Friedan, Betty

FRIEDAN, BETTY (1921-2006). Along with historians Eleanor Flexner and Gerda Lerner, Friedan provides a crucial link between Popular Front feminism of the late 1930s and early 1940s and Second Wave feminism of the 1960s. As Bettye Goldstein, she grew up in a relatively prosperous Jewish family in Peoria, Illinois, before going off to Smith College in the fall of 1938. Especially in her junior and senior years there, as a psychology major, journalist, and activist she became radicalized around issues such as anti-fascism and the rights of workers. On her birthday during her junior year, Goldstein carefully took notes as she listened to a lecture by the radical economist Dorothy Wolff Douglas on conditions women faced in Nazi Germany, a lecture whose central themes would be central to what as Betty Friedan she would write in The Feminine Mystique (1963). Goldstein spent the summer between her junior and senior years at the Highlander Folk School. In her final years at Smith, she passionately advocated anti-fascism, unionization of campus workers, equality for women, and progressive psychology.

She spent 1942-43 as a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, where the Communist Party rejected her application for membership, apparently because its leaders thought the Party had too many intellectuals and not enough workers. While there she participated in a study group whose members worked to bring together Marxism and psychology; its convener was Ralph Gundlach who was later fired from his position at the University of Washington. At Berkley Goldstein was romantically involved with David Bohm, a student of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who like Gundlach lost his academic position as McCarthyism took hold of American universities.

She then moved to Manhattan where from 1943 until 1952 she was Popular Front labor journalist. From 1943-46, she wrote for Federated Press where she wrote articles in which she called for justice for Jews, women, and African Americans; denounced what she saw as a conspiracy by big business to undermine progressive change; and opposed the unravelling of the United States-Soviet wartime alliance. She then became a writer for UE News, the publication of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine of America, a union expelled from the CIO because of the prominence of members of the Communist Party among its rank-and-file and its leaders. While at the UE News, she experienced the power of McCarthyism and continued her fight for women’s rights. In 1952, she authored a pamphlet, UE Fights for Women Workers, in which she celebrated how the UE fought valiantly against greedy corporations that sought to increase their profits by exploiting women. As part of her advocacy of an egalitarian workplace, she called for equal pay for equal work and highlighted what she called the “double bars” of being female and African American.

In 1946, she married Carl Friedan; moved first to the United Nations-sponsored community in Queens; and then to suburban New York where she worked as a free lance journalist, this time writing articles for popular women’s magazines. Among the ones that she drafted or considered but could not get published were attacks on McCarthyism, challenges to the picture of America as a homogenous society, and those that emphasized class and race. What she could get into print did offer a critique, albeit a muted one, of the conformity of suburban life in the 1950s.

Probably because she knew so well the costs of McCarthyism, by the time she began to work on her pathbreaking The Feminist Mystique, she had to hide and perhaps even reconsider the how her radical experiences from 1940 to 1953 shaped her feminism. She also decided to claim she knew nothing of feminism until she came to experience women’s suburban captivity. Nonetheless, that book played a major role in the emergence and shaping of Second Wave feminism. Even though she had earlier chronicled the struggles of working-class women and women of color and emphasized the importance of insurgent activism, she now focused on middle-class suburban ones and offered cautiously circumscribed changes. Yet the publication and impact of The Feminine Mystique transformed Friedan’s life and the lives millions of others. In 1966 she served as a co-founder and president of National Organization for Women, the first of several major political organizations she helped found and lead. Friedan’s publication of The Second Stage (1981); her focus on straight, white, middle-class women; and her move away from radicalism placed her in an often controversial relationship with American feminists. This happened even as her 1963 book remained important historically and she herself continued to remain an important public figure.

Evans, Sara M. Tidal Wave: How Women Changes America at Century’s End. New York, N.Y.: Free Press, 2003.

Freedman, Estelle B. No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women. New York, N.Y.; Ballantine, 2003.

Horowitz, Daniel. Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique. Amherst: Mass.: University of Massachsetts Press, 1998.

Horowitz, Daniel. “Feminism, Women’s History, and American Social Thought at Midcentury,” in American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein. Philadelphia, Penn: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, pp. 191-209.

Rosen, Ruth.The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York, N.Y.: Viking Penguin, 2000.

Weigand, Kate. Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Papers of Betty Friedan, Research Guide. The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.