B

etty Friedan, the feminist
crusader and author whose first book,

The Feminine Mystique

,
ignited the contemporary women’s movement in 1963, died in
February 2006, on her 85th birthday. 

Bettye Naomi Goldstein was born on February 4, 1921, in Peoria,
Illinois. Her father, Harry, was an immigrant from Russia who parlayed
a street-corner collar-button business into a prosperous downtown
jewelry store. Her mother, Miriam, had been the editor of the women’s
page of the local newspaper before giving up her job for marriage
and children. 

Betty received her bachelor’s degree in 1942—by that time
she had dropped the final “e”—and accepted a fellowship
to the University of California, Berkeley, for graduate work in
psychology. At Berkeley, she studied with psychologist Erik Erikson,
among others. She won a second fellowship that would allow her to
continue studying for a doctorate. After finishing her studies,
she moved to Greenwich Village in New York city. 

There, Friedan worked as an editor at the Federated Press, a small
news service that provided stories to labor newspapers nationwide.
In 1946, she took a job as a reporter with

UE News

, the weekly
publication of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers
of America. 

In 1947 she married Carl Friedan. They started a family and moved
to Rockland County, New York. 

In 1966 Friedan helped found the National Organization for Women
(NOW), serving as its first president. In 1969 she co-founded the
National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, now known
as NARAL Pro-Choice America. With Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and
others, she founded the National Women’s Political Caucus in
1971. 

Though in later years, some feminists dismissed Friedan’s work
as outmoded, a great many aspects of modern life that seem routine
today—from unisex help wanted ads to women in politics, medicine,
the clergy, and the military—are the direct result of the hard-won
advances she helped women attain. 

Friedan trained as a psychologist, but never pursued a career in
the field. When she wrote

The Feminine Mystique

, she was
a suburban housewife and mother who supplemented her husband’s
income by writing freelance articles for women’s magazines. 

The

Feminine Mystique

began as a survey Friedan conducted
in 1957 for the 15th reunion of her graduating class at Smith. It
was intended to refute a prevailing postwar myth: that higher education
kept women from adapting to their roles as wives and mothers. Judging
from her own capable life, Friedan expected her classmates to describe
theirs as similarly well adjusted. But what she discovered in the
women’s responses was something far more complex and more troubling—a
“nameless, aching dissatisfaction” that she would famously
call “the problem that has no name.” 

Drawing on history, psychology, sociology, and economics, Friedan
charted a gradual metamorphosis of the American woman from the independent,
career-minded “new woman” of the 1920s and 1930s into
the vacant, aproned housewife of the postwar years 

With its impassioned analysis of the issues that affected women’s
lives in the decades after World War II—including enforced
domesticity, limited career prospects, and the campaign for legalized
abortion—

The Feminine Mystique

is widely regarded as
one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century.
Friedan’s other books include

It Changed My Life: Writings
on the Women’s Movement

(Random House, 1976);

The Second
Stage

(Summit, 1981); and

The Fountain of Age

(Simon
& Schuster, 1993). 

The recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, she has been
a visiting professor at universities around the country, among them
Columbia, Temple, and the University of Southern California. In
recent years, Friedan was associated with the Institute for Women
and Work at Cornell University. 

The new society Friedan proposed, founded on the notion that men
and women were created equal, represented such a drastic upending
of prevailing norms that over the years, she would be forced to
explain her position again and again. “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.”