Friedan, Betty

(b. February 4, 1921) Influential feminist, author of The Feminine Mystique.

Bettye (later changed to Betty) Naomi Goldstein was born on February 4, 1921, in Peoria, Illinois, to a jewelry store owner and a society page editor. She graduated from Smith College in 1942 and went on to study psychology at Berkeley. Saying she did not want to become "an old maid college teacher," she quit graduate studies after a year to become a staff writer for the left-wing Federated Press from 1943 to 1946. She married Carl Friedman (later Friedan) in 1947 and had three children; the couple divorced in 1969. In the early 1960s Betty Friedan became one of the nation's most influential activists on behalf of women. Female involvement in World War II, the expansion of the middle class and consumer society following the war, and the expanded role of women in politics and the economy during the Cold War (1946– 1991) had created the context for women to reexamine their personal and social identities.

Betty became a labor journalist for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America in 1951, writing the pamphlet UE Fights for Women Workers (1952). She taught some classes at New York University and the New School for Social Research. An occasional magazine journalist from 1955 on, she contributed articles she would later critique as "propaganda" to Charm, the old Cosmopolitan, Coronet, Family Circle, McCall's, Mademoiselle, Parents' Magazine, and Redbook, bearing titles like "I Was Afraid to Have a Baby." It may have been "deradicalization" in the Cold War climate of McCarthyism, as some now suggest, that shifted Friedan's work away from trade unionism and Popular Front journalism in 1952.

In 1957 Friedan began writing what would become a landmark book. It grew, she wrote, out of her own uneasiness, "first as a question mark in my own life, as a wife and mother of three small children, half-guiltily and therefore half-heartedly, almost in spite of myself, using my abilities and education in work that took me away from home." She wondered if she was crazy for analyzing the "schizophrenic split" between the reality of women's lives and the attempt to conform to an ideal image of womanhood as projected by the media. The problem had "burst like a boil through the image of the happy American housewife," Friedan wrote; "by 1962 the plight of the trapped American housewife had become a national parlor game."

Published in 1963, The Feminine Mystique spoke of a new neurosis or "identity crisis" among the educated, the "problem that has no name." It was the frustration of middle-class women trying to conform to the postwar ideal of being suburban housewives and mothers. Girls grew up "feeling free and equal to boys," only to have their ambitions squelched. The media and "experts" projected the "image to which [women] were trying to conform," a new "cult of domesticity."

As a solution, Friedan called for self-realization out-side family and home, urging women to formulate a "new life plan" involving "creative work" and "professional achievement" to be combined with marriage and motherhood. Her approach entailed individual rather than social solutions, although she did argue for maternity leaves and professional nurseries. Friedan's book struck a chord and became a best seller.

In 1966 Friedan and her colleague Betty Furness formed the National Organization for Women (NOW), which grew out of state commissions on the status of women. Elected the first president of NOW, Friedan announced that "discrimination against women in this modern world is as evil and wasteful as any other form of discrimination."

Disliking younger, radical feminists who proclaimed "women's liberation," Friedan proved more conservative in ideology and style. Friedan lent her growing prestige to the formation of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) in 1969. She resisted the drive by Kate Millett and others to make defense of lesbianism part of the NOW agenda, dubbing them the "lavender menace." She and Bella Abzug, a congresswoman from New York State, convened 300 activists in 1971 to form the bipartisan National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC), but it became divided between those who wanted to support all women candidates and those insisting on backing only liberals with feminist ideas. Sharply critical of some elements of the women's movement, Friedan suggested there were FBI and CIA plots to disrupt women's organizations through "lesbianism and hatred of men," a "sexual red herring that would divide the movement and lead ultimately to sexual McCarthyism." She derided her arch rival Gloria Steinem as "The Hair," suggesting she was a CIA agent.

Friedan denounced feminist "extremism" in The Second Stage (1981), arguing that the movement had a "blind spot about the family." The "superwomen" trying to "have it all," she argued, had become as frustrated as the stay-at-home mom. Friedan urged that "family" become "the new feminist frontier." In 1993 she took up the subject of aging in her book The Fountain of Age, in which she urged seniors not to "forfeit these years with a preoccupation with death." The book criticizes geriatric experts who engage in "the same patronizing, 'compassionate' denial" of the "personhood" of the elderly once heard in "experts" characterizing women. Her memoir Life So Far appeared in 2000. Friedan has remained as angry and outspoken in

her stance on aging in contemporary society as she was in her heyday as a leading voice of feminism.

Equal Rights Amendment (Era) and Drafting Women; Popular Culture and Cold War; Women's Rights and Feminism, 1946–Present.

Hennessee, Judith. Betty Friedan: Her Life. New York: Random House, 1999.

Horowitz, Daniel. Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Life, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.

Horowitz, Daniel. "Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America." American Quarterly 48, no. 1 (1996): 1–42. Kaledin, Eugenia. Mothers and More: American Women in the 1950s. New York: Twayne, 1984.

Linden-Ward, Blanche, and Green, Carol Hurd. Changing the Future: American Women in the 1960s. New York: Twayne, 1993.

Linden-Ward, Blanche. "The ERA and Kennedy's Presidential Commission on the Status of Women." In John F. Kennedy: The Promise Revisited, edited by Paul Harper and Joann P. Krieg. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.

Wolfe, Alan. "The Mystique of Betty Friedan." Atlantic Monthly 284, no. 3 (Sept. 1999): 98–105.

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