Betty Friedan
Betty Friedan was an American feminist and writer known for her influential book "The Feminine Mystique," which sparked the second-wave feminist movement in the United States. She co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) and advocated for women's rights and gender equality. Friedan's work challenged traditional gender roles and played a significant role in shaping feminist discourse and activism.
7 Key excerpts on "Betty Friedan"
eBook - ePubFaces Of Feminism
An Activist's Reflections On The Women's Movement
- Sheila Tobias(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Once she had answers to her satisfaction, she began promoting her ideas. And the consequences were enormous. A population of women that had been virtually depoliticized was made to look again at the choices it had made, this time in political terms. Her analysis became part of the dogma and one of the founding themes of the second wave, and her energy, as promoter and later cofounder and first president of the National Organization for Women, gave the movement its first victories in the legislative arena. Thus, Betty Friedan is crucial to a certain class of women who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s and not just because she wrote a book that many women read and were moved by. 8 Her analysis actually changed the course of American women's history, first by identifying a phenomenon—the feminine mystique—no one had previously isolated or described, then by providing an analysis of how such a set of beliefs came into being, and finally, by giving the feminine mystique a limited place in history. I personally responded to being of the second sex by leaving the country after graduation from college. In 1963, I had just returned and was trying to figure out why I was not more successful either as a journalist or as a graduate student. For me, reading The Feminine Mystique, handed to me by my mother in summer 1963, only a month or so after Judith Saidel had discovered the book on her reading list at Wellesley, the message was loud and clear: The set of beliefs that had begun in the aftermath of World War II and held sway while I was a college student did not have to be. Betty Friedan's book would change my life, too. The Story of the Book As is often the case with germinal thinkers, Betty Friedan did not set out to write The Feminine Mystique but simply to collect some survey data about her graduating class of 1942, which had left college in the middle of World War II. The occasion for her report was the class's fifteenth reunion...
eBook - ePub- Jean Spence, Sarah Aiston, Maureen M. Meikle, Jean Spence, Sarah Aiston, Maureen M. Meikle(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...A popular press published Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and the U.S. Government released the report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, a group chartered two years earlier by John F. Kennedy. 5 Friedan’s blockbuster became central in the women’s movement of the later 1960s and beyond; in fact, The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the movement. American Women: The Report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women was well-read at the time, but has since assumed prominence as a benchmark, the first national study of women’s concerns. In fact, many readers today imagine American Women as a much more feminist analysis than it actually is. 6 Although different in many ways, these two books highlight issues faced by those thinking about women in the early 1960s. Ultimately, they offer different analyses, different approaches to activism, and different solutions for women’s concerns; yet each captures the challenges and thinking of an era that found no clear answers for how to support women. In 1963, it was hardly clear whether the future would proceed along the same path, or go in the new directions Friedan was hailing. Following a brief outline of key differences and similarities in the two books, this chapter will examine each volume in turn, explicating two themes. The first is that, although a post-feminist perspective may imagine Friedan as better capturing the era, a closer examination suggests that the presidential commission actually represented a truer picture of female agency—and its limits—in 1963. Although Friedan’s bold call for personal agency and collective action eventually characterised a later era, the President’s Commission more accurately shows well-intentioned thinkers caught in the period’s delicate balancing act between women’s personal choice and public change. In the early 1960s, Friedan’s boisterous feminism proved too risky for many women, on either the private or public level...
eBook - ePubProtest Nation
Words That Inspired a Century of American Radicalism
- Timothy Patrick McCarthy, John McMillian, Timothy Patrick McCarthy, John McMillian(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- The New Press(Publisher)
...12. Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique (1963) Betty Friedan ’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with reviving organized modern feminism. Friedan (1921–2006) was educated at Smith College and the University of California at Berkeley. In 1966 she founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), and she served as president of that organization until 1970. She also helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971. In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan argued against the widely held belief that women could find fulfillment only through childbearing, mothering, and homemaking. Beneath the 1950s image of the “happy suburban housewife,” Friedan found a great deal of discontentment. The Feminine Mystique was enormously well-received by millions of quietly desperate housewives, and as a result, Friedan has been called the “Susan B. Anthony of a newly revitalized women’s movement.” SOURCE: Betty Friedan. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1963. SELECTED READINGS: Betty Friedan, Life So Far (2000). Judith Adler Hennessee, Betty Friedan: Her Life (1999). Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (1989). Chapter 1 “The Problem That Has No Name” Gradually, I came to realize that something is wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives today. I sensed it first, as a question mark in my own life, as a wife and mother of three small children, half-guiltily and half-heartedly using my abilities and education that took me away from home. It was this personal question mark that led me in 1957 to my college classmates, fifteen years after our graduation from Smith. The problems and satisfaction of their lives and mine did not fit the image of the modern American woman written about in magazines [and] studied in classrooms and clinics...
eBook - ePubWriting Feminist Lives
The Biographical Battles over Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, and Simone de Beauvoir
- Malin Lidström Brock(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...Friedan argues that “the only thing that has changed so far is our own consciousness…What we need is a political movement,” thereby distancing herself from a radical feminist politics that emphasizes consciousness-raising as a significant political strategy. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 382. 24 Ibid., 374. 25 Ibid., 384–385. 26 Ibid., 384–385. 27 Ibid., 385, 386. 28 Ibid., 385. 29 For instance, see Friedan’s obituary in the New York Times. Margalit Fox, “Betty Friedan, Who Ignited Cause in ‘Feminine Mystique,’ Dies at 85,” NYTimes.com, February 5, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/national/05friedan.html?ex=1296795600&en=30472e5004a66ea3&ei=5090. 30 Betty Friedan, Life So Far: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 31 In her autobiography, Friedan states that “I never intended to write a memoir of my so-called life…But my hand was forced, really, when my family, friends and colleagues, past and present, told me a few years ago that they were being contacted for interviews for books other people were writing about my life. Well, really” (Friedan’s italics). Friedan, Life So Far, 13. These words allow for an interpretation of Friedan’s 2000 autobiography as a form of “self-defense,” where she strives to re-establish both her politics and the “authority” over her life story through a full-length, coherent and chronological narrative. On biography as self-defense, see also Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject, 179. See also Larsson, Sanning och konsekvens, 116. 32 Edel, Writing Lives, 174. 33 Ibid., 175. 34 Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 69–70. Friedan refers briefly to this “moment” also in her essay collection. Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement (1976; repr. New York: Harvard University Press, 1998), 5. 35 Horowitz’s source is an earlier biography aimed at young readers. See Justine Blau, Betty Friedan (New York: Chelsea House, 1990). Judith Hennessee quotes Friedan from a newspaper interview...
eBook - ePub- Valerie Bryson(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...In the following decades, feminism based on equal rights arguments was in abeyance (see Chapter4). However, as discussed in Chapter7, the years after the Second World War contained the seeds of the discontents that were to explode in a ‘second wave’ of mass feminist activity in the 1960s. Although this activity had a number of sources and developed rapidly in several very different directions, it began in the United States as an essentially liberal protest against the failure of that society to deliver to women the promises of independence, self-expression and fulfilment that seemed central to the ‘American dream’. By the 1960s, this kind of feminism was not usually expressed as a self-conscious political theory, but as a ‘common sense’ application of pre-existing values to women’s situation. As other feminist theories developed, a somewhat one-sided theoretical debate emerged, with critics of liberal feminism attacking positions that had never been fully articulated and perhaps at times creating and demolishing a liberal feminist ‘straw woman’ who did not really exist. However, uncovering and examining the assumptions behind campaigns and debates is central to the development of effective feminist politics, and the fact that liberal assumptions are often not consciously propounded or defended may indeed make the task more urgent. Betty Friedan and the politics of NOW The clearest and most famous expression of ‘common sense’ liberal feminism is to be found in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (first published 1963; references to the 1986 edition). Friedan argued that, in the United States since the Second World War, earlier feminist dreams of education and independence had been displaced by an all-pervasive ‘feminine mystique’, through which women had been manipulated and persuaded into the belief that their only fulfilment lay in domesticity...
eBook - ePubWhat She Said
The Art of Inspiring Action through Speech
- Monica Lunin(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
...The technique has several benefits. Firstly, you avoid a direct attack on an actual person, which may be dangerous. Secondly, you can craft the counterargument in a way that best suits your persuasive needs. And, most importantly, you whip up the environment of contention, maybe even aggression, to best suit your purpose, style and occasion. Emmeline Pankhurst, it now seems, was not just an instrumental player in the suffragette movement on two continents, she was also an exceptional, highly skilled public speaker. I propose that the women who are doing menial chores in the offices cover their typewriters and close their notebooks, the telephone operators unplug their switchboards, the waitresses stop waiting, cleaning women stop cleaning, and everyone who is doing a job for which a man would be paid more — stop. Betty Friedan Betty Friedan Feminist, writer and activist B: 4 February 1921, Peoria, IL, United States D: 4 February 2006, Washington, D.C., United States Call to women's strike for equality When: 20 March 1970 Where: New York City Audience: Members of the National Organization for Women (NOW) In August 1970, 50 years after American women were awarded the right to vote, Betty Friedan, author of the seminal feminist tome The Feminine Mystique, organised the Women's Strike for Equality to continue the fight. Friedan's initial call for the strike came a few months earlier. On 20 March 1970, Friedan was scheduled to deliver the farewell address to the fourth annual convention of NOW (the National Organization for Women)...
eBook - ePub- Shira Tarrant(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Formation of the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF) marked the inception of second-wave feminism in France, while politically minded groups simultaneously formed in the United States and Britain to raise feminist consciousness, to counter women's subordination, and to fight against inequalities in the law. By 1972, the women of Britain, France, and the United States had fully embarked on the journey into second-wave feminism. The writings of Kate Millett (1969), Shulamith Firestone (1970), Germaine Greer (1970), and Juliet Mitchell (1971), now among the classics of modern feminist theory, were in wide circulation by this time. Several years prior to the upheavals of this new era, Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, and the findings of President John F. Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women, published in 1965, marked a point of demarcation between the postwar years and the more tumultuous Sixties. Between passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the onset of the Women's Liberation Movement, women's experience had largely been academic terra mythologica. The American Woman (1972), William Chafe's book on the social, political, and economic status of U.S. women during the mid-twentieth century, makes clear that not all women unquestioningly embraced the mantle of domesticity. 11 Until the 1980s so little was written about postwar women and postwar feminist theory that Chafe's was an isolated voice in the academic wilderness. More recently, others have joined him in taking note of women's accomplishments and feminist activity in the postwar decades. In Beyond Separate Spheres, Rosalind Rosenberg's research on the intellectual roots of pre-1960s modern feminism (one of the few works on the theoretical dynamics of feminism from this era), the author comments on finding that the principal concern of early twentieth-century feminist-minded intellectuals centered on an understanding of human nature, not political strategy...
