Betty Friedan and the problem that had no name

One of the most recognised names and faces of the late 20th century, Friedan pushed for equal pay, sex-neutral help-wanted ads, maternity leave, child-care centres for working parents, legal abortion and many other topics considered radical in the 1960s and 1970s.

Impatient that the government, in implementing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, did not appear to be taking equal pay for women seriously, she helped found in 1966 the National Organisation for Women, the largest and most effective organisation in the women’s movement, and served as its first president. She led a 500,000-person Women’s Strike for Equality in New York in 1970.

She was a founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus in the 1970s and the abortion rights organisation now known as NARAL-Pro Choice America.

‘‘Many of us think of her as one of the mothers of the modern women’s movement,’’ said Kim Gandy, NOW president. ‘‘She played a very pivotal, very critical role in launching the second wave of the modern women’s movement.’’

‘‘She was a giant in the 20th century for women and most significantly was a catalyst for change in the American culture,’’ said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation. ‘‘She defined the problem, and then had the courage to do something about it.’’

Friedan’s was a voice that was loud, insistent and sometimes divisive. She split with NOW in the 1970s after she came to believe that the organisation focused too many resources on lesbian issues and that too many feminists hated men. Her 1981 book The Second Stage prompted some feminists to denounce her as reactionary.

Her 2000 memoir, Life So Far, said that her husband, Carl, beat her during their marriage. He objected, and Friedan amended the declaration to say that both of them fought physically during their marriage, which ended in divorce in 1969. He died this December.

She turned to other issues, focusing on ageism, family issues and economic empowerment. ‘‘It isn’t that I have stopped being a feminist, but women as a special separate interest group are not my concern anymore,’’ she said in 1993.

Bettye Goldstein was born February 4, 1921, in Peoria, Illinois, the Jewish daughter of an immigrant jeweller and a mother who quit her job as an editor of the local newspaper’s women’s pages to become a homemaker. She later said she felt like an outsider from childhood. She later moved 1,000 miles east to attend Smith College.

She did graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley but turned down a fellowship in psychology, afraid of outperforming her then boyfriend. After the romance broke up, she gave up graduate work and moved to New York’s Greenwich Village to work for a labour newspaper. She married and had a child, but when she became pregnant with a second child, she was fired.

Struggling as a freelance writer, she found that the editors of women’s magazines deleted references to her subjects’ interests outside the home, telling Friedan that the readers did not want to explore those topics. She was grinding away on a survey of her Smith College classmates upon their 15-year reunion, when she added a few questions and said she discovered that the highly educated and talented housewives in their mid-30s were dissatisfied and distraught, drugged by tranquilizers, misled by psychoanalysis and ignored by society.

No magazine would publish her article. Five years later, after significantly more work, she published The Feminine Mystique as a book and ‘‘pulled the trigger on history’’, as futurist Alvin Toffler said. It eventually sold more than two million copies in paperback and remains a staple of college history courses.

Daniel Horowitz, a Smith College professor who wrote Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminist Mystique, said that although Friedan presented herself at the time as a housewife who had an ‘‘aha!’’ moment, her ideas were partly rooted in the humanistic psychology that she studied at Smith. She shared a February 4 birthday with Rosa Parks, and both Friedan and Coretta Scott King were at the convention of the Progressive Party in Philadelphia in 1948, he said.

‘‘All three of them have their political roots in the struggles for social justice, for African Americans, for women and for working people in the 1940s. Friedan was deeply embedded in and engaged with issues raised on the left in the labour union movement,’’ Horowitz said.

During the next several decades, Friedan was often seen in demonstrations, protest marches and news conferences. She suffered insults, not just for her ideas, but for her appearance, which she readily admitted was ‘‘not pretty’’.

Never an organisation person, she alienated many who worked with her by insisting on holding the floor, claiming credit and running roughshod over her assistants. She insisted that the women’s movement remain in the mainstream of American life, objecting to the ‘‘bra-burning, anti-man, politics-of-orgasm school’’. Younger leaders took over NOW, and after the publication of The Second Stage, authors as different as Susan Brownmiller and Susan Faludi accused her of reversing the revolution.

LA Times-Washington Post