"The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive."
Born Betty Naomi Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois in 1921, Freidan graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts 1947, earning fellowships to work on a doctorate in psychology. Instead she abandoned her career plans due to what she later called "the feminine mystique," married met Carl Friedan, an actor, by whom she would have three children, and spent nearly 20 years as a housewife, or so she would claim later.
In actuality Freidan continued to work outside the home as a journalist and free-lance magazine writer, writing for the Federated Press, a left-wing news bureau who provided news stories, particularly about union activity, to national newspapers.
In the 60's, after surveying female college graduates, she came across some common threads of experience among woman in in 1963 published THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE, which caught the public imagination and became an international best-seller. The book was an examination of the frustrated lives of American woman who were trapped in a role that allowed them expression only as a wife and/or mother.
Credited as the inspiration for thousands of woman and the single most important influence on the modern feminist movement, Friedan's research and conclusions in THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE have been called into question in recent years. A large part of Friedan's book is based on now-discredited research by Margaret Mead (in COMING OF AGE IN AMERICAN SAMOA) and Alfred Kinsey in (SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN THE HUMAN MALE and SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN THE HUMAN FEMALE.) However, no one can deny that Friedan played a major role as the voice of the Baby Boomer woman's movement, despite any questions made of her research and sources.
One of the founders of the National Organization for Woman (NOW) in 1966, Friedan served as the organization's first president from 1966-1970 and worked to force enactment of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of race or sex. "Equal Pay for Equal Work" was the rallying cry, since in the 1970s women were earning on average sixty cents for every dollar a man in a similar job earned. Friedan and her husband divorced in 1969, and she retained custody of her youngest child, the two older children were adults by that time.
Resigning from NOW in 1970, Friedan continued to work for political reform, particularly in her support of the Equal Rights Amendment, and made her living as a teacher, speaker, writer and activist in woman's causes.
In 1975 Betty Friedan was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association and received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Smith College.
Friedan in the 80's began to feel that some members of the feminist movement had taken an extremist position, and she published THE SECOND STAGE, calling for a more moderate approach. Her 1993 THE FOUNTAIN OF AGE dealt with older people and their search for fulfillment. In 1997 Friedan published BEYOND GENDER: THE NEW POLITICS OF WORK AND FAMILY calling for men and women to work together in political activism.
