After a Life of Telling It Like It Is – Betty Friedan Dies at Age 84

Betty Friedan. Image: Orionpozo

When Alan Wolfe wrote about the “Mystique of Betty Friedan” in a 1999 Atlantic Monthly he applauded Friedan’s courage. He said the book today, “Remains one of the most powerful works of popular nonfiction written in America. Not only did it sell in the millions but it has long been credited with launching the contemporary feminist movement.”

Some feminists thought Freidan didn’t take her ideas far enough. Carol Iannone, writer for Frontpage Magazine and editor-at-large for the National Association of Scholars, called Betty Friedan the “godmother of equity feminism,” Freidan did hit rough waters in the women’s movement in the early 1970’s. She found herself stuck between the coffers of feminist who wanted to live their lives with, and those who wanted to live their lives comfortably without the comfort of men. There was no doubt. One way or the other Betty was changing the lives of countless American women.

Even Simone de Beauvoir was not immune. In a 1976 interview, she thanked Betty for dedicating The Feminine Mystique to her. “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice,” she said.

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“She spoke with energy and passion. She was a fighter,” said Eleanor Smeal, former President of NOW and president of the Feminist Majority Foundation. “The last time I saw her, at her last birthday party, she was so upset about what was happening to abortion rights and the backlash of women’s rights.”

Much earlier Betty had said, “It’s more than the women. It’s got to be the women and the men.”

Paving the road for later feminists like Bella Abzug, a young Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer; Betty, as one of the founders of the National Organization for Women, sought to bring the issues of home and world much closer to the public eye. Little did she know that her doodles, in 1965, on a cocktail napkin while trying to figure out a good name for a new women’s project would lead to the creation of NOW.

After being asked to attend a conference for the Association of Work-Life Professionals in Miami, in 1998, Betty Friedan shared one more bit of Friedan wisdom. After all the accomplishing, all the flag waving, all that giving voice for women, she shared the most important plan of all.That great life-loving “Aunt Betty” was still kicking after all those years and still telling it like it is.

“We don’t need to be such a nation of work-a-holics. We have to be life-a-holics.”

-In March, 2006, this article will, also, appear in Moondance Magazine, the UNESCO award-winning online magazine for women.

-Facts for this article supplied by Atlantic Monthly, NPR.org, The Seattle Times, YouTube and Saturday Review 1975.

©WNN -Women News Network 2006

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