had many affairs, about which she wrote quite candidly. Moving back and forth between the personal and the social, she was an activist for women’s rights and equality, she was the founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus, she advocated for abortion rights, and was the organizer and director of the First Women’s Bank and Trust in 1974. She also garnered community resources to form a collective of artists, politicians, and social workers, who worked on behalf of gifted children in the New York Public Schools. In 1976, she published It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement.
Continually involved with politics and activism, she lectured at more than 50 universities, institutes and professional organizations worldwide, and wrote a number of other books that reflected her own developmental stages. In 1981 she published The Second Stage and in 1993, the Fountain of Age. Life So Far: A Memoir was released in early 2000; in this book, she gives the fullest, most candid account of her experience in the vortex of the feminist revolution, and the toll it took on her personal life.
Sharing much in common with other women activists such as Rosa Parks, with whom she shared a birthday, and Coretta Scott King, she died at 85 years old, on her birthday, February 4, 2006, of congestive heart failure in Washington, DC.
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