US: Writer, thinker and activist Betty Friedan, who almost single-handedly revived feminism with her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, died of congestive heart failure on Saturday, at her home in Washington. It was her 85th birthday.
Her insights into what she described as the soul-draining frustrations felt by educated, stay-at-home women in the 1950s, startled a society that expected women to be happy with marriage and children. Her book became an instant and controversial bestseller, and Friedan became the leading spokeswoman for a revitalised women's movement.
One of the most recognised names and faces of the late 20th century, Friedan pushed for equal pay, sex-neutral help-wanted ads, maternity leave, childcare centres for working parents, legal abortion and other topics considered radical in the 1960s and 1970s.
Impatient that the federal government, in implementing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, did not appear to be taking equal pay for women seriously enough, she helped found in 1966 the National Organisation for Women, the largest and most effective in the women's movement. She served as its first president. She led the women's strike for equality in New York in 1970, on the 50th anniversary of women winning the right to vote.
She was a founder of the National Women's Political Caucus in the 1970s and of the abortion rights organisation now known as NARAL-Pro Choice America. She was an organiser and director of the First Women's Bank and Trust.
"She was a giant in the 20th century for women and most significantly was a catalyst for change in the American culture," said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation. "She defined the problem, and then she had the courage to do something about it."
Friedan's was a voice that was loud, insistent and sometimes divisive. She split with the National Organisation for Women in the 1970s after coming to believe that it focused too many resources on lesbian issues and that too many feminists hated men. Her 1981 book The Second Stage prompted some feminists to denounce her as reactionary.
Her 2000 memoir, Life So Far, said that her husband, Carl, beat her during their marriage. He strenuously objected, and Friedan amended the declaration to say that both of them fought physically during their marriage, which ended in divorce in 1969. He died in December.
She turned to other issues, focusing on ageism, family issues and economic empowerment. "It isn't that I have stopped being a feminist, but women as a special separate interest group are not my concern anymore," she said in 1993 when she published The Fountain of Age.
Bettye Goldstein was born on February, 4th, 1921, in Peoria, Illinois, the Jewish daughter of an immigrant jeweller and a mother who quit her job as an editor of the local newspaper's women's pages to become a housewife. She later said she felt like an outsider from childhood. She skipped second grade, then moved 1,000 miles east to attend Smith College. She edited the college newspaper and graduated in 1942.
She did graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley but turned down a prestigious fellowship in psychology, afraid of outperforming her then boyfriend. After the romance broke up, she gave up graduate work and moved to New York's Greenwich Village to work for a labour newspaper. She married and had a child, but when she became pregnant with a second child, she was fired.
Struggling as a freelance writer, she found that editors of women's magazines deleted references to her subjects' interests outside the home, telling Friedan that readers did not want to explore those topics. On a survey she carried out of her Smith College classmates on their 15-year reunion, she discovered that highly educated and talented housewives in their mid-30s were dissatisfied and distraught, drugged by tranquill- isers, misled by psychoanalysis and ignored by society.
No magazine would publish her article. Five years later, after significantly more work, she published The Feminine Mystique and "pulled the trigger on history", as futurist Alvin Toffler said. The book sold more than two million copies in paperback and remains a staple of college history courses.
She is survived by two sons and a daughter and nine grandchildren.