IN 1963, BETTY FRIEDAN (1921–2006) published The Feminine Mystique, a founding text of modern feminism that is considered one of the most influential books of the twentieth century.1
She was born Bettye Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois, on February 4, 1921.
Her father, Harry Goldstein, emigrated from Russia in the 1880s, and
built a successful jewelry business in the United States. His wife,
Miriam Horwitz, the daughter of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, had been
prevented from attending Smith College by her parents. Miriam supported
her daughter's education, and Bettye graduated summa cum laude from
Smith College in 1942. The following year, she enrolled in a research
fellowship in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. From
1944, she worked as a journalist in Manhattan, writing for the
Federated Press and the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of
America under the name Betty Goldstein. She married Carl Friedman
(later Friedan) in 1947, and the couple had 3 children before their
divorce in 1969.2
Friedan
was part of a broad movement of union supporters who campaigned against
racism and supported women's rights during the 1940s and 1950s.3 She published numerous articles on women's issues while writing for UE News,
including “UE Fights for Women Workers,” a pamphlet about
discrimination and the double burden of racism and sexism faced by Black
women. In 1950, while she was pregnant with her second child, she lost
her job because of cutbacks at the paper and began working from home as a
freelance writer for women's magazines. She found the work unrewarding
and began to consider alternative projects. In 1957, Friedan attended
the fifteenth reunion of her Smith College class, and asked her peers to
complete a survey about their lives since graduation. She was unsettled
by the degree of dissatisfaction they reported and began working on an
article about women's experiences of giving up work or further education
for motherhood. After rejection by several magazines, she secured a
book advance and began the 5-year task of developing The Feminine Mystique, excerpted here.4
Drawing
on her previous training in psychology, as well as history, economics,
and sociology, Friedan documented the independence enjoyed by women in
the 1920s and 1930s and noted how the 1950s had marked a significant
shift away from such self-determination. She described the unhappiness
of suburban “housewives,” who felt unrewarded by the tasks of their
daily lives and guilty for not feeling more fulfilled. While other
writers complained that higher education undermined women's abilities to
undertake their traditional roles as wives and mothers, she argued
instead that women were unfairly confined by the expectation that they
should stay at home and focus all of their energies on family life.
Friedan described the dissatisfaction they endured as “the problem with
no name,” and wrote of its terrible toll on the mental health of
American women. Thousands of women recognized themselves in the pages of
her study and were inspired to join the growing movement for women's
rights.
In 1966, Friedan cofounded the
National Organization for Women (NOW) to campaign for equality. In 1969
she helped launch the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion
Laws, later named NARAL Pro-Choice America. Throughout the 1970s and
1980s she was an outspoken advocate for women and a leading figure of
the feminist movement. She served on the faculty of the University of
Southern California, Queens College, Yale University, Columbia
University, and Cornell University and published various follow-ups to
her groundbreaking book including It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement in 1976 and Beyond Gender: The New Politics of Family and Work
in 1998. Friedan served as a delegate to the United Nation's Decade for
Women conferences in Mexico City in 1975, in Copenhagen in 1980, and in
Nairobi in 1985. She received the Eleanor Roosevelt Leadership Award in
1989 and was awarded honorary degrees by The State University of New
York and Columbia University.5 She died at her home in Washington, DC, at 85, in 2006. n
References
1.
Margalit Fox, “Betty Friedan, Who Ignited a Movement With ‘The Feminine
Mystique,’ Dies at 85,” New York Times (February 6, 2006), 20.
2. Judith Hennessee, Betty Friedan: Her Life (New York, NY: Random House, 1999), 45
3. Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique”: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 135–139
4. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1963).
5. “Betty Friedan,”Who's Who in America 2005 (New Jersey: Marquis Who's Who, 2005), 1564
Articles from American Journal of Public Health are provided here courtesy of American Public Health Association
