Betty Friedan Pioneer of Modern Feminist Movement

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Betty FriedanPioneer of Modern Feminist Movement

• Date of birth February 4, 1921
• Date of death February 4, 2006

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• "Gradually, without seeing it clearly for quite
  a while, I came to realize that something is very
  wrong with the way American women are trying to
  live their lives today," Friedan wrote in the
  opening line of the preface. "I sensed it first
  as a question mark in my own life, as a wife and
  mother of three small children, half-guiltily,
  and therefore half-heartedly, almost in spite of
  myself, using my abilities and education in work
  that took me away from home." -- "The Feminine
  Mystique"

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Betty Friedan 19212006

• Betty Friedan has been central to the reshaping
  of American attitudes toward women's lives and
  rights. Through decades of social activism,
  strategic thinking and powerful writing, Friedan
  is one of contemporary society's most effective
  leaders.
• Betty Friedan, 1999.
• Stacy Walsh Rosenstock/Getty Images

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Betty Friedan 19212006

• Bettye Naomi Goldstein was born on Feb. 4,
  1921, in Peoria, Ill. Her father, Harry, was an
  immigrant from Russia who parlayed a
  street-corner collar-button business into a
  prosperous downtown jewelry store. Her gifted,
  imperious mother, Miriam, had been the editor of
  the women's page of the local newspaper before
  giving up her job for marriage and children. Only
  years later did Friedan come to see her mother's
  cold, critical demeanor as masking a deep
  bitterness that came from giving up the work she
  loved.

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Betty Friedan 19212006

• Her mother was an unhappy housewife whose
  disposition and health dramatically improved when
  her husband's health faltered and she took over
  management of the jewelry business. In her 1976
  book "It Changed My Life," Friedan said her
  mother's discontent gave her an early glimpse of
  the perils of the malaise she would later call
  the "feminine mystique." Envious of her
  mother's social grace and her sister's beauty,
  Friedan did not feel at home until she arrived at
  Smith College in the late 1930s. A contemporary
  of Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush, who attended
  Smith about the same time, she became editor of
  the campus newspaper and quickly established a
  reputation for brilliance. Friedan finished summa
  cum laude in psychology in 1942 and entered
  graduate studies at UC Berkeley.

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Betty Friedan 19212006

• Growing up brainy, Jewish, outspoken and, by
  the standards of the time, unlovely, Bettye
  Goldstein was ostracized. But at Smith she
  blossomed. For the first time, she could be as
  smart as she wanted, as impassioned as she wanted
  and as loud as she wanted, and for four happy
  years she was all those things. Betty Goldstein
  received her bachelor's degree in 1942 -- by that
  time she had dropped the final "e," which she
  considered an affectation of her mother's -- and
  accepted a fellowship to UC Berkeley for graduate
  work in psychology.

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Betty Friedan 19212006

• At Berkeley, she studied with the renowned
  psychologist Erik Erikson, among others. She won
  a second fellowship, even more prestigious than
  the first, that would allow her to continue for
  doctorate. But she was dating a young physicist
  who felt threatened by her success. He pressured
  her to turn down the fellowship, and she did, an
  experience she would later recount frequently in
  interviews. She also turned down the physicist,
  returning home to Peoria before moving to
  Greenwich Village in New York City.

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• In October 1966 Friedan co-founded the National
  Organization for Women (NOW), a civil-rights
  group dedicated to achieving equality of
  opportunity for women. As president of NOW she
  directed campaigns to end sex-classified
  employment notices, for greater representation of
  women in government, for child-care centers for
  working mothers, and for legalized abortion and
  other reforms. Although it was later occasionally
  eclipsed by younger and more radical groups, NOW
  remained the largest and probably the most
  effective organization in the women's movement. A
  founding member of the National Women's Political
  Caucus (1971), she said it was organized "to make
  policy not coffee." In 1973 she became director
  of the First Women's Bank and Trust Company.

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Betty Friedan 19212006

• As president during its first three years, she
  wrote NOW's founding statement demanding full
  equality for women in the mainstream of American
  life. She also led the organization in its
  decisions in 1967 to support the Equal Rights
  Amendment for women and legalized abortion.
  During her presidency, she traveled across the
  country publicizing the new feminism and now and
  encouraged its older members to listen to the
  younger, more radical feminists. When she stepped
  down from the presidency in 1969, she suggested
  that now sponsor a national strike on August 26,
  1970, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of
  women's obtaining the vote. An attempt to broaden
  the feminist movement, it succeeded far beyond
  her expectations the New York rally alone
  attracted fifty thousand women.

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• Photo of Betty Friedan leading a groupof
  demonstrators outside a Congressional office in
  1971 to show support for the E.R.A.

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• Betty Friedan speaks regarding a national
  women's strike Aug. 26, 1966.

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Betty Friedan 19212006

• Initially Friedan and other feminists criticized
  women's role as primary caretaker of the family
  because they believed that status and success
  could be achieved only through work outside the
  home. But by the 1980s, she and others had come
  to believe that women and men desire both the
  prestige and fulfillment that come from work
  outside the home and the love and identity gained
  through marriage and children. In The Second
  Stage (1981) Friedan argued that feminism had
  become too woman-centered in the 1970s and had
  polarized the relationship between the sexes. She
  urged feminists to move away from this stance and
  join with men and even conservatives on these new
  family issues.

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• THE VOICES HEARD 'ROUND THE WORLD!
• Friedan stepped down from the presidency in
  March 1970 but continued to be active in the work
  that had sprung largely from her pioneering
  efforts, helping to organize the Women's Strike
  for Equality, held on August 26, 1970, the 50th
  anniversary of woman suffrage, and leading in the
  campaign for ratification of the proposed Equal
  Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

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Betty Friedan 19212006

• Despite all of her achievements, Friedan would
  be forever known as the suburban housewife who
  started a revolution with "The Feminine
  Mystique." Rarely has a single book been
  responsible for such sweeping, tumultuous and
  continuing social transformation.
• The book was so astute in its analysis that, as
  futurist Alvin Toffler said, it "pulled the
  trigger on history."

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Betty Friedan 19212006

• It is easy to see the concrete details that
  trap the suburban housewife, the continual
  demands on her time. But the chains that bind her
  in her trap are chains in her own mind and
  spirit. They are chains made up of mistaken ideas
  and misinterpreted facts, of incomplete truths
  and unreal choices. They are not easily seen and
  not easily shaken off.
• How can any woman see the whole truth within
  the bounds of her own life? How can she believe
  that voice inside herself when it denies the
  conventional, accepted truths by which she has
  been living? And yet the women I have talked to,
  who are finally listening to that inner voice,
  seem in some incredible way to be groping through
  to a truth that has defied the experts.

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• The new society Friedan proposed, founded on the
  notion that men and women were created equal,
  represented such a drastic upending of the
  prevailing social norms that over the years to
  come, she would be forced to explain her position
  again and again.
• "Some people think I'm saying, 'Women of the
  world unite -- you have nothing to lose but your
  men,"' she told Life magazine in 1963. "It's not
  true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum
  cleaners."

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The Long March towards Women's EqualityContinues
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Betty Friedan 19212006

• Reference
• http//www.vfa.us/Suffrage.htm
• http//search.eb.com/women/article-9035419
• http//news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ameicas/4682228.stm
• http//www.americanwriters.org/writers/friedan.as
  p
• http//www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philoso
  phy/works/us/friedan.htm
• http//www.greatwomen.org/ http//www.wpunj.edu/
  newpol/issue35/boucher35.htm
• http//www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/ar
  ticle/2006/02/04/
• http//www.rambles.net/friedan_gender.html
• http//www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/02/06/fried
  an/
• http//www.sfgate.com/