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Born: February 4, 1921 - Peoria, Illinois
| Excerpt from The Feminine Mystique |
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 he problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made 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 ask even of herself the silent question - "Is this all?'"
Link to the work
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Teaching Topics in Social Studies
Betty Friedan formulated her thesis of the American female's emotional malaise in the 1950s when SUBURBANIZATION and the effects of the BABY BOOM
were beginning to have a noticeable impact on American life. Her groundbreaking book The Feminine Mystique, which sold three million copies in a year, is still regarded as a handbook for the FEMINIST movement, and foreshadowed Friedan's own involvement in founding THE NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN and her support of THE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT to the U.S. Constitution.
Teaching Topics in Language Arts
Much of Friedan's work was based on INTERVIEWS with women and immersing herself in SOCIOLOGICAL research
| Scavenger Hunt |
| Name one of the national women's magazines that rejected Betty Friedan's early work from The Feminine Mystique?
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on the role of women in society. Giving voice to the hidden dissatisfaction women felt in contemporary American society, Friedan became a vigorous ADVOCATE for the feminine POINT OF VIEW in her work.
| Facts About Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique |
- As one of the cofounders of the National Organization of Women in 1966, Friedan and her colleagues first conceived of the structure of the group on a cocktail napkin when meeting at the Washington Hilton Hotel
- Friedan graduated summa cum laude from Smith College in 1942 with a degree in psychology
- Friedan's father was a Russian Jewish immigrant who was a jeweler; her mother was a former newspaperwoman
- The article which formed the basis of Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was rejected by several national women's magazines, one saying it would only appeal to "sick" women who could relate to feelings of dissatisfaction with being full-time mothers and wives
- When working on a New York newspaper in 1949, Friedan was fired when she informed her superior that she was pregnant, a practice then routine in the working world
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