Historian Joanne Meyerowitz argues ( in " Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946-1958 ," Journal of American History 79, March 1993 ) that many of the contemporary magazines and articles of the period did not place women solely in the home, as Friedan stated, but in fact supported the notions of full-or part-time jobs for women seeking to follow a career path rather than being a housewife.

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:

Judith Hennessee ( Betty Friedan: Her Life ) and Daniel Horowitz, a professor of American Studies at Smith College, have also written about Friedan.

Betty Friedan: Her Life, Hardcover Edition, Random House 1999, ISBN 0-679-43203-5

* After a Life of Telling It Like It Is: Betty Friedan Dies at Age 85, Lys Anzia, Moondance magazine Spring 2006

Indeed, Carl Friedan had been quoted as saying " She changed the course of history almost singlehandedly.

She married Carl Friedan, a theatre producer, in 1947 while working at UE News.

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

" Carl Friedan died in December 2005.

Cornering a large table at the conference luncheon, so that they could start organizing before they had to rush for planes, each of those women chipped in five dollars, Betty Friedan wrote the acronym NOW on a napkin, and the National Organization for Women was created.

Chapter 5: Friedan, who had a degree in psychology, criticizes Sigmund Freud ( whose ideas were very influential in America at the time of her book's publication ).

" Friedan also points out that Freud's unproven concept of " penis envy " had been used to label women who wanted careers as neurotic, and that the popularity of Freud's work and ideas elevated the " feminine mystique " of female fulfillment in housewifery into a " scientific religion " that most women were not educated enough to criticize.

Friedan points out that this is unproven and that Margaret Mead, a prominent functionalist, had a flourishing career as an anthropologist.

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.

It had always had extremely vociferous critics, from the tabloid press to Marxist groups ; and, generally, not a happy relationship with the so-called ' stars ' of feminism such as Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem or Germaine Greer.

" 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.

Chapter 8: Friedan notes that the uncertainties and fears during World War II and the Cold War made Americans long for the comfort of home, so they tried to create an idealized home life with father as the breadwinner and mother as the housewife.

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.

Daniel Horowitz, a Professor of American Studies at Smith College points out that although Friedan presented herself as a typical suburban housewife, she was involved with radical politics and labor journalism in her youth, and during the time she wrote The Feminine Mystique she worked as a freelance journalist for women's magazines and as a community organizer.

One of their sons, Daniel Friedan, is a noted theoretical physicist.

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 1957, Friedan was asked to conduct a survey of her former Smith College classmates for their 15th anniversary reunion ; the results, in which she found that many of them were unhappy with their lives as housewives, prompted her to begin research for The Feminine Mystique, conducting interviews with other suburban housewives, as well as researching psychology, media, and advertising.

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 9: Friedan shows that advertisers tried to encourage housewives to think of themselves as professionals who needed many specialized products in order to do their jobs, while discouraging housewives from having actual careers, since that would mean they would not spend as much time and effort on housework and therefore would not buy as many household products, cutting into advertisers ' profits.

Chapter 10: Friedan interviews several full-time housewives, finding that although they are not fulfilled by their housework, they are all extremely busy with it.

Chapter 11: Friedan notes that many housewives have sought fulfillment in sex, unable to find it in housework and children ; Friedan notes that sex cannot fulfill all of a person's needs, and that attempts to make it do so often drive married women to have affairs or drive their husbands away as they become obsessed with sex.

When the mother lacks a self, Friedan notes, she often tries to live through her children, causing the children to lose their own sense of themselves as separate human beings with their own lives.

Chapter 13: Friedan discusses Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs and notes that women have been trapped at the basic, physiological level, expected to find their identity through their sexual role alone.

Friedan continued to work after marriage, first as a paid employee and, after 1952, as a freelance journalist.

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.

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 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.

" 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.