He was a Russian Jewish immigrant jeweler, and she was a former newspaperwoman. Friedan received her early education in Illinois state schools. At seventeen she entered the all-girls' Smith College, where she majored in psychology, receiving her B.A. summa cum laude in 1942. She was awarded a graduate research scholarship to continue her studies in psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, but completed only one year of study. Opinion remains divided as to why she abandoned her graduate research. In
The Feminine Mystique Friedan claims it was at the request of her then boyfriend, who had been unsuccessful at attaining funding; an alternative reason offered by biographers is that Friedan opted to focus her energies on working in the labor movement. In 1944 she moved to New York City to begin work as a journalist. In 1947 she married Carl Friedan, a returning World War II veteran, with whom she had three children, Daniel, Jonathan, and Emily, who were born between 1948 and 1956. The Friedans remained in New York, where he worked in the fields of advertising and public relations, while she sought to balance raising children with her career as a journalist first with the Federated Press (1943-1948) and later with the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) News.
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