Betty Friedan

Bettye Naomi Goldstein grew up in Peoria, where her father Harry sold jewelry and her mother Miriam, who had given up newspaper work to keep house, went back to writing the society page when he fell ill and was visibly happier for it. The antisemitism of the town gave the daughter what she later called the origin of her passion against injustice. When the Peoria High paper turned down her application to write a column, she and six friends started a magazine of their own called Tide. At Smith she took over the student paper in 1941 and pushed its editorials into antiwar politics, graduated summa cum laude in psychology in 1942, and won a Berkeley fellowship in 1943 that she gave up when a boyfriend pressed her to.

She wrote for the Federated Press from 1943 and for the United Electrical Workers' paper from 1946 until 1952, when the union fired her for being pregnant. In 1957 she sent a questionnaire to her Smith classmates at their fifteenth reunion and did not like the answers. She founded the group that became NARAL, co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971, and on August 26, 1970 led tens of thousands of women down Fifth Avenue. The book and the movement it started are told on BriefHistory. Here is the part she argued about for the rest of her life.

The argument was over who she had been. Friedan presented herself as a suburban housewife who woke up, and the historian Daniel Horowitz showed she had been a labor journalist writing about the exclusion of women from work since the 1940s, an account she disputed. The marriage went the same way. She married Carl Friedan, a theater producer, in 1947 and divorced him in May 1969, and when she wrote in her memoir that he had beaten her he called it a complete fabrication. She then revised it herself: we fought a lot, and he was bigger than me. Inside her own organization, Black members opposed her push to make the government enforce Title VII for women first. She stepped down as president in 1969.

She died of congestive heart failure at her Washington home on February 4, 2006. The reputation has moved in two directions since. Her subject was the college-educated white housewife, and the women who had always worked for wages are not in the book, a criticism raised early and never retired. At the same time the scholarship that recovered her union years made her a longer and stranger figure than the one she wrote. In 2022 the Peoria school board considered naming a school after her, then chose another name, citing what she had said about gay people. The town she came from and the movement she started are both still deciding.

Betty Friedan's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Feminine Mystique book
  Built out of a questionnaire sent to her Smith classmates 1963
• National Organization for Women company
  She drafted its first statement of purpose 1966
• National Women's Political Caucus company
  Founded to put women into elective office 1971
• It Changed My Life book
  Her writings from inside the movement 1976
• The Second Stage book
  Her argument that the movement had to make room for family 1981
• The Fountain of Age book
  On ageing, 30 years after the first book 1993

• 1941 aged ~20 Becomes editor-in-chief of the Smith College student paper The editorials turned antiwar and drew complaints.
• 1943 aged ~22 Gives up a Berkeley psychology fellowship She wrote later that a boyfriend pressed her to abandon the academic career.
• 1947 aged ~26 Marries Carl Friedan
• 1952 aged ~31 Fired from the UE News for being pregnant
• 1957 aged ~36 Surveys her Smith classmates at their fifteenth reunion
• 1966 aged ~45 Becomes the first president of the National Organization for Women
• May 1969 aged 48 Divorces Carl Friedan and steps down from the NOW presidency
• August 26, 1970 aged 49 Leads the Women's Strike for Equality down Fifth Avenue Estimates ran from 20,000 to 50,000 marchers.
• February 4, 2006 aged 85 Dies of congestive heart failure in Washington

• Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962
  First Lady and human rights advocate who chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration. predecessor in the argument
• Alice Paul 1885–1977
  Strategist of the final campaign for women's suffrage and author of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. first wave
• Margaret Sanger 1879–1966
  Birth-control advocate who transformed reproductive health access while leaving a deeply contested legacy involving eugenics. earlier campaigner
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg 1933–2020
  Supreme Court Justice whose advocacy for gender equality made her a cultural icon. took the argument into court
• Shirley Chisholm 1924–2005
  First Black woman elected to Congress and first woman to run for a major party's presidential nomination. co-founded the caucus with her