Elizabeth M. Johnson

Author and modern feminist movement pioneer, Betty Friedan, died Saturday on her birthday. She was 85. Friedan was a suburban housewife in 1957 hoping to get together a magazine article out of her Smith College classmates as she prepared for a class reunion. She prepared a survey and discovered that her highly intelligent classmates were all asking ‘Is this it?”. Unable to get her article published in a magazine, she continued her research and turned it into the revolutionary book, The Feminine Mystique. The Feminine Mystique made Friedan famous and ignited the modern feminist movement.

Friedan later went on to found the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 where she staked out positions on issues such as abortion, equal pay, maternity leave, gender neutral help wanted ads. She also helped found NARAL Pro-Choice America and the National Women’s Political Caucus.

For all of her accomplishments and awards, she tends to be remembered as the housewife who started a revolution by exploring the ‘nameless, aching dissatisfaction’ that women everywhere were feeling, a bewilderment later to be coined ‘the problem with no name’. Friedan gave women permission to think about a life for themselves, a life where their self-esteem is not completely tied up in the housework and maintenance of a family.