Betty Friedan (born 1921) is 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 ap...

With the publication of The Feminine Mystique (1963) Betty Friedan helped launch the second wave of the women's movement in the United States. Led by what she calls her "inner Geiger counter," she pioneered the investigation into the difference between t...

SISTERHOOD, INTERRUPTED: FROM RADICAL WOMEN TO GRRLS GONE WILDBy Deborah Siegel Palgrave Macmillan, 170 pages, $14.95Review By Linda Hirshman I’m having a very bad time with Deborah Siegel’s very good book, Sisterhood, Interrupted, about how modern feminism has fared across the generational divide. It’s a...

"Something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives," the late Betty Friedan wrote in "The Feminine Mystique," her groundbreaking 1963 book attacking the idea that a husband and children were all a woman needed for fulfillment.That book effectively...

"Something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives," the late Betty Friedan wrote in "The Feminine Mystique," her groundbreaking 1963 book attacking the idea that a husband and children were all a woman needed for fulfillment.That book effectively...

THE SPARE WIFEBy Alex Witchel Alfred A. Knopf, 286 pages, $23.95 The characters in Alex Witchel’s new novel, The Spare Wife, have all the familiar markings of chick-lit New Yorkers: magazine jobs, plastic surgery, personal trainers, expensive apartments, adulterous love affairs, baby lust. But they’re...

Compares female characters in The Darwin Reader, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Iliad. Describes the power and influence that female characters hold over male characters in each literary work.