- Person
- Betty Friedan
- Lived
- 1921–2006
- Field
- Women’s rights
- From
- American
The story
By the late 1980s Betty Friedan had spent a quarter of a century leading the women's movement. In her sixties she turned her attention to a new subject: growing old. In 1988 she became a distinguished visiting professor at the University of Southern California's journalism school and its Institute for the Study of Women and Men. She also researched at Columbia University's Center for Social Science, Harvard's Center for Population Research and USC's Andrus Gerontology Center.
The result was The Fountain of Age, published in 1993. Just as her first book had attacked the feminine mystique, this one decried an age mystique, in which old age is seen only as decline or deterioration from youth and older people are treated as helpless and childlike, stripped of identity and activity. Friedan admitted her own denial and fear of growing old, but argued against experts who saw age only in terms of pathology.
Instead she presented aging as another stage for growth, a time when new qualities and strengths can emerge. She used her feminist analysis to ask whether, as women came to see themselves as full persons rather than only through their roles as mothers and partners, their experience of aging would change too. She also noticed that the rigid divide between masculine and feminine traits softened with age, and suggested that women made this transition more easily, which might help explain why they live longer.
For Friedan personally, aging meant liberation from the power politics of the women's movement and a chance to move beyond the war between the sexes. She continued to argue for a broad domestic agenda of child care, health care, housing and jobs, and for women and men to work together toward a better society.
Friedan wrote the book in her seventies and kept writing and campaigning for years afterwards. Her autobiography, Life So Far, appeared in 2000, and she died on her 85th birthday, February 4, 2006. The Fountain of Age challenged the idea that later life is only a period of loss, and it encouraged readers to see older people as capable of growth, purpose and continued contribution.
Why it matters
Friedan helped change how older people are seen, encouraging society to value later life rather than write it off.
About Betty Friedan
Author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), which named ‘the problem that has no name’, and co-founder and first president of the National Organization for Women.
More about Betty Friedan
- The Feminine Mystique sold over three million copiesBetty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique became an immediate best-seller in 1963, sold well over three million copies and was translated into a dozen languages.
- Betty Friedan scribbled NOW on a paper napkinIn 1966 Betty Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women, writing its name on a napkin in her hotel room, and served as its first president.
- Betty Friedan's NOW opened job listings to womenUnder Betty Friedan's leadership NOW won a 1967 executive order extending affirmative action to women and a 1968 ruling that sex-segregated help-wanted ads were illegal.
- Betty Friedan's survey of classmates changed historyIn 1957 Betty Friedan surveyed 200 of her Smith College classmates and found many suffering from what she called the problem that has no name.
- Betty Friedan led the Women's Strike for EqualityOn August 26, 1970, the 50th anniversary of women's suffrage, Betty Friedan organized a nationwide Women's Strike for Equality and led tens of thousands down Fifth Avenue.
Sources
- Betty Friedan Jewish Women's Archive Encyclopedia
- Betty Friedan Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.