unleashed the second wave of feminism in the United States, raising social consciousness and drawing women fully into the mainstream of American society
Betty Friedan
(1921–2006)
“Gradually, without seeing it clearly for quite a while, I came to realize that something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives today,” Betty Friedan began the preface to The Feminine Mystique, her 1963 book that the feminist health journalist Barbara Seaman called “the most important . . . of the twentieth century.” Friedan continued: “I sensed it 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.” Then it hit her: “There was a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform, the image that I came to call the feminine mystique.” As for the earth-shaking book that flowed from this insight—it came from Friedan’s intense desire to answer the question: Did other women face “this schizophrenic split”?
She was born Bettye Naomi Goldstein on February 4, 1921 in Peoria, Illinois, where her father, Harry, owned a jewelry store. When he became ill, her mother, Miriam, took a job with the local newspaper, writing pieces for the society page. While her father’s illness was a strain on the family, young Bettye noted that her mother, now working outside of the home, seemed happier than ever.
As a girl, Bettye was attracted to Marxism, which fed into what she identified as a “passion against injustice,” a passion that grew in large part out of her resentment of the anti-Semitism she had experienced in Peoria, where Jews were a small minority. Like her mother, Bettye had an inclination toward journalism and joined the staff of her high school newspaper. Her ambition was to have her own column, but the editor turned her down. Undaunted, she gathered six friends and put together from scratch a literary magazine, Tide, which enjoyed considerable success within the circle of the school.
Bettye excelled in high school and, in 1938, she was accepted into the exclusive, all-female Smith College. She won a scholarship prize in her freshman year there and, as a sophomore, began writing poetry, which was printed in various campus publications. In 1941, her senior year, Bettye was named editor-in-chief of the college newspaper, a belated fulfillment of her high school journalistic ambition. She churned out left-leaning political editorials. With World War II raging in Europe and Asia but the United States still neutral, she also wrote numerous antiwar opinion pieces, which often stirred controversy. She found that she was quite comfortable with controversy.
After graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1942, having majored in psychology, Bettye enrolled for a year at the University of California, Berkeley, on a graduate fellowship in psychology, studying under the developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. At Berkeley, her involvement in left-wing politics became more intense. She reached a career crossroads. Should she pursue a PhD in psychology? She had the offer of a full fellowship. Or should she embark on a career in journalism? Her decision (which she claimed had been influenced by her boyfriend) was to abandon academic study, leave Berkeley, and begin writing for leftist and labor-union publications. From 1943 to 1952, she wrote for the Federated Press and then for the United Electrical Workers’ UE News. By this time, she was married—and had become Betty Friedan—and UE News fired her in 1952 when she became pregnant with her second child. Undaunted and still determined to work, she turned freelance, writing for a variety of publications, the most widely circulated of which was Cosmopolitan, before it became a women’s magazine.
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Her freelance work was beginning to earn her a readership, but it was in 1957 that her writing career took a truly momentous turn. In the months leading up to her fifteenth Smith class reunion, Betty Friedan prepared a questionnaire, which she sent to members of the class. The questions focused on education, post-college employment and experience, and overall satisfaction with the lives they were leading. From her classmates’ descriptions of their lives since college and from additional research, Friedan concluded that the women of her cohort—well-educated, bright, relatively affluent—suffered from what she called the “Problem That Has No Name.” She wrote a series of articles about it, hypothesizing that middle- and upper-class American women were, for the most part, dissatisfied with their roles as wives and mothers. “The problem lay buried,” she wrote, “unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries . . . she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—‘Is this all?’”
In her 1963 book, Friedan gave the problem a name: the “feminine mystique,” a pervasive notion that women could gain satisfaction only through marriage and children. It was a controlling myth, and the book both analyzed it and tore it down, piece by piece, case by case, story by story. The result was the opening of the proverbial floodgates. An obscure, unspoken problem with no name suddenly became an issue that millions of women identified with and embraced. The Feminine Mystique was an instant bestseller.
Women had proved themselves in the workplace during World War II, when they showed that they could do any job a man did. Society, it seemed, had changed—until the war ended, and women overwhelmingly returned to their homes, their children, and their homemaking. By the early 1960s, however, women began coming back to the workplace, and publication of The Feminine Mystique meshed with their return. It coincided with, even as it fostered, the female reentry into the job market—a market very different from what it had been in the 1940s and 1950s. The earlier work environment had been heavily industrial. The environment emerging in the 1960s was far more service-oriented, propelled by a tsunami of consumerism. As consumerism increased demand and as increased demand stimulated production of a greater variety of consumer goods, families found an economic incentive for an added income. The days of the male as sole breadwinner were numbered. Increasingly, achieving and maintaining middle-class life required two incomes.
Women were up to the task. More of them were enrolling in and graduating from college in the 1960s, and when the first oral contraceptive—“The Pill”—was approved by the FDA in 1960, it became possible, feasible, and convenient for women to go to work instead of to the maternity ward and the nursery.
The Feminine Mystique disrupted the consciousness not just of American women but of America and the world. As women came to accept that they had alternatives—or additions—to the life of wife and mother, they felt themselves increasingly empowered. Both men and women began to question the values they had been taught as the only “normal” and “acceptable” way to live. Ever the socially committed political activist, Friedan, in 1966, helped to found the National Organization for Women (NOW) and served as its first president.
Riding the tide of insight raised by Friedan’s book, NOW began a campaign for full equality for women in every aspect of legal, political, family, and working life. Friedan and NOW worked for liberalized abortion laws and for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Originally written by pioneering feminists Alice Paul and Crystal Eastman, ERA was first introduced in Congress in 1923 and repeatedly failed to pass until 1971, when it passed both houses of Congress. Submitted the next year for ratification by the states, it was three states short of the necessary 38 ratifications by the deadline of March 22, 1977. The deadline was extended to 1982, but the proposed amendment received no further ratifications.
Today, the fate of ERA remains uncertain. Even within the women’s movement that The Feminine Mystique had helped to launch and propel, some argued and continue to argue that ERA would actually invalidate many state and federal laws designed to protect women, while others argue that, without ERA, women will never achieve complete equality. Despite the disagreements, the membership of NOW continued to grow, from more than 210,000 members to over half a million today.
The success of The Feminine Mystique and the widespread acceptance of NOW among college-educated, liberal women gave rise to another manifestation of the campaign for equality in the 1970s. The popular Ms. magazine, edited by Gloria Steinem from 1972 to 1987, became a primary vehicle for the spread of the feminist message.
As NOW became more politically powerful and Ms. spread the doctrines of feminism, various strains of the women’s movement could be discerned The work carried out by NOW came to be characterized as “liberal feminism.” The organization began lobbying not only for women’s rights but also for the rights of the LGBTQ community. Most of its attention focused on reform through the electoral process, lobbying, and legislation.
In the late 1960s, a new movement separated from the NOW movement. It consisted of women who doubted that reform could ever be achieved by conventional political means. Most of these women had a history of involvement with the civil rights movement or with the New Left. To their consternation, they found that they were given very little power in these movements. So they broke away. Meeting first in small support-and-discussion groups, the more radically inclined feminists began to define all their relationships with men—in the workplace and in the home—as innately political, and they coined the phrase “sexual politics” to describe these relationships. Labeled by the press “women’s liberationists,” the radical activists rejected NOW because of what they regarded as its failure to address women’s subordination to men in the family and the workplace. In-depth studies by such writers as Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, Ti-Grace Atkinson, and others analyzed the debilitating effects of male supremacy on women.
The divide between the women’s liberationists and the members of NOW began to close during the 1970s when both groups found themselves working against a common threat—outright antifeminists of the reactionary right, who claimed that feminism of any kind would lead to a society in which men behaved irresponsibly toward women and children.
Despite the differences that have plagued as well as enriched the women’s movement since publication of The Feminine Mystique, women have made substantial gains in American society. In state legislatures, the number of women elected to office doubled between 1975 and 1988. By 1987, forty states had implemented policies to ensure that women received comparable pay for comparable work. In addition, laws protecting female victims of rape have been strengthened in many states. Still, relatively few women hold national political office or sit in the nation’s boardrooms. Rape and domestic violence remain serious problems in American society. And highly publicized cases of sexual harassment and sexual assault in the workplace—with especially high-profile cases in the entertainment industry, in Congress, and, most notoriously, the White House—suggest that the problems of women in societies that are still dominated by men run deep. Doubtless, they will require additional disruptions to resolve—if resolved they will be.