In this position, Ephron made a name for herself by taking on subjects as wide-ranging as Dorothy Schiff, her former boss and owner of the Post ; Betty Friedan, whom she chastised for pursuing a feud with Gloria Steinem ; and her alma mater Wellesley, which she said had turned out a generation of " docile " women.

Regarded as an influential author and intellectual in the United States, Friedan remained active in politics and advocacy for the rest of her life, authoring six books.

One of her later books, The Second Stage, critiqued what Friedan saw as the extremist excesses of some feminists who could be broadly classified as gender feminists.

As a young girl, Friedan was active in Marxist and Jewish circles ; she later wrote how she felt isolated from the community at times, and felt her " passion against injustice ... originated from my feelings of the injustice of anti-Semitism ".

In this magazine, Friedan and her friends talked about home life as opposed to school life.

Friedan claims in her memoirs that her boyfriend at the time pressured her into turning down a Ph. D fellowship for further study and abandoning her academic career.

Friedan was dismissed from the union newspaper UE News in 1952, because she was pregnant with her second child.

Allan Wolf, in The Mystique of Betty Friedan writes: “ She helped to change not only the thinking but the lives of many American women, but recent books throw into question the intellectual and personal sources of her work .” Although there have been some debates on Friedan ’ s work in The Feminine Mystique since its publication, there is no doubt that her work for equality for women was sincere and committed.

Horowitz explored Friedan ’ s engagement with the women's movement before she began to work on her book, The Feminine Mystique and argues that Friedan ’ s feminism did not start in the 1950s but rather before that in the 1940s.

Focusing his study on Friedan ’ s ideas in feminism rather than on her personal life Horowitz ’ s book connects Friedan to the history of American feminism.

Lisa Fredenksen Bohannon in Woman ’ s work: The story of Betty Friedan goes deep into Friedan ’ s personal life and writes about her relationship with her mother.

Betty Friedan has influenced many individuals into writing about her and topics about women's rights and equality.

Writer Camille Paglia, who had been denounced by Friedan in a Playboy interview, wrote a brief obituary for her in Entertainment Weekly:

Friedan is credited for starting the contemporary feminist movement and writing a book that is one of the cornerstones of American feminism.

Journalist Janann Sheman wrote a book called Interviews with Betty Friedan containing interviews with Friedan for the New York Times, Working Women, and Playboy, among others.

Carl Friedan denied abusing her in an interview with Time magazine shortly after the book was published, describing the claim as a " complete fabrication ".

At its first conference in October 1966, Friedan was elected NOW's first president, and her fame as the author of the bestselling book The Feminine Mystique helped attract thousands of women to the organization.

In 1963 Betty Friedan, influenced by The Second Sex, wrote the bestselling book The Feminine Mystique in which she explicitly objected to the mainstream media image of women, stating that placing women at home limited their possibilities, and wasted talent and potential.

In this book and her essay, " Woman: Myth & Reality ", de Beauvoir anticipates Betty Friedan in seeking to demythologise the male concept of woman.

The Feminine Mystique is a nonfiction book by Betty Friedan first published in 1963.

The Fountain of Age is a book written by Betty Friedan, who also wrote The Feminine Mystique.

" British novelist Fay Weldon called the book " essential reading for the New Woman ", and Betty Friedan wrote in Allure magazine that " The Beauty Myth and the controversy it is eliciting could be a hopeful sign of a new surge of feminist consciousness.

The term female chauvinism has been adopted by critics of some types or aspects of feminism ; second-wave feminist Betty Friedan is a notable example.

O ' Leary was referring to the Lavender Menace, a description by second wave feminist Betty Friedan for attempts by members of the National Organization for Women ( NOW ) to distance themselves from the perception of NOW as a haven for lesbians.

* 1963-" The Feminine Mystique " by Betty Friedan published, sparking the women's liberation movement

The national strike was successful beyond expectations in broadening the feminist movement ; the march led by Friedan in New York City alone attracted over 50, 000 women and men.

Friedan was also a strong supporter of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution that passed the United States House of Representatives ( by a vote of 354-24 ) and Senate ( 84-8 ) following intense pressure by women's groups led by NOW in the early 1970s.

Justine Blau was also greatly influenced by Friedan.

" And in February 2006, shortly after Friedan's death, the feminist writer Germaine Greer published an article in The Guardian, in which she described Friedan as pompous and egotistic, somewhat demanding, and sometimes selfish, as evidenced by repeated incidents during a tour of Iran in 1972.

It came as a response to activities by the National Organization for Women and a 1978 Barbara Walters interview with feminist Betty Friedan.

She claimed that women could have it all, " love, sex, and money ", a view that even preceding feminists such as Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer did not support at all and has been met with notable opposition by advocates of grass-roots devotion of women to family and marriage.

* On August 26, the 50th anniversary of woman suffrage in the U. S., tens of thousands of women across the nation participated in the Women's Strike for Equality, organized by Betty Friedan, to demand equal rights.

# The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan

Chapter 1: Friedan points out that the average age of marriage was dropping and the birthrate was increasing for women throughout the 1950s, yet the widespread unhappiness of women persisted, although American culture insisted that fulfillment for women could be found in marriage and housewifery ; this chapter concludes by declaring " We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ' I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.

Chapter 2: Friedan shows that the editorial decisions concerning women's magazines were being made mostly by men, who insisted on stories and articles that showed women as either happy housewives or unhappy, neurotic careerists, thus creating the " feminine mystique "— the idea that women were naturally fulfilled by devoting their lives to being housewives and mothers.

Chapter 3: Friedan recalls her own decision to conform to society's expectations by giving up her promising career in psychology to raise children, and shows that other young women still struggled with the same kind of decision.

Chapter 6: Friedan criticizes functionalism, which attempted to make the social sciences more credible by studying the institutions of society as if they were parts of a social body, as in biology.

Chapter 7: Friedan discusses the change in women's education from the 1940s to the early 1960s, in which many women's schools concentrated on non-challenging classes that focused mostly on marriage, family, and other subjects deemed suitable for women, as educators influenced by functionalism felt that too much education would spoil women's femininity and capacity for sexual fulfillment.

Friedan notes that this was helped along by the fact that many of the women who worked during the war filling jobs previously filled by men faced dismissal, discrimination, or hostility when the men returned, and that educators blamed over-educated, career-focused mothers for the maladjustment of soldiers in World War II.

Friedan says that this change in education arrested girls in their emotional development at a young age, because they never had to face the painful identity crisis and subsequent maturation that comes from dealing with many adult challenges.

" The work focuses specifically on the similarities and differences of these political philosophies, by critically examining the liberal feminist writings of John Stuart Mill, Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir and Janet Radcliffe Richards, especially focusing on the issues of employment, education, marriage and the family, and governmental politics.