48 Facts About Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan was an American feminist writer and activist.

In 1966, Friedan co-founded and was elected the first president of the National Organization for Women, which aimed to bring women "into the mainstream of American society now [in] fully equal partnership with men".

In 1970, after stepping down as NOW's first president, Betty Friedan organized the nationwide Women's Strike for Equality on August 26, the 50th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granting women the right to vote.

In 1971, Betty Friedan joined other leading feminists to establish the National Women's Political Caucus.

Betty Friedan was a strong supporter of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution that passed the United States House of Representatives and Senate following intense pressure by women's groups led by NOW in the early 1970s.

One of her later books, The Second Stage, critiqued what Betty Friedan saw as the extremist excesses of some feminists.

Harry owned a jewelry store in Peoria, and Miriam wrote for the society page of a newspaper when Betty Friedan's father fell ill.

Betty Friedan attended Peoria High School, and became involved in the school newspaper.

Betty Friedan won a scholarship prize in her first year for outstanding academic performance.

Betty Friedan lived in Chapin House during her time at Smith.

Betty Friedan became more politically active, continuing to mix with Marxists.

Betty Friedan started publishing articles about what she called "the problem that has no name", and got passionate responses from many housewives grateful that they were not alone in experiencing this problem.

Betty Friedan then decided to rework and expand this topic into a book, The Feminine Mystique.

Betty Friedan spoke of her own 'terror' at being alone, wrote that she had never once in her life seen a positive female role-model who worked outside the home and kept a family, and cited numerous cases of housewives who felt similarly trapped.

Betty Friedan asserted that women are as capable as men for any type of work or any career path against arguments to the contrary by the mass media, educators and psychologists.

Betty Friedan originally intended to write a sequel to The Feminine Mystique, which was to be called Woman: The Fourth Dimension, but instead only wrote an article by that title, which appeared in the Ladies' Home Journal in June 1964.

In 1966 Betty Friedan co-founded, and became the first president of the National Organization for Women.

Under Betty Friedan, NOW advocated fiercely for the legal equality of women and men.

In 1973, Betty Friedan founded the First Women's Bank and Trust Company.

In 1970 NOW, with Friedan leading the cause, was instrumental in the US Senate's rejection of President Richard M Nixon's Supreme Court nominee G Harrold Carswell, who had opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act granting women workplace equality with men.

Betty Friedan founded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, renamed National Abortion Rights Action League after the Supreme Court had legalized abortion in 1973.

In 1970 Friedan led other feminists in derailing the nomination of Supreme Court nominee G Harrold Carswell, whose record of racial discrimination and antifeminism made him unacceptable and unfit to sit on the highest court in the land to virtually everyone in the civil rights and feminist movements.

In 1972, Betty Friedan unsuccessfully ran as a delegate to the 1972 Democratic National Convention in support of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm.

That year at the DNC Betty Friedan played a very prominent role and addressed the convention, although she clashed with other women, notably Steinem, on what should be done there, and how.

One of the most influential feminists of the twentieth century, Betty Friedan opposed equating feminism with lesbianism.

Betty Friedan pushed the feminist movement to focus on economic issues, especially equality in employment and business as well as provision for child care and other means by which both women and men could balance family and work.

Betty Friedan ignored lesbians in the National Organization for Women initially, and objected to what she saw as their demands for equal time.

Betty Friedan supported the concept that abortion is a woman's choice, that it shouldn't be a crime or exclusively a doctor's choice or anyone else involved, and helped form NARAL at a time when Planned Parenthood wasn't yet supportive.

Betty Friedan disagreed with a resolution that framed abortion in more feminist terms that was introduced in the Minneapolis regional conference resulting from the same White House Conference on Families, believing it to be more polarizing, while the drafters apparently thought Friedan's formulation too conservative.

Betty Friedan joined nearly 200 others in Feminists for Free Expression in opposing the Pornography Victims' Compensation Act.

In 1968, Betty Friedan signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

Betty Friedan is credited for starting the contemporary feminist movement and writing a book that is one of the cornerstones of American feminism.

Lisa Fredenksen Bohannon, in Woman's work: The story of Betty Friedan, went deep into Friedan's personal life and wrote about her relationship with her mother.

Journalist Janann Sheman wrote a book called Interviews with Betty Friedan containing interviews with Friedan for The New York Times, Working Women and Playboy, among others.

Betty Friedan was featured in the 2013 documentary Makers: Women Who Make America, about the women's movement.

In 2014, a biography of Betty Friedan was added to the American National Biography Online.

The New York Times obituary for Betty Friedan noted that she was "famously abrasive", and that she could be "thin-skinned and imperious, subject to screaming fits of temperament".

Betty Friedan pursued her feminist principles with a flamboyant pugnacity that has become all too rare in these yuppified times.

Betty Friedan hated girliness and bourgeois decorum, and never lost her earthly ethnicity.

Betty Friedan married Carl Friedan, a theater producer, in 1947 while working at UE News.

Betty Friedan continued to work after marriage, first as a paid employee and, after 1952, as a freelance journalist.

Carl and Betty Friedan had three children, Daniel, Emily and Jonathan.

Betty Friedan was raised in a Jewish family, but was an agnostic.

In 1973, Betty Friedan was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II.

Betty Friedan died of congestive heart failure at her home in Washington, DC, on February 4,2006, her 85th birthday.

Some of Betty Friedan's papers are held at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Betty Friedan was portrayed by actress Tracey Ullman in the 2020 FX limited series Mrs America.

Betty Friedan was portrayed in Season 1 Episode 7 of the HBO Max series "Julia".