A jeweller’s daughter in Peoria
Bettye Naomi Goldstein was born on February 4, 1921, in Peoria, Illinois, the daughter of Harry Goldstein, an immigrant from Russia who owned a jewellery store in town, and Miriam Horwitz Goldstein; the families had roots in Russia and Hungary. Her mother had worked on the women’s page of the local newspaper and gave it up to raise her children; years later her daughter would remember how much livelier her mother had seemed when she was working, and how restless she became at home. The family was secular and comfortably middle-class, part of a small Jewish community in a Midwestern city.
That distance left a mark. Friedan later wrote that her passion against injustice began with her feelings about the injustice of antisemitism, and that she had felt isolated as a Jewish girl in Peoria. She was bookish, sharp-tongued and ambitious. When the high-school paper turned down her bid to write a column, she and six friends launched a literary magazine of their own, called Tide. It was an early sign of a lifelong habit: when an institution would not make room for her, she built a new one.
Smith, Berkeley and the labour press
In 1938 she entered Smith College in Massachusetts, where she studied psychology, won academic prizes, published poetry and in 1941 became editor-in-chief of the college newspaper. Under her editorship the paper grew openly political, campaigning against fascism abroad and for union organising at home. She graduated summa cum laude in 1942 and dropped the final “e” from her first name, which she had come to think pretentious. At Smith, she later recalled, she noticed that some Jewish classmates preferred to hide their background, another lesson in how prejudice shapes people’s choices.
A fellowship took her to the University of California, Berkeley, for graduate work in psychology, where she studied with the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. She was offered a further fellowship that could have led to a doctorate, but turned it down; in her memoirs she said that a boyfriend had pressured her to abandon an academic career. Instead she moved to New York and became a reporter for the left-wing labour press, first for the Federated Press news service and then, from 1946, for UE News, the paper of the radical United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers union. She covered strikes, the House Un-American Activities Committee and the conditions of women in factories, material that historians now see as the root of her later feminism.
Marriage, motherhood and the suburbs
In 1947 she married Carl Friedan, a theatre producer who later worked in advertising; the couple had changed the family name from Friedman. They had three children, Daniel, Jonathan and Emily. Friedan kept working after her first child was born, but in the early 1950s she lost her job at UE News when she was pregnant with her second, a blunt experience of the discrimination she would later fight. The family moved to the New York suburbs, and she became a freelance writer for women’s magazines, producing the kind of upbeat domestic features that the publications of the day preferred.
The marriage was stormy. In her memoir Life So Far (2000) she wrote that her husband had hit her; he called the claim a fabrication, and she later said she had been no passive victim and that they had simply fought a great deal. They divorced in 1969. What mattered for history was that by the late 1950s Friedan was living, from the inside, the suburban life that American culture held up as the summit of female happiness, and finding that it did not fit.
The problem that has no name
In 1957, for her fifteenth college reunion, Friedan surveyed some two hundred of her Smith classmates about their education, their lives and their satisfaction. The answers surprised her. Many of these well-educated women, married with children and homes in the suburbs, reported a vague but persistent unhappiness that they blamed on themselves. Magazines would not run the article she wanted to write about it, so she expanded her research, interviewing women across the country, reading the advertising industry’s own studies of the housewife market, and dissecting the psychology and sociology that told women their fulfilment lay only in marriage and motherhood.
The result, published by W. W. Norton in 1963, was The Feminine Mystique. Friedan argued that after the Second World War a powerful ideology, the “feminine mystique”, had persuaded American women that the only proper aim of their lives was to be wives and mothers. Women’s magazines, advertisers, Freudian psychologists, educators and social scientists, she wrote, had combined to sell that ideal, and millions of women were paying for it with depression, anxiety and a sense of emptiness. She called it “the problem that has no name” and closed her opening chapter with the silent question she believed many housewives asked themselves: “Is this all?” Her answer was that women, like men, needed serious work and purpose of their own.
The book became an immediate bestseller. It has sold more than three million copies and been translated into many languages, and it is widely credited with igniting the second wave of American feminism. Thousands of women wrote to Friedan to say she had described their lives. It also cost her: neighbours cooled, and her children were dropped from car pools. Critics have pointed out its limits, most famously the writer bell hooks, who argued in 1984 that it spoke for white, middle-class, college-educated housewives and ignored poor women and women of colour, many of whom already worked outside the home. Friedan’s book named a real problem for a large group of women; it did not speak for all of them.
Founding NOW
Fame turned Friedan from writer to organiser. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had banned sex discrimination in employment, but the new Equal Employment Opportunity Commission showed little interest in enforcing that part of the law. In June 1966, at a Washington conference of state commissions on the status of women, delegates were told they could not even pass a resolution urging the commission to do its job. A group of them gathered in Friedan’s hotel room, and she scribbled the name of a new organisation on a paper napkin: NOW, the National Organization for Women. That October it was formally launched, with Friedan as its first president.
Friedan wrote NOW’s statement of purpose with the lawyer and civil-rights activist Pauli Murray. It set out to bring women “into the mainstream of American society now” in “fully equal partnership with men” and attacked the assumption that a woman had to choose between family and serious work. Under her leadership NOW pressed the commission to take sex-discrimination complaints seriously, campaigned for the 1967 executive order extending affirmative action to women, fought sex-segregated “help wanted” advertisements, and backed the Equal Rights Amendment, paid maternity leave and public child care. In 1969 Friedan also helped found the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, later NARAL. She led NOW until 1970.
The strike for equality and the movement’s divisions
As she stepped down from NOW’s presidency, Friedan called for a national day of protest on August 26, 1970, the fiftieth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment that had given American women the vote. The Women’s Strike for Equality brought out demonstrations across the country; in New York, tens of thousands marched down Fifth Avenue, estimates range from about twenty thousand to fifty thousand. That same year she testified against the Supreme Court nomination of G. Harrold Carswell, which the Senate rejected. In 1971 she joined Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, Gloria Steinem and others in founding the National Women’s Political Caucus to get women elected to office.
Friedan was also a divisive figure inside the movement she had helped start. She wanted feminism to stay focused on jobs, law, child care and political power, and to appeal to ordinary women and to men; she distrusted what she saw as a turn toward sexual politics and hostility to men. In 1969 she warned that lesbian activists were a “lavender menace” that could discredit the movement, a phrase that wounded many feminists and that she later moved away from, seconding a lesbian-rights resolution at the 1977 National Women’s Conference. Her rivalry with Gloria Steinem was public and long-lasting. Her 1981 book The Second Stage, which argued that feminism had neglected the family, was attacked by many feminists as a retreat.
A Jewish feminist
Friedan was never religious; she described herself as an agnostic and in 1973 signed the Humanist Manifesto II. But she traced her sense of injustice to the antisemitism of her childhood, and her Jewish identity grew stronger in middle age. In 1975 she led American women to the United Nations’ International Women’s Year conference in Mexico City and was shocked by the anti-Zionist and antisemitic rhetoric there. When the UN General Assembly passed its resolution equating Zionism with racism that November, she publicly declared herself a Zionist. She later said that her feminism and her Jewish identity had come to reinforce each other.
She worked with the American Jewish Congress as co-chair of its National Commission on Women’s Equality, criticised both antisemitism in the international women’s movement and the discomfort of some Jewish male leaders with feminism, and in the 1980s joined a monthly Torah study group. In 1984 she led a delegation of American Jewish women to a dialogue in Israel, “Women as Jews, Jews as Women” organised by the American Jewish Congress; according to the Jewish Women’s Archive, it led directly to the founding of the Israel Women’s Network.
Teacher, ageing rebel and final years
From the 1970s onward Friedan taught and lectured at universities including New York University, the New School, Temple, Yale, Queens College and the University of Southern California. In 1973 she helped found the First Women’s Bank and Trust Company in New York. In 1993 she published The Fountain of Age, which did for old age what her first book had done for the suburbs: it attacked an “age mystique” that treated growing older only as decline, and argued that later life could be a time of growth. Beyond Gender followed in 1997 and her memoir, Life So Far, in 2000.
Even admirers called her difficult. The New York Times obituary described her as famously abrasive and given to fits of temper, and she herself admitted to a bad temper. She was also generous with younger women and relentless for the causes she cared about. Betty Friedan died of congestive heart failure at her home in Washington, D.C., on February 4, 2006, her eighty-fifth birthday. She was survived by her three children.
Legacy
Few books have changed as many lives as directly as The Feminine Mystique. It gave a generation of women words for what they felt, and the organisations Friedan helped build, NOW, NARAL, the National Women’s Political Caucus, turned that recognition into laws and lawsuits. The enforcement of workplace sex-discrimination law, the end of sex-segregated job advertisements, the opening of professions and political offices to women, and the long fight for the Equal Rights Amendment all bear her stamp.
Her legacy is also argued over: her narrow focus on educated white women, her hostility toward lesbian activism in the movement’s early years and her later criticism of fellow feminists are part of the record. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993, and her papers are held at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute. More than anyone else, Betty Friedan turned a private discontent into a public cause.
Sources & further reading
Betty Friedan, Wikipedia · Betty Friedan, Jewish Women’s Archive Encyclopedia · Betty Friedan, Wikiquote · Gil Troy, “When Feminists Were Zionists”, Tablet · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.