Betty Friedan's revolution began with a survey for her college reunion
Preparing for her fifteenth Smith College reunion in 1957, Betty Friedan quizzed fellow graduates about their lives. Their quiet discontent became the problem that has no name, in her phrase, and the book she built from it, The Feminine Mystique of 1963, is widely seen as the spark for feminism's second wave in America.
She was born Bettye Naomi Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois, on February 4, 1921, to secular Jewish parents with roots in Russia and Hungary. Her father ran a jewellery store; her mother wrote for a newspaper society page when he fell ill. Friedan later traced her anger at injustice to experiences of anti-Semitism. At Smith she won an academic prize in her first year, published poetry and became editor-in-chief of the campus paper in 1941, steering its editorials toward politics.
A 1943 fellowship took her to Berkeley to study psychology with Erik Erikson, though she later said a boyfriend pushed her to decline a doctoral award. She then worked as a labour journalist, first for Federated Press and from 1946 for the United Electrical Workers' UE News, where one beat was the House Un-American Activities Committee. In 1952 the paper dismissed her because she was pregnant with her second child, and she turned freelance, writing for magazines including Cosmopolitan. Her biographer Daniel Horowitz dates her awareness of women's exclusion to those union years, a reading she rejected.
The reunion survey led to articles and a flood of letters from housewives relieved to learn they were not alone. After the book, she co-founded the National Organization for Women in 1966 and became its first president. In 1970 she organised the nationwide Women's Strike for Equality on August 26, fifty years after the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the vote, and it widened the movement far more than expected. A year later she helped launch the National Women's Political Caucus and pushed hard for the Equal Rights Amendment, which cleared the House by 354 to 24.
Friedan wrote six books and stayed active into the late 1990s. She criticised feminist factions that attacked men or homemakers, a theme of The Second Stage in 1981. She died on her 85th birthday in 2006.
Source: Betty Friedan
