Betty Friedan dies on 85th birthday Sun, February 5, 2006 The philosopher of feminism is best known for her bestseller The Feminine Mystique. By AP
WASHINGTON -- Betty Friedan, whose manifesto The Feminine Mystique became a bestseller in the 1960s and laid the foundations for the modern feminist movement, died yesterday on her birthday.
She was 85.
Friedan died at her home of congestive heart failure, said a cousin, Emily Bazelon.
Friedan's assertion in her 1963 book that having a husband and babies was not everything and women should aspire to separate identities as individuals, was highly unusual, if not revolutionary, just after the baby and suburban booms of the Eisenhower era.
The feminine mystique, she said, was a phoney bill of goods society sold to women that left them unfulfilled, suffering from "the problem that has no name" and seeking a solution in tranquillizers 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.
In the racial, political and sexual conflicts of the 1960s and '70s, Friedan's was one of the most commanding voices and recognizable presences in the women's movement.
As a founder and first president of the National Organization for Women in 1966, she staked out positions that seemed extreme at the time on such issues as abortion, sex-neutral help-wanted ads, equal pay, equal promotion opportunities and maternity leave.
But at the same time, Friedan insisted the women's movement had to remain in the U.S. mainstream, that men had to be accepted as allies, and the family should not be rejected.
"Don't get into the bra-burning, anti-man, politics-of-orgasm school," Friedan said in 1970.
To more radical and lesbian feminists, Friedan was "hopelessly bourgeois," Susan Brownmiller wrote at the time.
Friedan, deeply opposed to "equating feminism with lesbianism," conceded later she had been "very square."