Betty Friedan: Betty Friedan, the writer, thinker and activist who almost single-handedly revived feminism with her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, died of heart failure last Saturday, her 85th birthday, at her home in Washington.
Her insights into what she described as the soul-draining frustrations felt by educated, stay-at-home women in the 1950s, "the problem that has no name", 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, gender-neutral job advertisements, maternity leave, childcare centres for working parents, legal abortion and many other topics considered radical in the 1960s and 1970s.
Impatient that the US 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 organisation in the women's movement, and served as its first president. She led the 500,000-strong 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.
"Many of us think of her as one of the mothers of the modern women's movement," said Kim Gandy, Now president. "She played a very pivotal, very critical role in launching the second wave of the modern women's movement."
Friedan's was a voice that was loud, insistent and sometimes divisive. She split with Now in the 1970s after she came to believe that the organisation 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 her account to say that both of them fought physically during their marriage, which ended in divorce in 1969.
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 any more," she said.
Betty Goldstein was born on February 4th, 1921, in Peoria, Illinois, the daughter of a Jewish immigrant jeweller and a mother who quit her job as an editor of the local newspaper's women's pages to become a homemaker.
She attended Smith College, the liberal arts college for women in Massachusetts, and graduated summa cum laude 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 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 the editors of women's magazines deleted references to her subjects' interests outside the home, telling Friedan that the readers did not want to explore those topics. She was grinding away on a survey of her Smith College classmates upon their 15-year reunion, when she added a few questions and said she discovered that the highly educated and talented housewives in their mid-30s were dissatisfied and distraught, drugged by tranquillisers, 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 as a book and "pulled the trigger on history", as one commentator said. She pitched it on television, she did question-and-answer interviews in magazines and she took every opportunity to alert the world to the crisis she perceived. The book eventually sold more than two million copies in paperback and remains a staple of college history courses.
Daniel Horowitz, a Smith College professor who wrote Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminist Mystique, said that, although Friedan presented herself at the time as a housewife who had an "Aha!" moment, her ideas were partly rooted in the humanistic psychology.
She shared a birthday with Rosa Parks, and both Friedan and Coretta Scott King were at the convention of the Progressive Party in Philadelphia in 1948, he said.
"All three of them have their political roots in the struggles for social justice, for African Americans, for women and for working people in the 1940s. Friedan was deeply embedded in and engaged with issues raised on the left in the labour union movement," said Horowitz.
During the next several decades, the highly recognisable Friedan was often seen in demonstrations, protest marches and news conferences. Never an organisation person, she alienated many who worked with her by insisting on holding the floor, claiming credit and riding roughshod over her assistants.
She insisted that the women's movement remain in the mainstream of American life, objecting to the "bra-burning, anti-man, politics-of-orgasm school". Younger leaders took over Now, and after the publication of The Second Stage" authors as different as Susan Brownmiller and Susan Faludi accused her of reversing the revolution.
Friedan declared herself past feminism and went to work on ageism, publishing The Fountain of Age in 1993. But she never entirely left the feminist field, showing up at the 1977 National Women's Conference in Houston to second a resolution on lesbian rights, teaching at numerous colleges and serving on the White House Conference on the Family.
She is survived by three children, Daniel, Jonathan and Emily; a brother and sister; and nine grandchildren.
Betty Friedan: born February 4th, 1921; died February 4th, 2006