Betty Naomi Friedan

For more information on Betty Friedan, visit Britannica.com.

Betty Friedan (born 1921) was a women's rights activist, author of "The Feminine Mystique", and a founding member of the National Organization for Women, the National Abortion Rights Action League, and the National Women's Political Caucus.

Betty Friedan appeared suddenly in the national limelight with the publication of her first book, The Feminine Mystique, in 1963. It became a national best seller and propelled Friedan to a leadership position in the burgeoning movement for women's liberation. In that book Friedan identified a condition she claimed women suffered as the result of a widely accepted ideology that placed them first and foremost in the home. Attacking the notion that "biology is destiny," which ordained that women should devote their lives to being wives and mothers at the expense of other pursuits, Friedan called upon women to shed their domestic confines and discover other meaningful endeavors.

Friedan was herself well situated to know the effects of the "feminine mystique." She was born Betty Naomi Goldstein in 1921 in Peoria, Illinois, the daughter of Jewish parents. Her father was a jeweler, and her mother had to give up her job on a newspaper when she married. The loss of that potential career affected her mother deeply, and she urged young Betty to pursue the career in journalism that she was never able to achieve. The daughter went on to graduate summa cum laude from Smith College in 1942. She then received a research fellowship to study psychology as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. Like her mother, she did some work as a journalist, but unlike her mother she did not end her career to build a family. She married Carl Friedan in 1947, and during the years that she was raising their three children she continued her freelance writing. After her husband established his own advertising agency they moved to the suburbs, where Friedan experienced what she later termed the "feminine mystique" first hand. Although she continued to write she felt stifled in her domestic role.

In 1957 Friedan put together an intensive questionnaire to send to her college classmates from Smith 15 years after graduation. She obtained detailed, open-ended replies from 200 women, revealing a great deal of dissatisfaction with their lives. Like Friedan herself, they tried to conform to the prevailing expectations of wives and mothers while harboring frustrated desires for something more out of life. Friedan wrote an article based on her findings, but the editors of the women's magazines with whom she had previously worked refused to publish the piece. Those refusals only spurred her on. She decided to investigate the problem on a much larger scale and publish a book. The result of her effort was The Feminine Mystique, which became an instant success, selling over three million copies.

Friedan began her book by describing what she called "the problem that has no name." In words that touched a sensitive nerve in thousands of middle-class American women, she wrote, "the problem lay buried, 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, matched slipcover material … she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question - 'Is this all?"'

With the publication of The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan rose to national prominence. Three years later in 1966 she helped found the first major organization established since the 1920s devoted to women's rights, the National Organization for Women (NOW), and became its first president. Under Friedan's leadership NOW worked for political reforms to secure women's legal equality. The organization was successful in achieving a number of important gains for women. It worked for the enforcement of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of sex. As a result of the organization's efforts, the Equal Opportunities Commission ruled that airlines could not fire female flight attendants because they married or reached the age of 35, nor could employment opportunities be advertised according to male or female categories.

NOW also lobbied for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which had remained dormant since it was first introduced in Congress by Alice Paul in 1923. In addition, the organization called for federally funded day care centers to be established "on the same basis as parks, libraries and public schools." NOW also worked to achieve the legalization of abortion and the preservation of abortion rights. Friedan was among the founders of the National Abortion Rights Action League in 1969. Finally in 1973 the Supreme Court legalized abortions. Deaths of women resulting from abortions dropped by 60 percent.

In 1970 Friedan was one of the most forceful opponents of President Nixon's nomination of G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court. She argued before the Senate Judiciary Committee that in 1969 Carswell defied the Civil Rights Act by ruling in favor of the right of employers to deny jobs to women with children. That same year, at the annual meeting of NOW, she called for a Women's Strike for Equality, which was held on August 26 - the 50th anniversary of the day women gained the right to vote. Women across the country commemorated the day with demonstrations, marches, and speeches in 40 major cities. Friedan led a parade of over 10,000 down Fifth Avenue in New York City.

The following year Friedan was among the feminist leaders who formed the National Women's Political Caucus. During the next several years she moved away from central leadership in the movement to concentrate on writing and teaching. She wrote a regular column for McCall's magazine and taught at several colleges and universities, including Temple University, Yale University, Queens College, and the New School for Social Research.

Friedan became an influential spokeswoman for the women's movement nationally as well as internationally. In 1974 she had an audience with Pope Paul VI in which she urged the Catholic Church to "come to terms with the full personhood of women."

As the women's movement grew and new leaders emerged with different concerns, Friedan's centrality in the movement dwindled. Nevertheless, she remained an out-spoken feminist leader for many years. In 1977 she participated in the National Conference of Women in Houston, Texas, and called for an end to divisions and a new coalition of women. Her writing, teaching, and speaking continued throughout these years, as her ideas concerning the feminist movement evolved. In 1976 she published It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement, which was followed by her 1981 book, The Second Stage. In that publication Friedan called for a shift in the feminist movement, one that would address the needs of families and would allow both men and women to break from the sex-role stereotypes of the past.

In 1993, Friedan released The Fountain of Age, in which she began to explore the rights of the elderly and aging, just as she had once become attuned to women's issues. Friedan's focus is not on mere economics, but rather on helping the elderly find fulfillment in their latter years. In The New York Times she said, "Once you break through the mystique of age and that view of the aged as objects of care and as problems for society, you can look at the reality of the new years of human life open to us."

In 1996 new scholarship arose about Friedan's life when Daniel Horowitz published a controversial article in American Quarterly. Horowitz, who teaches at Friedan's alma mater, Smith University, draws a link between Friedan's feminism and her undergraduate years at Smith during the 1940s. Horowitz presents a new outlook on the work of Friedan, who has often said her feminism first emerged during the 1960s; in his article, Horowitz makes a strong case that it can be traced to the 1940s. But regardless of the time that Friedan's feminism first surfaced, she remains a significant influence on societal expectations and equality for women.

Further Reading

Betty Friedan's own writings are the best source of information on her life and work. She wrote extensively in popular magazines and was interviewed numerous times after 1963. She published four books: The Feminine Mystique (1963), It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement (1976), and The Second Stage (1981), and The Fountain of Age (1993).

Widely known for her feminist text The Feminine Mystique of 1963, Betty Friedan came to represent the cause of many women ‘trapped’ in the rapidly growing post-war suburbs in the United States. After studying at Smith College from 1938 to 1942 she abandoned a doctorate in psychology, having studied at graduate school at Berkeley for a single year. She pursued a career in journalism, working for the Federated Press until 1946, when she was dismissed on account of her radical opinions at a time when the political climate was highly sensitive. She then worked for a union newspaper from 1946 to 1952. Having married in 1947, she moved to the suburbs, where she brought up her three children. This suburban experience endowed her with some real insight into the ways in which consumption-led housewives were ‘trapped’ in their homes. She painted a radically different picture from the one conjured up by the conventional American Dream. There the American housewife was ‘freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth and the illnesses of her grandmother…she was free to choose automobiles, clothes, appliances, supermarkets; she had everything that women ever dreamed of’. In 1966 Friedan founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) which helped further consolidate her place at the heart of the feminist movement of the 1960s.

(1921- ), catalyst and leader in the second feminist movement. Friedan graduated summa cum laude from Smith College in 1942 and settled in New York City. During the ten years after her marriage to Carl Friedan in 1947, she was a housewife, mother of three children, and free-lance magazine writer.

Friedan's role as catalyst of the second feminist wave began with her book, The Feminine Mystique. For her fifteenth college reunion in 1957 she sent questionnaires to members of her class asking them to describe their lives since college. From their answers and other research came the book, which she published in 1963. It was an instant best-seller, was excerpted in major women's magazines, and made Friedan a celebrity. Its thesis that suburban middle-class housewives were not necessarily fulfilled by housewifery and childbearing engendered hundreds of letters from unhappy, dissatisfied women who realized that Friedan had identified their "problem with no name." She called it the "feminine mystique," the theory that women's fulfillment could be found only in motherhood and family. She criticized psychiatrists, social scientists, educators, and businesspeople who used the mystique to encourage women to live segregated lives in the suburban ghettos of the postwar world.

In 1966 she helped found the National Organization for Women (now). As president during its first three years, she wrote now's founding statement demanding full equality for women in the mainstream of American life. She also led the organization in its decisions in 1967 to support the Equal Rights Amendment for women and legalized abortion. During her presidency, she traveled across the country publicizing the new feminism and now and encouraged its older members to listen to the younger, more radical feminists. When she stepped down from the presidency in 1969, she suggested that now sponsor a national strike on August 26, 1970, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of women's obtaining the vote. An attempt to broaden the feminist movement, it succeeded far beyond her expectations: the New York rally alone attracted fifty thousand women.

Initially Friedan and other feminists criticized women's role as primary caretaker of the family because they believed that status and success could be achieved only through work outside the home. But by the 1980s, she and others had come to believe that women and men desire both the prestige and fulfillment that come from work outside the home and the love and identity gained through marriage and children. In The Second Stage (1981) Friedan argued that feminism had become too woman-centered in the 1970s and had polarized the relationship between the sexes. She urged feminists to move away from this stance and join with men and even conservatives on these new family issues.

Bibliography:

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963) and The Second Stage (1981).

Author:

Frances Arick Kolb

See also Equal Rights Amendment; Feminist Movement; National Organization for Women.

An author and political activist of the twentieth century, who has worked for the extension of women's rights. In 1963, Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a book that proved fundamental to the women's movement of the 1960s and beyond. She was a founder of the National Organization for Women.

In 1963, author Betty Naomi Goldstein Frie- dan's first book, The Feminine Mystique, launched the feminist movement, which eventually expanded the lifestyle choices for U.S. women. By the 1990s, she had also become a spokesperson for older people and economically disadvantaged people and was recognized and honored by women outside the United States for her global leadership and influence on women's issues.

Born February 4, 1921, in New York, Frie- dan grew up in Peoria, Illinois. She entered Smith College in 1939, majored in psychology, and served as editor of the college newspaper. After graduating summa cum laude in 1942, she interviewed for the only type of job available to women journalists at the time: researcher for a major U.S. news magazine. But the position of researcher amounted to doing all the work while someone else received the byline, and Friedan was not interested in that. Instead, she wrote for a Greenwich Village news agency, covering the labor movement.

When World War II ended, Friedan lost her job to a returning veteran. (Returning veterans were guaranteed their prewar jobs.) Friedan then thought of going to medical school, a choice very few women could pursue. But instead, she followed the traditional path, marrying returning veteran Carl Friedan in 1947 and starting a family. After her first child was born, she worked for another newspaper, but was fired when she became pregnant with her second child. She protested to the newspaper guild, as no one had ever questioned her ability to perform her job, but was told that losing her job was "her fault" because she was pregnant. At that time, the term sex discrimination did not exist.

While she was a mother and housewife living in suburban New York, Friedan wrote articles for women's magazines such as McCall's and Ladies' Home Journal on a freelance basis. Tapped by McCall's to report on the state of the alumnae of the Smith class of 1942 as they returned for their fifteenth reunion in 1957, Friedan visited the campus and was struck by the students' lack of interest in careers after graduation. This disinterest in intellectual pursuits contrasted greatly with Friedan's perception of her Smith classmates of the 1930s and 1940s.

Extensive research over the next several years brought Friedan to the conclusion that women's magazines were at fault because they defined women solely in relationship to their husbands and children. This had not always been the case; the magazines had evolved in the postwar years from promoters of women's independence into paeans to consumerism, bent on keeping U.S. housewives in the home by selling them more and more household products.

Not surprisingly, Friedan was unable to get her work on this issue published in an acceptable format by the women's magazines she was criticizing. Her report was published in book form in 1963 as The Feminine Mystique, in which she chronicled the dissatisfaction of suburban housewives, dubbing it "the problem with no name." The book struck a common chord among U.S. women, who recognized themselves in the women she described in its pages. For the first time since the women's suffrage movement ended successfully with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote, women gathered together on a large scale to work for equal rights with men, a concept that at the time was nothing less than revolutionary.

In 1966, with Kathryn Clarenbach, Friedan cofounded the National Organization for Women (NOW). NOW's original statement of purpose was written by Friedan: "Women want feminism to take the actions needed to bring women into the mainstream of American society, now; full equality for women, in fully equal partnership with men." Friedan served as NOW's president until 1970. Under her leadership, NOW propelled the women's movement from middle-class suburbia to nationwide activism. Friedan also helped organize the National Abortion Rights Action League in 1969, and the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971. All three organizations were still active participants in U.S. politics and culture into the 1990s.

On August 26, 1970, the fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the Women's Strike for Equality took place. Friedan's brainchild, this women's rights demonstration was the largest that had ever occurred in the United States. Thousands of U.S. women marched in the streets for a day rather than working as housewives, secretaries, and waitresses, to show how poorly society would fare without women's labor and to demand three things for women: equal opportunity in employment and education, twenty-four-hour child care centers, and legalized abortion. Although the media at the time portrayed the strike as frivolous or a result of female hysteria, their compulsion to pay the event any attention at all was a step forward for the women's movement.

By the 1980s, it was apparent that Friedan's feminism differed from that of other U.S. feminists such as Gloria Steinem and Kate Millett. When other feminist leaders were saying women could "have it all," meaning a successful career, fulfilling marriage, and happy children, Friedan, who had been divorced from her husband since 1969, wrote articles such as "Being ‘Superwoman' Is Not the Way to Go" (Woman's Day, Oct. 1981) and "Feminism's Next Step" (New York Times Magazine, July 1981). Rather than focusing on sexual violence and abortion rights, Friedan's writings emphasized the necessity of working with other groups to improve the plight of children, members of minorities, and economically disadvantaged people. In her 1981 book The Second Stage, Friedan called for an open discussion of traditional feminism's denial of the importance of family and of women's needs to nurture and be nurtured. She predicted that the women's movement would die out if feminists did not take the issues of children and men more seriously. It was not surprising that this position was roundly criticized as antifeminist by many of Friedan's contemporaries. Another position that was at odds with NOW surfaced in 1986 when she declared her support for a California law requiring employers to grant up to four months of unpaid leave for women who were disabled by pregnancy or childbirth. The 1980 law (West's Ann. Cal. Gov. Code §12945) was the subject of a U.S. Supreme Court case, California Federal Savings and Loan Ass'n v. Guerra, 479 U.S. 272, 107 S. Ct. 683, 93 L. Ed. 2d 613 (1987). NOW opposed the law as a dangerous singling out of women for special treatment; Friedan called it outrageous that feminists would side with employers who were trying to evade offering women important and needed benefits. These opinions, among other things, caused Friedan to lose support within the women's movement as well as an audience in the media.

Another reason for Friedan's fall from media attention was her style, which, like her philosophy, also differed from that of other feminist spokespersons, most notably Steinem. Whereas Steinem was a favorite of the media and actively courted their attention, Friedan did not seek out media attention and often railed against what she saw as the stereotyping of women. Her stormy relationship with the media contributed to an image of her as old, unattractive, and out of touch with modern feminism.

By 1990, although Friedan was moving away from what was considered mainstream feminism, she had earned a permanent place in history. That year, Life magazine named her one of the one hundred most important people of the twentieth century.

In September 1995, a new generation of journalists seemed surprised at Friedan's extensive international influence, which was demonstrated at the Non-Governmental Organization Forum on Women, an unofficial gathering at the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women. Friedan attended the forum as one of only a few women who had participated in all four U.N. women's conferences since the first one in Mexico City in 1975. Women of all nationalities and ages sought her out, listened to her speeches, and attended her workshops. Her focus was to move the women's movement away from conflict with men and toward economic policies that benefited both sexes, such as shorter workweeks and higher minimum wages. As she saw it, policies that were pro-women alone were portrayed in the media and by opponents as antifamily and antimen. Poor economic conditions and shrinking job opportunities often resulted in the treatment of women's developing economic power as a scapegoat for difficulties suffered by men or families. In Friedan's opinion, this unnecessary tension between men and women diverted attention from the issues that really threatened the well-being of women and families: poverty, unemployment, lack of education and health care, and crime. To combat these problems, she supported a proposal put forth by distinguished academics and public policy researchers that would provide low-income parents, not just women on welfare, with health insurance and child care.

Friedan's focus on more gender-neutral policies was an outgrowth of her research into gerontology and the issues facing aging people. The 1993 publication of The Fountain of Age had put Friedan back in the media spotlight as the spokesperson of her generation, an advocate for freeing older people from damaging stereotypes, just as she had previously done for women. Friedan brought to her advocacy for older people her philosophy of cooperation, developed during her decades of work in the women's movement. A delegate to the Fourth White House Conference on Aging in 1995, she fought against the polarization of young and older U.S. citizens that some politicians encouraged in order to increase their political power. She eschewed the idea of forced retirement, instead arguing for older workers to voluntarily and gradually cut down their work schedules and to explore job sharing and consultant work. At the same time, Friedan vowed to save programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which were under attack by fiscal conservatives. With that full plate of issues, it was clear that Friedan was not ready to stop her advocacy work.  She died on February 4, 2006.

CROSS-REFERENCES: Ireland, Patricia.

Quotes:

"The problem lay buried, 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 twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban housewife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: Is this all?"

"The suburban housewife -- she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife -- freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth, and the illnesses of her grandmother had found true feminine fulfillment."

"Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim."

"It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself."

"A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man's advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all."

"Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgasmic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery."

See more famous quotes by Betty Friedan