Betty Friedan: Creative Work and Feminist Awakening

“The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own”. Betty Friedan, feminist author and icon who’s most famous work came to be known as The Feminine Mystique (1963), was not always aware of the impact she would have on the feminist cause, but after requesting a maternity leave to raise her three children, she was terminated from her job and replaced by a man. This event made Friedan conscientious of the fact that women struggled with the choice of having a family or a career, while their male counterparts could juggle both with ease. Although some critique Friedan for keeping the Women’s Rights movement in the mainstream, and believe she mainly focused on middle class white

women, Friedan, as a direct result of her personal experiences of being solely a housewife and a mother for eight years, found that her female peers from Smith College shared the same feeling of purposelessness. This led Friedan to become a powerful advocate and voice for women’s rights and equality, and is why her works have proven so effective.
In addition to her various publications, Friedan was a cofounder of NOW, the National Organization for Women, in 1966. NOW fought for a multitude of causes, including the want for a greater role and more equal representation of women in government and politics, pro-choice rights and more easily available and accessible contraceptive methods, and an increased number of childcare facilities for women participating and working in the public sphere. These civil rights were seen as basic human rights to Betty Friedan, who had personally struggled with managing her occupation while simultaneously raising children, maintaining a household, and having and caring for a husband, Carl Friedan. Friedan often gained support for the Women’s Rights Movement by comparing it to the Civil Rights Movement, which most women and some others had knowledge about and could resonate with the civil rights groups’ eagerness to be granted equal rights, liberties, and freedoms. At the Third National Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women, Betty Friedan made this connection, “privately suggesting the need for an organization to speak on behalf of women in the way the civil rights groups had done for blacks.” This comment aided in sparking the creation of the National Organization for Women and quickly gained the movement an abundance of fresh followers, women and men.
Another effective strategy utilized by Friedan was how she drew a contrast between how free women were in the 1920s and 1930s after the passing of the nineteenth amendment which granted them the right to vote, and how during World War II women ventured even farther into the public sphere and left the cult of domesticity to fill the occupations left behind by the men who were sent off to war, only to be forced, confined, and shoved back into the home they had grown so tired of when their husbands returned and reclaimed their usual everyday positions and jobs. In Friedan actually being able to verbalize and articulate this point and contrast in history, she made apparent how women have been treated as history’s puppets and men’s replacements over time. She made visible to women how they have never been viewed as independent and equal in society, even when their husbands went off to war and they bore the brunt of keeping the American economy afloat, while running single mother households and still continuously earning lower wages than men.
Previously, Friedan had studied and been trained in Psychology while attending Smith College, and during a brief period of time she spent at the University of California Berkeley.

Additionally, after leaving UC Berkeley, Friedan dropped everything in California and moved to New York, where she got a job at a news company as a reporter. Friedan had always been an editor for the school newspaper during college and had hastily discovered her profound love and passion for writing, but had yet to put it to use as momentum for the feminist cause until she published The Feminine Mystique. The book took five years of researching what roles women exactly and actually have in society. The qualities of the novel that make it so exceptionally effective, are how Friedan was able to combine her psychological knowledge from her studies and her desire to write into a piece of work full of anecdotes and interviews from various ordinary and some influential women. The Feminine Mystique discussed how women were not pleased with being housewives and had feelings of worthlessness and helplessness. Friedan often refers to this emotion of feeling stuck throughout the novel as “the problem that has no name” or the “Housewives Syndrome”. Friedan exclaimed “sometimes a woman would tell me that the feeling gets so strong she runs out of the house and walks through the streets. Or she stays inside her house and

cries”.
To further strengthen her argument about women’s inequality, she mentioned Sigmund Freud, the well-known Austrian psychologist, and the results of his many controversial studies. Dubbed “Freudian Thought”, Friedan sheds light on how Freud’s explanation of a woman’s sexual nature had given a renewed authority to a woman never discovering her true identity and potential. By highlighting this information from the past, Friedan shows how women have been deliberately forced by their societies to conform to typical norms and values, and have done so as a result of the fear of being different or unique. In taking facts, studies, and data collected by Freud, Friedan not only makes a valid point but establishes a sense of credibility in her claims. Friedan used this idea of women constantly being required to conform to their societies as a driving force in helping to start the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, NARAL, in 1969, and as a reason for participating in Women’s Strike Equality Day, where she marched down Fifth Avenue.
Besides Freud, many people held opposing opinions regarding women as well. These people include Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative activist who advocated for women to stop supporting the Equal Rights Amendment, while Betty Friedan had always fought and been a strong advocate for women’s rights and equality. Phyllis Schlafly once proclaimed that “feminism is doomed to failure because it is based on an attempt to repeal and restructure human nature.” This quote by Schlafly is surprisingly accurate, because the Women’s Rights movement’s main goal was to protest against unfair and unequal treatment of women. The feminists and women’s rights supporters, groups, and organizations all had a common goal, to restructure society to transform it into a more egalitarian and accepting environment for women themselves. It is ironic that a woman would not be eager for equal rights and to acquire a greater number of freedoms from a society that has treated them as a minority group since the beginning of time.
Betty Friedan’s work was exceedingly effective, because she used her personal experiences and being fired to propel an enormous and significant movement that has long endured. Although her ways of embodying and portraying a feminist icon did not always agree with everyone, Friedan drew attention to a significant issue and acted as a voice for millions of voiceless women, not only in the United States, but around the world. Without Betty Friedan, the fight for women’s rights would not have been made into the powerful and progressive movement that would set the stage for a continuing battle for equal rights and pay for women today.