- Person
- Betty Friedan
- Lived
- 1921–2006
- Field
- Women’s rights
- From
- American
The story
By the late 1950s Betty Friedan was a suburban mother of three who had been forced out of her job at a union newspaper during her second pregnancy and was writing freelance articles for middle-class women's magazines. She had graduated summa cum laude from Smith College in 1942, and in 1957 she was asked to survey her former classmates for their 15th reunion.
Friedan surveyed two hundred of them about their education, their later experiences and how satisfied they were with their lives. The answers surprised her. Many of the women, supposedly happy in their suburban homes with working husbands and smiling children, said they felt bored, depressed and anxious. Friedan was not satisfied with the explanation that they had caused their own unhappiness, and she began to dig deeper.
She interviewed other suburban housewives and studied psychology, the media and advertising. She tried to publish her findings as a magazine article, but no magazine would take it. When she did publish an article in Good Housekeeping in September 1960, titled Women Are People Too!, the flood of responses showed her that the malaise reached far beyond graduates of prestigious eastern colleges. Many women wrote back grateful to learn they were not alone.
She called it the problem that has no name: a strange stirring and sense of dissatisfaction that each suburban wife struggled with alone, silently asking herself whether this was all. Her years of interviews and research became the basis of The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963. The book went on to sell more than three million copies and is widely credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism.
Critics later noted that Friedan's research focused mainly on white, middle-class women and overlooked the experiences of women of colour and working-class women. But by listening to her classmates and taking their unhappiness seriously, she showed that private frustrations could reveal a public problem, an insight that helped launch a movement for equality in education, work and public life.
Why it matters
By listening to ordinary women and taking their unhappiness seriously, Friedan turned private frustration into a public question that launched a movement.
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 took on the age mystiqueIn The Fountain of Age (1993), Betty Friedan challenged the view of old age as only decline, arguing that later life can be a time of growth.
- 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 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
- The Feminine Mystique 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.