WOMAN of ACTION™

Betty Naomi Friedan

Betty Friedan was born as Betty Naomi Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois on February 3, 1921. When she was 17, she graduated from high school and soon after, she attended Smith College. She graduated in 1942 with a degree in psychology. She was offered a scholarship to receive her Ph. D. in 1944, but she declined the offer, moving to New York City and working as a workers’ press reporter.

It was there in New York City that Betty noticed the workplace discrimination, especially the discrimination against women. In 1947, she married a Soldier Show Corporation actor named Carl Friedan and together they had a child. When Betty was pregnant with her second child in 1949, she was fired from her job at the workers’ press because she had asked for maternity leave for her second child. Instead, Betty became a full-time wife and mother. It was through this experience that she realized that it was a myth that women were satisfied being only housewives and mothers. She decided to survey other female graduates of Smith College, and she discovered that many other women were unsatisfied as well.

Taking Action, Betty wrote an article on how women felt about the issue and strived to get it published, but all the publishers were male and none would print it. Nonetheless, Betty did not give up. She made her article into a book called The Feminine Mystique.

When it was finally published, it sold over 3 million copies.

After that, Betty toured the country and lectured on her ideas in the women’s movement. She met with women in Washington and created the “first major structure of the women’s movement“: NOW, the National Organization for Women, which was founded in 1966. She became its first president, wanting women to be present in society’s mainstream and to have full equality.

In 1970, Betty resigned from office, choosing to concentrate more on political reform, writing, and teaching, which she still does to this day. On August 26, 1970, on the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the vote for women, 50,000 women marched down Fifth Avenue to demand equal rights and a political voice of their own. This Women’s Strike for Equality, the first nationwide Women’s Action since the suffrage victory, had been organized by Betty Friedan, the writer whose expose of the so-called “feminine mystique” sparked a new wave of feminist activism. The size of the march considerably altered depictions of the resurging women’s rights movement. No longer could the media portray the movement as a fringe action, for it was clear that it attracted a large and significantly mainstream following.

At the defining moment of the march, as Friedan came forward to address a vast, cheering throng in Bryant Park behind New York’s Public Library, she found herself speaking—and revising—the ancient Hebrew prayer which Orthodox Jewish men recited every morning.

“Down through the generations in history,” Friedan declared,

“my ancestor prayed, “I thank Thee, Lord, I was not created a Woman.”

From this day forward women all over the world will be able to say,

“I thank Thee, Lord, I was created a Woman.”

THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE

“The 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 the 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?’ ” –

-quoted from the book, The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan

BIOGRAPHY: http://www.bookrags.com/biography/betty-naomi-friedan-dlb/

A Celebration of Women

celebrates the Life of this Woman in our History,

that had the courage and strength to SPEAK OUT LOUD, words that

all other Women were thinking.

May Betty’s spirit always be with us!

Brava Betty!