Betty Friedan

American writer and feminist

• Born: February 4, 1921
• Birthplace: Peoria, Illinois
• Died: February 4, 2006
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique (1963) energized an untold number of women and helped spark the second wave of the feminist movement. Although Friedan became a leader in the continuing struggle for women’s rights, she also was a controversial figure. She later advocated against radical feminism and sexual politics and argued instead for unity with men in common struggle for gender equality.

Early Life

Betty Friedan (free-DAN) was born Betty Naomi Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois, to jeweler Harry Goldstein and former journalist Miriam Horowitz Goldstein. Friedan recalled that her mother gave up a career in journalism to be a homemaker and mother. This, Friedan believed, explained her mother’s enthusiastic encouragement of her daughter’s journalistic endeavors in high school, college, and beyond.

Friedan graduated from Smith College in 1942, summa cum laude, and later did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, studying with the famous child psychologistErik Erikson. She received a fellowship for her studies and was about to accept a second, which would have allowed her to complete a doctorate, when she quit school. She decided that becoming an academic was too “tame”; she preferred the more active world of reporting. Accordingly, she returned to were chosen, where she worked as a reporter for The Federated Press, a labor news service. It was wartime, and women were encouraged to fill jobs while men were overseas as soldiers. In 1946 she became a reporter for U.E. News, a weekly union paper.

Once the war ended, however, women were expected to give up their jobs so that returning veterans could find work. Friedan lost her reporting position and had to take a position as a researcher. This was a “woman’s job,” which involved doing the research and often much of the writing for articles that were then published under the male authors’ bylines.

In the postwar era, women also were expected to return to their traditional domestic roles to get married, settle down, and have children. Thus began a time when women were presented with idyllic visions of being “happy housewives” at home in the suburbs raising families and caring for their homes and husbands. In 1947, Friedan accepted this vision and married Carl Friedan, an advertising executive; they had three children: David, Jonathan, and Emily. Friedan had, however, kept her job, taking a year’s maternity leave after her first child’s birth. When she requested her second leave, however, she was fired.

Friedan now tried to live up to the ideals of the day, working hard to find the so-called feminine fulfillment her mother had never found in domestic life. Eventually moving to a house in Rockland County, New York, Friedan reared her family, but she also continued to write, contributing articles to several magazines for women.

Life’s Work

A popular topic in the media of the postwar period was the idea that women’s education was not preparing them adequately for their roles as women. That is, women went to colleges where they received educations they would never be able to apply in careers, since their proper role as women was to be housewives. Too much education was making them discontent with this role in life. The focus was on the inappropriateness of women’s education, but Friedan began to see that what was wrong was not education but the role expectations that limited the choices of educated women.

Based on a 1957 survey of her classmates from Smith College, Friedan wrote an article for McCall’s magazine on the issue of women and education, but her work was rejected by the male editor as too unbelievable. She was then asked to write the same story for Ladies’ Home Journal, but the article that was published revealed the opposite of what Friedan had originally written. Redbook also considered and refused to do the story. Friedan realized that she would have to write a book to get her ideas into print, because her ideas threatened the very identity and existence of magazines geared to women.

In her first book, The Feminine Mystique (1963), Friedan coined the now-famous phrase “feminine mystique” to describe the prescribed female role of the postwar years. Although reviewers were largely hostile or cautious, the book caused shock waves throughout the country among readers, because thousands of American women identified with the “nameless, aching dissatisfaction” that she described. Friedan’s readers were to become part of the energy that would instigate the second wave of the feminist movement, beginning in the late 1960’s.

By 1966, Friedan, sensing that words were not enough to make change, began putting her energies into organizing for women’s rights. In that year, she attended a conference in Washington, D.C., of all the state Commissions on the Status of Women. The delegates, who shared their frustrations at having state and local governments dismiss their concerns, soon organized what was to become the National Organization for Women (NOW). Friedan wrote NOW’s statement of purpose. The organizing conference of the new group was held in October of 1966, with about three hundred members, and Friedan was elected the first president, a post she held until 1970 (one year after her divorce in May, 1969). In 1969 she also cofounded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (now known as NARAL Pro-Choice America ) with Bernard Nathanson.

Continuing her activism, Friedan became a major organizer of the Women’s Strike for Equality, which took place on August 26, 1970, the fiftieth anniversary of the date women won the right to vote. During this time, Friedan joined the debates over sexual politics. She was opposed to a feminist politics that condemned males as oppressors of women and girls, that embraced notions of female separatism, and that supported lesbian sexuality as a political issue. She argued that sexual politics was divisive and that it diverted attention from what she considered the real political and economic issues of most women.

In 1971, Friedan helped organize and was the co-convener of the National Women’s Political Caucus (with Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug). The caucus was formed to encourage and support women and pro-women candidates for public office. By 1972, however, Friedan was beginning to back out of political activism, focusing her energies on writing, speaking, and teaching. In that year, she was invited to teach as a visiting professor at Temple University. This was followed by invitations to teach at Yale in 1974 and at Queens College of the City University of New York in 1975. It was around this time as well that Friedan was exploring what she called the “second stage,” defined by her as the sex-role revolution that must include men. This new focus was reflected in her course titles at Temple, Yale, and Queens: “The Sex-Role Revolution, Stage II.”

In 1975, Friedan was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association, and she received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Smith College. The following year saw the publication of her second book, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement (1976). In this book Friedan described her work over the previous years and included a journal of her experiences. Her third book, The Second Stage (1981), further explored her growing concern with the need to overcome the polarization between women and men and to achieve the human wholeness that she saw as the ultimate promise of feminism. In addition, she was concerned about a damaging myth she saw growing in American culture that of the superwoman who could have it all: career, marriage, and family. Her book argued that the time for reacting against male dominance and focusing on work outside the home was passing as women’s goals were being won. Women now needed to begin to unite with men in building a new society of male-female equality.

Although a logical extension of Friedan’s previous work, The Second Stage unleashed a great controversy. Many feminists turned on Friedan, saying that she had betrayed the women’s movement by buying into popular ideas about the importance of the traditional family and the need to gain the approval of men. Moreover, she was faulted for focusing on the problems of middle-class white women and neglecting women of color and the poor. By the early 1990’s, however, she insisted that while she still considered herself a feminist, she was not concerned with women as a separate special interest group.

Friedan’s next book was The Fountain of Age (1993), which she wrote to face her own denial and dread of aging. However, in the process of her research she found a major contradiction between the typical view that aging is a time of loss and debility and the realities of the lives of the aging people she interviewed. She notes that for women the aging process is changing because of differences in the way women are defining themselves (a change she helped bring about with her leadership in the feminist movement). She developed the phrase “fountain of age” (a play on “fountain of youth”) to describe the new generativity experienced by both women and men as they grow older.

Friedan held a variety of academic appointments. She became Distinguished Visiting Professor and director of the New Paradigm Project at Cornell University and also taught at New York University, the University of Southern California, and Mount Vernon College as the George Mason Professor of Social Evolution. She also lectured worldwide. Beyond academia she organized and directed the First Women’s Bank and Trust.

In her 2000 autobiography Life So Far , Friedan described her married life as stormy to the point of physical battles. Her husband Carl once said much the same when, following the couple’s divorce, he admitted, in describing Friedan, “It took a driven, superaggressive, egocentric almost lunatic dynamo to rock the world the way she did. Unfortunately, she was the same person at home, where that kind of conduct doesn’t work. She simply never understood this.” Friedan was well-known among colleagues for her abrasiveness, fits of temper, and tendency to monopolize the spotlight. According to Germaine Greer, a writer and feminist who did not share Friedan’s philosophy, Friedan also was very feminine and dressed in stylish clothes.

Friedan divided her time at homes in Washington, D.C., and Sag Harbor, New York. She died at her Washington home on February 4, 2006, from congestive heart failure. It was her eighty-fifth birthday.

Significance

Friedan’s effect on the American women’s movement, and on American culture, is immeasurable. Indeed, her name, along with that of Gloria Steinem, has become synonymous with feminism in the United States. Friedan first gave voice to the dissatisfaction of housewives caught in the postwar ideology of the feminine mystique, then cofounded and led feminist organizations such as NOW. In her later years she focused first on the second stage and then on aging. She always was willing to be controversial, to follow her own star, and always spoke for many who identified with her insights. On a practical level, Friedan worked successfully with others for economic parity with men, and for gender-neutral language, maternity leave, abortion rights, and childcare centers for working women.

Biographer David Horowitz suggested that it was less Friedan’s experience as a housewife than it was her youthful communist sympathies, evidenced by her journalistic work for labor unions, that led her to reject the midcentury stereotype of American womanhood. Whatever her inspiration, historians regard The Feminine Mystique as among the most influential nonfiction books of the twentieth century. More than 3 million copies of the book have been sold, and it has been translated into numerous languages. Although a flamboyant, divisive figure, Friedan continued to personify women’s struggle for equity, even after her death.

Bibliography

Behm, Barbara. Betty Friedan: Speaking Out for Women’s Rights. Milwaukee, Wis.: Gareth Stevens, 1992. This book discusses Friedan’s views of women’s rights and her impact on the women’s movement.

Friedan, Betty. It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement. New York: Random House, 1976. Perhaps the most autobiographical of Friedan’s books, this work documents her activism in the women’s movement and provides various entries from her journal.

Hennessee, Judith. Betty Friedan: Her Life. New York: Random House, 1999. Hennessee portrays Friedan as a “woman of paradoxes,” a feminist who did not like women. The biography covers her youth and early ambitions, including her desire to be an actor, but focuses on the women’s movement and her ongoing conflicts with leading feminists such as Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug.

Horowitz, Daniel. Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. Horowitz contends that many of Friedan’s ideas came from her study of humanistic psychology and from her participation in the labor movement of the 1940’s.

Sherman, Janann, ed. Interviews with Betty Friedan. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. A collection of published interviews with Friedan conducted over the course of her career. Part of the Conversations with Public Intellectuals series.