Born on February 4, 1921, in Peoria, Illinois, Betty Goldstein graduated from Smith College with a degree in psychology in 1942 and after a year of graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley settled in New York City. She worked at various jobs until June 1947, when she married Carl Friedan. For ten years thereafter she lived as a housewife and mother in New York suburbs while doing freelance work for a number of magazines. In 1957 a questionnaire that she circulated among her Smith classmates suggested to her that a great many of them were, like her, deeply dissatisfied with their lives. She planned and undertook an extensive series of studies on the topic, formulating more detailed questionnaires, conducting interviews, discussing her results with psychologists and other students of behavior, and finally organized her findings, illuminated by her personal experiences, in book form as The Feminine Mystique, 1963.
The book was an immediate and controversial best seller and was translated into a number of foreign languages. Friedan╒s central thesis was that women as a class suffered a variety of more or less subtle forms of discrimination, but that they were in particular the victims of a pervasive system of delusions and false values under which they were urged to find personal fulfillment, even identity, vicariously through the husbands and children to whom they were supposed cheerfully to devote their lives. This restricted role of wife-mother, whose spurious glorification by advertisers and others was suggested by the title of the book, led almost inevitably to a sense of unreality or general spiritual malaise in the absence of genuine, creative, self-defining work. The growing public discussion that followed the publication of the book was bolstered by Friedan╒s lectures and radio and television appearances around the country.
In October 1966 Friedan founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), a civil-rights group dedicated to equality of opportunity for women. As president of NOW she directed campaigns for the ending of sex-classified employment notices, for greater representation of women in government, for child-care centers for working mothers, 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. 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 fiftieth anniversary of woman suffrage, and leading in the campaign for ratification of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 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.
In 1976 she published It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women╒s Movement, and in 1981 The Second Stage, in which she argued that the women's movement was being misrepresented by some feminists whose aim was to put down men, marriage and the family. Although some viewed the latter book as a softening, even a recantation, of her earlier views, Friedan dismissed criticisms from both the left and right, saying she was merely ╥dealing with the reality of today's evolving family.╙ The Fountain of Age, 1993, dealt with the psychology of old age and urged society to rid itself of the view that aging is about loss and depletion.
Friedan received the Eleanor Roosevelt Leadership Award in 1989.
