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BETTY Friedan, whose manifesto, The Feminine Mystique, laid the groundwork for the modern feminist movement, died on Saturday, her birthday. She was 85.
Few books have so profoundly changed so many lives as did Friedan's 1963 bestseller. Her assertion that a woman needed more than a husband and children was a radical break from the postwar era.
Independence for women was no joke, Friedan wrote. The feminine mystique was a phony deal sold to women that left them unfulfilled, suffering from "the problem that has no name" and seeking a solution in tranquillisers and psychoanalysis.
"A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, 'Who am I, and what do I want out of life?' She mustn't feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children, " Friedan said.
Senator Hillary Clinton said Friedan's activism and writing "opened doors and minds, breaking down barriers for women and enlarging opportunities for women and men for generations to come. We are all the beneficiaries of her vision".
In the racial, political and sexual conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s, Friedan's was one of the most commanding voices and recognisable presences in the women's movement.
As the first president of the National Organisation for Women, in 1966, Friedan staked out positions that seemed extreme at the time on such issues as abortion, sex-neutral help-wanted adverts, equal pay, promotion opportunities and maternity leave.
But at the same time, Friedan insisted that the women's movement had to remain in the mainstream, that men had to be accepted as allies and that the family should not be rejected.
"Don't get into the bra-burning, anti-man, politics-of-orgasm school, " Friedan told a college audience in 1970.
To more radical feminists, Friedan was hopelessly bourgeois. In her seventies, Friedan moved on to the issue of how society both views and treats its elderly. She said that while researching her final book, The Fountain of Age, published in 1993, she found those who dealt with old people "talk about the aged with the same patronising, 'compassionate' denial of their personhood that was heard when the experts talked about women 20 years ago".
Friedan, born in Illinois, was a high-achieving Jewish outsider growing up in middle America. Her father, Harry Goldstein, owned a jewellery store; her mother, Miriam, quit a job as a newspaper women's page editor to become a housewife.
As a girl, Friedan watched her mother "cut down my father because she had no place to channel her terrific energies, a typical female disorder that I call impotent rage, " she said.
She won a fellowship in psychology to the University of California, Berkeley, but turned down a bigger fellowship there so as not to outdo a boyfriend. The romance broke up anyway and Friedan moved to Greenwich Village in New York and became a reporter.
She lost one job to a returning veteran, but found another before marrying Carl Friedan, a summer-stock producer and later an advertising executive, in 1947. The marriage, which produced three children, ended in divorce 22 years later.
Friedan got a maternity leave to have her first child in 1949, but was fired and replaced by a man when she asked for another leave to have the second child five years later. The family had moved to a big Victorian house in the suburban Rockland County village of Grandview-on-the-Hudson, New York, where Friedan cranked out freelance magazine articles while bringing up her brood. Hoping to get a magazine piece out of a Smith College 15-year reunion, Friedan prepared an in-depth survey of her classmates. What she found was that these well-educated women of the class of 1942, now largely suburban housewives, were asking, in effect, "Is this all?"
Friedan could not get the article published in a magazine, but five years of more research and writing turned it into The Feminine Mystique.
If some women read it as a call to arms, others were outraged, Friedan recalled. Dinner invitations stopped; she was out of the school car pool. But the first printing of 3000 eventually grew to 600,000 copies hardcover and more than two million in paperback. It was listed in a survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the century.
In 1964, the family moved back to the Manhattan area and Betty Friedan began working to have the government enforce the Civil Rights Act as it applied to sex and not only to race, religion and national origin.
Her 1981 book, The Second Stage, was seen by many as a public break with the feminist leadership that had succeeded her. She said they had pursued "sexual politics that distorted the sense of priorities of the women's movement during the 1970s", and had opened the way for conservatives and reactionaries to occupy the centre on family issues.
Betty Friedan helped persuade the Democratic Party in the US to give women half the delegate strength at its nominating convention and was herself a delegate when Geraldine Ferraro was nominated for the vice-president position in 1984.
Betty Friedan, activist and novelist; born February 4, 1921, died February 4, 2006.
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