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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 the reality of mid-twentieth-century women's lives and the ideal of femininity to which dominant gender ideology encouraged them to conform, famously dubbing this discrepancy the problem that had no name. For more than thirty years, whether in the guise of freelance journalist, social psychologist, or feminist theorist, her writing and activism have helped set the tone for many of American feminism's most significant campaigns for equal rights in education, the law, the family, and women's reproductive freedom. Like all radical thinkers, her work evokes controversy, and she has often generated hostility within movement circles. Nevertheless, her enormous influence on women and men's consciousness of gender issues cannot be denied.
Betty Friedan was born Bettye Naomi Goldstein on 4 February 1921 in Peoria, Illinois, to Harry and Miriam Horowitz Goldstein.
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