CREDIT: Associated Press
BETTY FRIEDAN’S 1963 book The Feminine Mystique catalyzed the modern feminist movement, helped change attitudes toward women’s equality, and identified the “problem that has no name” (which feminists later labeled “sexism”). Friedan was also instrumental in organizing the National Organization for Women (NOW) and other key groups that advocated women’s liberation.
Friedan was born Bettye Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois, and was raised in a prosperous family with a nursemaid, cook, and butler-chauffeur. Her Russian immigrant father ran a jewelry business, and her mother hosted bridge luncheons in their spacious home. But as Jews, the Goldsteins were never fully accepted into Peoria society. Friedan’s brilliance and ambition helped her overcome anti-Semitism. In high school she wrote for the school paper, founded the literary magazine, joined the debating society, and graduated as class valedictorian.
Her academic and leadership skills blossomed when she arrived at Smith College in 1938, in the midst of the Depression’s exciting political ferment. She majored in psychology, and as editor of the Smith College Weekly, she revitalized the paper from a bland publication filled with gossip and social news to a far more political outlet, the Smith College Associate News (SCAN).
At Smith, she embraced radical ideas and the labor movement as an instrument for progressive change. When maids at the college went on strike, Bettye sympathetically covered the struggle in SCAN. Her editorials challenged her privileged classmates to wake up to issues of social justice, workers’ rights, and fascism. The summer after her junior year, she spent eight weeks at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, participating in a writing workshop and taking classes about unions and economics.
In 1942 she went to graduate school at University of California, Berkeley, and dropped the “e” at the end of her first name. She traveled in left-wing circles and joined a Marxist study group. But she later panicked at the implications of getting a Ph.D., imagining her future as a lonely spinster in academia. She gave up her scholarship.
Fleeing Berkeley, she moved to Greenwich Village in 1944. Her first job was as a reporter for the Federated Press, an agency that fed news stories to progressive publications and union newspapers. Her stories were popular and showed a talent for humanizing class, race, and women’s issues. Her next job was with the UE News, the weekly paper of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, a left-wing union. In 1947 she married Carl Friedan, an actor and stage producer. The first of their three children was born the following year.
There was no significant feminist movement at the time, but the Communist Party and the unions in its orbit were among the few organizations concerned about what they called the “woman question.” In 1946 they started the Congress of American Women to address issues facing working-class women. As a reporter for UE News, Friedan often wrote about women’s issues, including a popular pamphlet, UE Fights for Women Workers, on corporate discrimination and on the special problems faced by black women workers. In 1952, when she became pregnant with her second son, Friedan left the UE News.
In some respects, Friedan’s experience was similar to that of millions of women who had worked during World War II and were then encouraged—by employers, the media, advertising, and government propaganda—to return to “hearth and home” as mothers and housewives after men came home. Like many women in postwar America, Friedan volunteered for a variety of community activities, though some of hers were unconventional, such as participating in rent strikes. But frustrated by the fact that she was not contributing financially to the family or using her considerable professional talents, Friedan began a freelance writing career, mostly for women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan.
The seed of The Feminine Mystique was planted in 1957 when Friedan was asked to prepare an alumni questionnaire for her Smith College fifteenth reunion. She felt vaguely guilty as she worked on it, thinking of the academic star she had been and feeling she had not realized her potential.
In 1947 Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham published Modern Women: The Lost Sex, which argued that American women were overeducated and that this excess of education caused discontent and prevented females from “adjusting to their role as women.” The book triggered considerable controversy in the postwar era. Using the Smith questionnaire as a starting point, Friedan pitched a story to McCall’s magazine aimed at refuting Modern Women’s thesis. She and two friends developed a survey, including open-ended questions “that we had not asked ourselves out loud before.” They covered such topics as decision making in the family, hours of housework, feelings about being a mother, number of books read in a year, interests outside the home, and agreement, or not, with a husband’s politics.
Two hundred women responded. Friedan found that those who seemed most happy and fulfilled were those who did not conform to the “role of women” and that those who were most dispirited were traditional housewives. She completed her article for McCall’s—“Are Women Wasting Their Time in College?”—but it was rejected. When her agent sent it to Redbook, a male editor sent it back saying that Friedan “must be going off her rocker. Only the most neurotic housewife will identify with this.” No magazine would touch it.
Frustrated but convinced she was on to something important, Friedan expanded the article into a book and worked for five years to complete The Feminine Mystique, which was published in February 1963.
Not aware that other women shared their troubles, many women experienced their unhappiness as a personal problem and blamed themselves for their misery. Friedan called this “the problem that has no name.” Earlier books had diagnosed women’s oppression and second-class status—including Elizabeth Hawes’s Why Women Cry (1943), Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (published in English in 1953), Mirra Komarovsky’s Women in the Modern World (1953), and Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein’s Women’s Two Roles (1956)—but none of them tapped the vein of dissatisfaction in a way that The Feminine Mystique did. The book touched millions of women, aided by Friedan’s accessible writing style and the luck of good timing.
The publisher initially printed only 2,000 copies, but the book’s sales exploded. The Feminine Mystique spent six weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. The first paperback printing sold 1.4 million copies. McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal, magazines with a combined readership of 36 million, published excerpts.
Though the analogy was certainly overwrought, Friedan argued that women were trapped by their domestic lives, that their existence was akin to a “comfortable concentration camp.” Women became helpless, almost childlike, with no privacy, cut off from the outside world, doing soul-killing work. Friedan also exposed the myriad ways that advertisers, psychiatrists, educators, and newspapers patronized, exploited, and manipulated women.
The Feminine Mystique made Friedan famous and a person to be reckoned with. She was flooded with letters from women reporting that the book had opened their eyes about their own lives and had validated their dissatisfaction with the status quo. She was asked to speak at colleges, before women’s groups, and elsewhere across the nation.
Friedan’s agenda for change in The Feminine Mystique was quite modest, especially for someone with her radical background. She wrote about the problem of workplace discrimination, but she barely mentioned the issues of childcare and maternity leave. The book had little to say about the problems confronting poor and working-class women or women of color—issues she had written about for Federated News and the UE News. She mostly encouraged women to get an education and to prepare themselves for a career beyond housework. It was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that Friedan and others embraced a wider and more progressive agenda: the right to an abortion, protection against sexual violence and domestic abuse, the criminalization of sexual harassment and rape, the demand for childcare centers, equality with men in terms of access to financial credit and other aspects of economic life.
After the book came out, as Friedan was gaining a platform on TV and radio shows and on the lecture circuit, she described herself as an “educated housewife.” She made no reference to her experience in the left-wing movements of the late 1930s through the early 1950s. Indeed, many other women with similar backgrounds (including Bella Abzug)—women who played a key role in building the women’s liberation movement and later in creating the new academic field of women’s studies—downplayed their past left-wing affiliations. Friedan believed that she and the book would have more credibility if she was seen as someone who shared the frustrations of other middle-class suburban women. Of course in 1963 the hysteria of McCarthyism and the Red Scare were still a lingering force in American politics and culture, and Friedan understood that her past associations with Communist and radical groups could undermine her reputation and destroy her growing influence.
Moreover, Friedan wanted to do more than write about women’s roles. She wanted to instigate real change, and that meant renewing her activist credentials. She quickly connected with a small network of liberal, professional women who were involved with the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, which had been created in 1961 by John F. Kennedy at the suggestion of Eleanor Roosevelt. They talked about creating a women’s version of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and in 1966 they formed NOW to lobby and organize for the civil rights of women. Friedan was elected president, a position she held until 1970. She became the first media celebrity of the women’s liberation movement and its de facto spokesperson.
Friedan could be difficult and antagonizing, and she clashed with most radical feminists on the issue of overthrowing male-dominated power structures. Instead she believed in sharing power equally. “Some people think I’m saying, ‘Women of the world unite—you have nothing to lose but your men,’” she told Life magazine in 1963. “It’s not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners.”
Some criticized NOW for being too focused on middle-class white women’s concerns. At the same time, Friedan was also concerned that the women’s movement would be identified as being dominated by man-hating lesbians, a stereotype that was widespread at the time and that Friedan worried would undermine feminism’s credibility.
Two years before NOW’s founding, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in employment on the bases of race, color, national origin, religion, and sex. Most members of Congress viewed the law primarily in terms of race and hardly noticed that “sex” was included. For half a century, NOW and other feminist groups have used the law—which established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—to fight for women’s equality at work.
Friedan also cofounded the National Abortion Rights Action League (originally the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws) in 1969. The next year—the fiftieth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women the vote—she co-organized the Women’s Strike for Equality. In 1971, a year after the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, Friedan joined Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, and others to form the National Women’s Political Caucus to encourage more women to participate in politics and run for office.
Throughout her life, Friedan continued to write major books, among them The Second Stage (1981), The Fountain of Age (1993), and Beyond Gender (1997). In the last book, she worried that progressives had splintered into separate identity movements. She outlined an agenda for change that, ironically, was similar to the radical politics she had embraced in her younger years. In a 1995 column in Newsweek, she wrote,
The problems in our fast-changing world require a new paradigm of social policy, transcending all “identity politics”—women, blacks, gays, the disabled. Pursuing the separate interests of women isn’t adequate and is even diversionary. Instead, there has to be some new vision of community. We need to reframe the concept of success. We need to campaign—men and women, whites and blacks—for a shorter workweek, a higher minimum wage, an end to the war against social-welfare programs. “Women’s issues” are symptoms of problems that affect everyone.