Betty Friedan Started A Revolution — And We’re Still Not There Yet

WEDNESDAY, FEB 13, 2013 02:15 PM

It's been 50 years since "The Feminine Mystique" came out, and we are still feeling the pressure to "have it all"

By Mary Elizabeth Williams



(Credit: AP/Steven Senne/Salon)


Middle age is not generous to females. A man in his sixth decade can, like Alec Baldwin just this week did, proudly announce imminent parenthood with one’s yoga instructor spouse. He can be a George Clooney, appearing on magazine covers looking like the guy every guy wants to be. But for women, it’s different. As Tina Fey once said, “The definition of ‘crazy’ … is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.” And that would generally be sometime soon after 30. But Betty Freidan’s groundbreaking “Feminine Mystique,” which turns 50 this week, is celebrating its milestone by getting a fresh shower of attention — showing both just how remarkably it’s aged and how stunningly topical it still is.

Friedan’s book was a wallop of a tome, a peek behind the placid façade of the happy homemaker and into the dark heart of a seemingly enviable segment of American womanhood. Educated women, with their nice families and pretty homes, Friedan revealed, weren’t fulfilled by staying at home and waxing their floors. They needed more. And by starting the conversation about that need, by making it OK for women to want something else, Friedan helped start a revolution.

It has been a long time since I first read “The Feminine Mystique” as a bright-eyed young “feminazi,” checking off her required list of important authors: Susan Brownmiller, Kate Millet, Adrienne Rich, Barbara Ehrenreich. Then, Friedan’s searing look at the previously unexpressed pain of American women seemed like a relic of another era. I, after all, had grown up in a world of Gloria Steinem and Mary Richards. In my lifetime, women had gained the legal right to abortion and to go to West Point. I came of age as Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf were reinventing the concept of feminism, yet again, for Generation X. I had opportunities – educationally, vocationally, sexually — that my grandmother’s generation never dreamed possible. And yet today, years later, I come back to Friedan’s book as a working mother. I understand in a very different way the howl of frustration that she articulated so poignantly. And I think, Holy crap, this is our lives right now — and then some.

Friedan wrote the book because “no magazine would publish” it as an article. Just last week, after inviting feminist writer Kristine Holmgren to blog for them, Beliefnet told her they were“concerned about the negative connotation that our readers may associate with the word ‘feminism’” — and asked her not to use it.

Friedan famously identified “the problem that has no name” — the unhappiness and lack of fulfillment that came from the relentless pressure on women to conform to a narrow and limiting feminine ideal. Then, it was about being a traditional housewife. Now, the challenge we face is that we’re expected to somehow “have it all,” an insidious and unwinnable concept – while simultaneously being undermined on every single front.

Today, many of us have enviable careers – a fact we apologetically explain by quantifying our professional successes and making sure we repeat, over and over, that our first, best and most important job is as a mother. We wage “mommy wars” that pit stay-at-home mothers against working ones. We second-guess women for wanting to return to work after having kids but we’re disdainful of those who stay home too long. We fetishize Martha Stewart–level domestic perfection, pinning our cake-decorating inspirations on Pinterest – while simultaneously aspiring to attain the now all but required bikini-hot, post-baby MILF status. And hoo boy do wedenigrate women who opt out of motherhood entirely. I don’t know about you, but there are days when I think that if all I had to do to be considered doing right by my sex was put on a crinoline, vacuum the rug and make somebody a martini, I would have it easy.

Feminism opened a million new doors, but our cultural anxiety about and animosity toward women swept right in to create new wormholes of dread just beyond them. We have gained so much, and yet we struggle mightily with all the guilt and pressure that have come with every one of those victories. Five full decades after Friedan sent out the rallying cry for us to be seen as more than just wives and mothers, our president refers to “our wives, mothers and daughters” when addressing the nation as if, when he speaks to the American people, he’s not speaking to wives, mothers and daughters. It’s been 50 years of hard-won battles and gains for women, 50 years of fighting to write for ourselves our place in American culture. So how much has changed since Friedan sent out a flare called “The Feminine Mystique”? Everything. And nothing. And our definition of what it means to be a woman didn’t get easier — it just got impossibly broader.


Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub.

Peoria Honors Favorite Daughter Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan, founder of N.O.W. and author of the Feminine Mystique, responds to questions about the energy crisis and it's effect on women. (photo by Howard D. Simmons 2/16/74) office at 37 s. Wabash

Betty Friedan was a product of Peoria, where a program honoring her life will be held at the Peoria Riverfront Museum on Feb. 19. Called “It Changed My Life,” after one of Friedan’s lesser-known books, six or seven local women will speak on how “The Feminine Mystique” and the women’s movement changed their lives.

Barbara Mantz Drake, 67, former editorial page editor for the Peoria Journal Star and a member of the Betty Friedan Hometown Tribute group, interviewed Friedan in 1999. She thinks Friedan’s legacy is largely unknown to young women today, including those living in Peoria. In the 1990s, she went to speak to a class at Peoria High School about its alumnus Friedan, who died in 2006.

“I was stunned to learn only two of them knew who she was, and none of them knew that she had gone to high school there,” Drake said. “That began a crusade at the newspaper to get her better known and to establish a museum that would recognize the contributions of Peorians like her.”Drake said she is “constantly stunned by the number of young women I’ve met who don’t know who Betty Friedan is.”“I think that young women don’t know enough about how it used to be,” she said. “When I tell a couple of stories about how it was when I was young, you can see people’s mouths drop open. They find it hard to believe.”Still, she said she had a hard time believing Friedan’s book when she read it as a college freshman.“I remember thinking this can’t be true, all these opportunities that were closed to women,” she said. “I just refused to believe it.”
February 7, 2013 4:50PM By Kara Spak

Mary Ann Lupa and Kathy Rand, VFA board members, interviewed about Betty Friedan by Chicago Sun Times

'The Feminine Mystique’ turns 50

By Kara Spak Staff Reporter kspak@suntimes.com February 7, 2013 4:54PM

Before women were allowed on the front lines or in the boardroom, before the words feminist and feminazi, before the idea of equal pay for equal work or work-life balance, there was “The Feminine Mystique.”

The book by Peoria-raised Betty Friedan turns 50 years old this month, a landmark anniversary for the premise that housewives might just be unhappy because they weren’t allowed access to intellectually fulfilling jobs.

Friedan famously called it the “problem that had no name,” writing “Each suburban wife struggled with it alone as she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night. She was afraid to even ask of herself the silent question: Is this all?”

Both credited and blamed with kicking off the women’s movement, Friedan’s book wasn’t specifically a call to arms. Though the author would go on to found the National Organization for Women, “The Feminine Mystique” was directed at a generation of women who married upwardly mobile World War II veterans, a legion of “Mad Men’s” Betty Drapers.

If these women complained of discontent, it wasn’t uncommon for a doctor to diagnose them with “housewives’ syndrome,” a malaise where shopping was considered a legitimate cure.

The book’s most consistent criticism hasn’t changed in five decades — that Friedan ignored the issues of working-class and minority women. Still, despite what some believe is too narrow a focus, one look at the gender makeup in virtually any American office is a testament to the book’s lasting impact.

“It really did change everything,” said Kathy Rand, a Lake Forest resident who is a member of the Veteran Feminists of America, a group dedicated to preserving the history of second-wave feminism, the women’s movement that started in the 1960s. “I don’t think you can estimate the impact that it had.”

Rand, now 67, was a single working gal active in the women’s movement when she read “The Feminine Mystique.”

“I couldn’t relate to not being able to have a job,” she said. Still, Friedan’s message of equality rang true, and on Aug. 26, 1970, Rand joined thousands of women in Daley Plaza for a “Strike for Equality” commemorating the 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage.

Throughout the United States, housewives were asked to head downtown instead of into the laundry room. Working women skipped their lunch break to rally around the theme “Don’t Iron While the Strike Is Hot.”

“I was overwhelmed by this whole thing,” Rand said. “That day changed my life.”

Mary-Ann Lupa, a 70-year-old Portage Park resident, was one of the organizers of the Chicago strike, which Friedan had called for at a NOW conference in Chicago in March 1970.

“I wasn’t sure anybody was going to show up,” Lupa said. “[Friedan] was a great visionary. Besides her having the high intellect that allowed her to write the book, she had a tremendous vision of what women could be. It was in her heart, both intellectual and emotional.”

Before women were allowed on the front lines or in the boardroom, before the words feminist and feminazi, before the idea of equal pay for equal work or work-life balance, there was “The Feminine Mystique.” The book by Betty Friedan turns 50 this month, a landmark anniversary for the premise that housewives might just be unhappy because they weren’t allowed access to intellectually fulfilling jobs.

Melissa Harris Perry on 50 Years Since The Feminine Mystique

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE7Etdjdxro&list=PLMb4lAwWMuPpGnsa88uQp5P0DxITdWDE0 Melissa Harris Perry on 50 yrs. since the Feminine Mystique. Also a good interview w/ Stephanie Coontz. 

Mary-Ann Lupa

Presentation of 1997 ASJA Career Achievement Award to Betty Friedan

The following is a copy of the remarks I made when presenting the Career Achievement Award from the American Society of Journalists & Authors (ASJA) to Betty in 1997

Almost 35 years ago, in 1963, I was a young mother with three small daughters. My life plan had always been to be a full-time wife and mother until all the girls were in school all day. And then I would pursue my dreams. But now my baby was only 18 months old, and I didn’t think I could keep my life on hold for five more years without going crazy. I thought my restlessness was my problem.
            And then I read a book that changed my life. That same book changed the lives of millions of other women, too, as we received powerful, ringing confirmation that our feelings of alienation and frustration were not a repudiation of our womanhood, but an affirmation of our personhood. The writer of that book hadn’t started out to write it. As a highly successful freelancer, she had expected one of the major magazines in which her articles regularly appeared to publish her finding that an entire generation of women were feeling unfulfilled doing what women were supposed to do – take care of their homes, their children, and their husbands, while those same husbands were out in the world working at the jobs they had been educated for. But every one of the major women’s magazine editors – all of whom were men – refused to publish her findings. They said, “This is not where American women are today.” She knew better. So what was a writer to do?
            This writer wouldn’t be silenced. Instead, she expanded and interpreted her research and in so doing gave millions of women a voice that heralded a worldwide revolution. The book, of course, was The Feminine Mystique and the writer was ASJA member Betty Friedan, whose career exemplifies the criteria for ASJA’s Career Achievement Award.
            Betty is the ultimate exemplar of the power of the pen to change individual lives, and to bring about broad, sweeping changes in an entire society, so that the world my daughters are living in today is a different one from the world that existed before The Feminine Mystique was published. Based on the overwhelming response to her book, Betty built on the ideas and the determination it inspired, and
three years later, in 1966, founded the most influential organization in the women’s movement, the National Organization for Women. She became its first president, and then went on
to organize Women’s Strike for Equality,
to convene the National Women’s Political Caucus,
to serve as a delegate to both White House and United Nations conferences on women and the family,
and to have a long personal audience with the Pope. Or maybe he had the audience with her?
 She has lectured and taught all over the world, raising the consciousness of college students and adults in all walks of life. But at her roots – besides being a social activist, an academic, a mother, and a grandmother – Betty has always been and continues to be a writer.
She went on to write about the ramifications of the women’s movement in magazine articles and in two other books charting important developments in the movement:
It Changed My Life reported on feminism’s effects on women around the world; and
The Second Stage acknowledged the importance of women’s relationships with men, children, and other significant others in their lives.
 Betty then went on to pursue another highly controversial topic, the pervasive attitudes equating old age with physical and mental breakdown. Drawing on her extensive research, as well as her own life experiences, she wrote The Fountain of Age. This landmark book, published in 1993, persuasively demonstrates that “aging is not ‘lost youth’ but a new stage of opportunity and strength.”

Betty Friedan has received numerous honorary doctorates of humane letters and law. She has been named on list after list of the most influential people of the twentieth century. It gives me great pleasure to add to the many awards and honors she has received by bestowing upon her the American Society of Journalists and Authors Career Achievement Award. Betty, we’re proud you’re one of us!

Sally Wendkos Olds
---------------------
Epilogue after Betty's death in 2006:

With Betty Friedan's death on February 4 at the age of 85, she has received one encomium after another in the media, in recognition that she was one of the most important people of our time. Her momentous influence stemmed from The Feminine Mystique, according to The New York Times "widely regarded as one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century." The Times also wrote, "Rarely has a single book been responsible for such sweeping, tumultuous and continuing social transformation." By the year 2000 Mystique had sold more than three million copies and has been translated into many different languages. For those members who were too young to have read it earlier, I urge you to pick it up now -- it's a great read and it offers an important window into the history of America 's women.
    From the lengthy obituaries marking Betty's extraordinary accomplishments, I learned more about Betty's life pre-ASJA -- actually, pre the Society of Magazine Writers (SMW), as we were known when the Society was formed in 1948. A fellowship recipient at the University of  California , Berkeley , she studied psychology with Erik Erikson, an interest that showed in her writing, and especially in her seminal work, The Feminine Mystique. She got her start as an editor in labor movement publications, and then went on to her successful freelance career. She joined SMW in 1954 and remained a member until 2000. Her last book, a memoir titled Life So Far, was published that year.
    Betty was far from a one-note singer. According to her good friend TV journalist Marlene Sanders, "Friedan was more than a spokesperson for change. She cared deeply about her three children, and later her grandchildren, and in later years preferred talking about them more than about feminism." I'm even happier now than I was in 1997 that ASJA conferred our Career Achievement Award on Betty, so that while this great woman was still alive she could enjoy receiving the most meaningful tribute for a writer -- the praise of her peers.

A Younger Feminist’s Reflection on The Feminine Mystique

By Erin Matson

“The only way for a woman, or a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own. There is no other way.” – Betty Friedan

It’s been fifty years since Betty Friedan wrote the The Feminine Mystique. How much has changed. How much remains the same.

Sexism is as foundational to society as it was during the Mad Men era that drove Betty Draper and Betty Friedan mad, if you ask me. The major difference is that people don’t smoke inside, and like colors and hemlines and shag carpets, oh the styles of expression are different.

For-men-only employment ads have jumped over to the lifestyle section of the newspaper, where you see presumed for-women-only feature articles about that ever-elusive “work/life balance.”

(Put no paid parenting leave; no childcare support; and no legal guarantee that you won’t get fired for asking what your coworkers are getting paid on a see-saw: Somehow it always seems to be the women dragged to the ground while men sit on top of Fortune 500 companies, law partnerships, and corporate boards almost totally by themselves. Most “work/life balance” experts say a super pink, super non-structural self-help approach will solve it, no government required! What a sexist joke.)

Only yesterday The New York Times published a column about “pro-life feminism,” in which a man sympathetic to the anti-human rights movement bringing you comparisons of pregnant women to farm animals, bills suggesting that women raped who have abortions be prosecuted for “tampering with evidence” and men-only congressional panels comparing the availability of birth control to choosing a place to go for lunch – a man sympathetic to all of that suggested that feminism be reformed. I beg your pardon.

But of course, the world has changed drastically since The Feminine Mystique, just look! Last week they said women would no longer be barred from combat, and daughters expect equality as do sons. Living up to the expectation of equality, and securing justice for those many experiences outside the realm of wealthy white men, has proved to be the continuing problem for the women’s movement to tackle.

Betty Friedan and her book, to say nothing of the first organization she founded, the National Organization for Women, have had outsize impact on my life as a feminist organizer.

I never knew Friedan personally, saw her across a room at a conference when I was an intern, and, you know, by then the women’s movement was so professionalized interns paid money in the form of tuition to get course credit for working free at the registration table.

When she died on a weekend in February 2006, I was in the National Organization for Women office chairing a meeting of the Young Feminist Task Force. I remember leading a moment of silence and thinking to myself what a profound responsibility I was accepting then, right then, to take the leadership required to help move feminism forward in a new way. I have never lost that feeling.

A few months ago, I decided taking meaningful leadership – contributing the most I have to give – meant leaving a big title in the big organization Friedan started. One of the key factors in my decision was realizing how many people, especially young people, were looking to me as an example of what was possible both in society and for their own lives. Believing in you, as I do, ultimately meant demonstrating I believe in myself and our power to create a better world.

I believe it is within our power to end sexism. I also believe getting there requires taking personal, interpersonal and structural risks. It requires acknowledging uncomfortable truths and working to change them. I believe younger people should define feminism for themselves and help lead the way forward. And while I am profoundly grateful for feminism and feminists of the past, I couldn’t be prouder to set this example. This is not an end. I am only getting started.

What would Friedan say about this? Honestly, I have no idea. As for me, I continue to take considerable inspiration from her legacy and The Feminine Mystique.
Gail Collins, a feminist of a different generation than myself, wrote a beautiful piece on ‘The Feminine Mystique’ at 50. In it, she pointed out more often the book is commented on for what it left out (basically anyone who wasn’t an upper middle class heterosexual white woman), rather than what it was (a piercingly accurate description of the waste of women like Betty).

Strangely enough, the waves of reaction in feminist thought went a bit too far in the other direction, in my opinion, when it became imperative for the incarnation of the women’s movement that followed The Feminine Mystique to speak declaratively “for all women” as if that was somehow possible to do really well. In my experience, people can speak profoundly well for themselves, and do both themselves and others a disservice when they try to speak for everyone else at the same time.

You cannot homogenize diversity, nor is it wise to try. It is the diversity that is the strength. It is the diversity that is the beautiful part. In encouraging diverse people to speak and lead for themselves (and having others listen and add their experience, not to change what the speaker said, but to speak and lead for themselves in the pursuit of an equality to be achievable in common by all) we can move the needle closer to justice. Modern feminism is already doing this all over the Internet.This is my experience and I deserve to be heard. That is your experience and you deserve to be heard. I know we can do better. We can be more than this. Let’s take a risk and organize something totally new and spectacular. It is very exciting, and dare I argue, a very inclusive expression of what Betty Friedan could have helped to kick off had her slice of reality, The Feminine Mystique, been published today.


Erin Matson is a VFA and Bridge Project member.

Originally published at http://erintothemax.com/2013/01/28/a-younger-feminists-reflection-on-the-feminine-mystique/

The Feminine Mystique at 50

By Gail Collins, Published January 23, 2013

Every writer yearns to create a book that will seize the moment — to perfectly encapsulate the problem of an era before other people even notice the problem exists. Of course, that almost never happens. Mostly we’re happy if we can manage to explain, in an interesting way, something people already know is going on. But Betty Friedan won the gold ring. When “The Feminine Mystique” emerged in 1963, it created a reaction so intense that Friedan could later write another book about the things women said to her about the first one (“It Changed My Life”). If there’s a list of the most important books of the 20th century, “The Feminine Mystique” is on it. It also made one conservative magazine’s exclusive roundup of the “10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries,” which if not flattering is at least a testimony to the wallop it packed.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 27, 2013, on page MM42 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: ‘At a Time When Women Can Be Free, Finally, To Move On to Something More’.

We’re still reading it today. In “A Strange Stirring,” her book about “The Feminine Mystique” and its impact, Stephanie Coontz writes that her students “responded viscerally” to chapters like “The Sexual Sell” that spoke to their own feelings of being under pressure to buy consumer goods and “to present themselves as objects to be consumed.” And of course, if you want to understand what has happened to American women over the last half-century, their extraordinary journey from Doris Day to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and beyond, you have to start with this book.

Critics — and many fans — feel obliged to point out the things that “The Feminine Mystique” ignores, and they are right to be a bit flummoxed that although Friedan was writing during the civil rights movement, she barely mentions African-American women. Working-class women make their appearance mainly in a few suggestions that married women who want to work might want to hire a housekeeper or a nanny. Remarkably, Friedan managed to write a whole book indicting American society for its attitudes toward women without discussing its laws. In 1963, most women weren’t able to get credit without a male co-signer. In some states they couldn’t sit on juries; in others, their husbands had control not only of their property but also of their earnings. Although Friedan obsesses about women getting jobs, she does not mention that newspapers were allowed to divide their help-wanted ads into categories for men and women, or that it was perfectly legal for an employer to announce that certain jobs were for men only. Even the federal government did it.

In a strange way, all those deficits are the book’s strength. “The Feminine Mystique” is a very specific cry of rage about the way intelligent, well-educated women were kept out of the mainstream of American professional life and regarded as little more than a set of reproductive organs in heels. It is supremely, specifically personal, and that’s what gives it such gut-punching power. Friedan dropped out of her postgraduate studies because, she said, her academic success was threatening to her boyfriend. She was furious about the way the female college students of the next generation had been programmed to regard getting an MRS. degree as the be-all and end-all of their experience in higher education. She was enraged by the way the psychiatric profession regarded housewives’ unhappiness as a symptom of an out-of-whack libido. She was angry at the way the economy appeared to see her entire sex as simple consumption machines who built national prosperity by buying new appliances for the kitchen and searching madly for the perfect laundry detergent.

And don’t get her started on women’s magazines. Friedan wrote for them, and she piles up one astonishingly awful example of the selling of the feminine mystique after another. There’s one short story about a young woman who planned to “be something,” then married, wore out six copies of Dr. Spock’s child-care book and wound up declaiming: “I’m lucky! Lucky! I’M SO GLAD TO BE A WOMAN!” You really can envision the team from the mental hospital strapping her to a gurney.

The postwar suburbs were either heaven or hell for their inhabitants — endless stretches of brand-new houses on quarter-acre lots, occupied, during weekday hours, entirely by women and children. I grew up in one in Cincinnati, where the dads drove off to work every morning in what was then the only family car, leaving behind a land in which the only adult males were Tommy the milkman and Art, who drove an old bus outfitted with shelves of groceries that he sold to the stranded housewives. The moms were busy, mainly with the several small kids, but they were not overworked. The high point of the day came at 4 or 5, when the chores were done, dinner was in the oven and the women could congregate in someone’s kitchen or on the back porch to drink and talk. In our house at least, that was followed by my father’s arrival and a second cocktail hour, during which my parents discussed their day while the older children took the younger ones for endless walks in the stroller. Perhaps the only way Friedan’s household resembled mine was in the drinking.

In “The Feminine Mystique,” Friedan tried to portray herself as the typical middle-class housewife of the early ’60s. But really, the Smith graduate who worked for a series of left-wing and union newspapers in Manhattan before matrimony and motherhood was no such thing. She was from a smaller cadre of women who went to college holding two self-images simultaneously: the future stay-at-home housewife and the serious student who cared about grades and reading lists and serious discussions, who took the same courses as the men — or who, like Friedan, went to Smith and presumed her courses were actually harder. Then she was off to graduate school until the boy she was dating took her for a walk in the Berkeley hills and said, “Nothing can come of this, between us. Because I’ll never win a fellowship like yours.” Friedan gave up her academic career, came East and “lived in the present, working on newspapers with no particular plan. I married, had children, lived according to the feminine mystique as a suburban housewife.”

Did that really happen? Did that one remark from a jealous suitor really send Friedan off to New York and marriage to an entirely different man? It doesn’t actually matter. What matters is that as a housewife — even one who kept writing freelance magazine articles on the side — Friedan was bored out of her mind. The difference between her era and the past, she understood, was that the nature of housework had changed when Americans moved from the farm to the cities, and then the suburbs. The farm wife had a crucial economic role in the family, which depended on her to manufacture the clothes, the soap, the candles and the cheese; to grow the vegetables and raise the chickens; and to participate in the informal housewife economy where she could trade the things she made for other vital family supplies.

The suburban housewife had no economic point at all, and modern appliances had stripped her of most of the time-consuming chores of the past as well. A woman’s sense of self, Friedan wrote, “once rested on necessary work and achievement in the home.” But that vanished in an era when housework “is no longer really necessary or really uses much ability — in a country and at a time when women can be free, finally, to move on to something more.”

Friedan’s analysis of what was bothering her turned into “The Feminine Mystique.” And when it hit the stands, women who were feeling bored and trapped by their perfect homes and marriages picked up the book and mentally repositioned themselves in the world. “Some of the women were outraged that ‘The Feminine Mystique’ placed their choices into question, and others, like myself, felt at last they had been understood,” said Madeleine Kunin, who argued about it at her book club in Cambridge, Mass., where she was the wife of a medical student. Kunin later rejoined the working world herself. Like Friedan, she overachieved, and eventually she became governor of Vermont.

As far as I know, none of the moms in my neighborhood read “The Feminine Mystique.” If they ever questioned their choices, it was later, when an inherent flaw became apparent in the ideal suburban lifestyle that was celebrated in all those women’s magazines that drove Friedan nuts. The feminine mystique was built around the central feminine role as mother, but the first generation of suburbanites had their babies young, and the children were grown and gone while their role-deprived moms were still in the primes of their lives. We looked back from our new homes at college dorms and understood that this was an emptiness we had to protect ourselves against. Later, when we got our late-arriving hands on “The Feminine Mystique,” it was an aha! moment. Friedan’s obsession about having a career — the one answer she seemed to grab at for every single problem — made perfect sense.

“The Feminine Mystique” became the kind of best seller that defines an author’s life. In 1966, Friedan was researching another book in Washington when she wound up at a conference of state commissions on the status of women, where attendees were angry over the fact that the federal government had made it clear it had no intention of enforcing a law against job discrimination on the basis of sex that was included in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. (This is a good time to point out that “The Feminine Mystique” did not create the women’s rights movement. Those commissions on the status of women were started by the Kennedy administration before the book was published, and the Civil Rights Act was being debated in Congress while American housewives were still just starting to pass Friedan’s book around.)

It was in Friedan’s hotel room that the angry conference-goers met to discuss what they should do when the Johnson administration showed no interest in pursuing the issue. (Friedan was universally known as a difficult personality, and at one point she locked herself in the bathroom and told everyone to go home, but no one did.) The next day, it was Friedan’s coterie that angrily passed around notes at lunch, creating, on the spot, the National Organization for Women, which Friedan would head. It would be NOW, under Friedan, that would file suits on behalf of exactly the kind of average, unglamorous, working women that “The Feminine Mystique” is always criticized for ignoring. And in 1970, it was Friedan who called for the great march to celebrate the 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage, creating a mass turnout in cities around the country that would drive home to the nation exactly how determined women were to transform their lives and their society. In New York, the marchers were denied a parade permit for Fifth Avenue and were told to keep to the sidewalks. Friedan, at the head of the pack, took the lead again. “There was no way we were about to walk down Fifth Avenue in a little thin line,” she wrote later. “I waved my arms over my head and yelled, ‘Take to the streets!’ What a moment that was.”

Excerpted from the introduction to the 50th-anniversary edition of “The Feminine Mystique,” by Betty Friedan, to be published next month by W.W. Norton & Company.