Betty Friedan Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Betty Friedan (1921–2006) was an American writer and feminist known for being a founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and for her writings, public statements, and actions that helped change the perception of the role of women in American society.

Born in Peoria, Illinois, she attended Smith College and graduated with a major in psychology. At Smith, she became the editor of the campus newspaper, and under her leadership the paper editorialized in favor of the unionization of the maids on campus. Friedan then spent a year completing a master’s degree in psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, where she became politically active and was involved in a number of left-wing causes.

After leaving Berkeley, Friedan moved to New York City and became a reporter. She wrote for the Federated Press, a news service that was controlled by the Communist Party. She then wrote for the UE News, the newspaper of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. She was fired by the paper because she was pregnant with her second child. In 1963 Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published. An outgrowth of a survey of Smith College graduates that she had conducted for the fifteenth reunion of their class in 1957 (later extended to other female college graduates), the book discusses the role of women in industrial societies. It contends that the role of the full-time homemaker repressed and stifled women and that there was an absence of female role models who both worked and took care of a family. Friedan argues that women are as capable as men and can follow any career path. She asserts that restrictive laws and narrow social views were responsible for the limits on women’s lives rather than any inherent weakness or incapacity and that women could find personal fulfillment outside of their traditional role as homemakers. The book became a best seller, is credited with launching the contemporary feminist movement, and became the catalyst for the passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In 1966 Friedan helped found NOW, serving as its first president until 1970. Under her leadership NOW lobbied for equal legal status for men and women. Among the organization’s successes were a 1967 executive order extending affirmative action to women and an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruling that sex-segregated employment advertising was illegal. NOW was the first national organization to support abortion rights (Friedan was a cofounder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws in 1968) and the Equal Rights Amendment. The August 26, 1970, Women’s Strike for Equality, organized by NOW, culminated with a march on Fifth Avenue in New York City where more than fifty thousand participated. The following year, Friedan helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus. The National Women’s Political Caucus was intended to be a vehicle for women who wanted to work within the traditional political structure to increase the participation of women in politics. In 1973 she helped found and was a director of the First Women’s Bank and Trust.

While lauded for her work in the women’s movement, Friedan was criticized by some for focusing on the concerns of white, middle-class, married women while ignoring the issues of the poor, minorities, and lesbians. During the 1970s Friedan left NOW, claiming that the organization devoted too many resources to lesbian issues, which she believed was a private issue and not a women’s rights issue, and that many feminists hated men. In 1977 she attended the National Women’s Conference and supported a resolution on lesbian rights.

Friedan wrote five more books: It Changed My Life (1976), a collection of essays; The Second Stage (1981), in which she dealt with the issues of women attempting to balance the demands of career and home in the “post-feminist” age; The Fountain of Age (1993), which examined the challenges faced by older women; Beyond Gender: The New Politics of Work and Family (1997), which focused on economic justice; and Life So Far (2000), a memoir.

Friedan taught as a visiting professor at several universities and was also associated with the Institute for Women and Work at Cornell University where she was the director of the New Paradigm Program.

Bibliography:

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton, 2001.
Life So Far. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.
Hennessee, Judith. Betty Friedan: Her Life. New York: Random House, 1999.
Horowitz, Daniel. Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.
Oliver, Susan. Betty Friedan: The Personal Is Political. New York: Pearson Longman, 2008.
Sherman, Janann, ed. Interviews with Betty Friedan. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002.
Tong, Rosemarie. Feminist Thought. Boulder, Colo.:Westview, 1998.