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.

Gregory was an outspoken feminist, and in 1978 he joined Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Margaret Heckler, Barbara Mikulski, and original suffragists to lead the National ERA March for Ratification and Extension, a march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the United States Capitol of over 100, 000 on Women's Equality Day ( August 26 ), 1978 to demonstrate for a ratification deadline extension for the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution, and for the ratification of the ERA.

Betty Friedan ( February 4, 1921 – February 4, 2006 ) was an American writer, activist, and feminist.

In 1966, Friedan founded and was elected the first president of the National Organization for Women, which aimed to bring women " into the mainstream of American society now fully equal partnership with men ".

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 founded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws but was later critical of the abortion-centered, politicized tactics of many liberal and radical feminists.

As early as the 1960s Friedan was critical of polarized and extreme factions of feminism that attacked groups such as men and homemakers.

Friedan was born Bettye Naomi Goldstein on February 4, 1921 in Peoria, Illinois, to Harry and Miriam ( Horwitz ) Goldstein, whose Jewish families were from Russia and Hungary.

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 ".

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.

Justine Blau was also greatly influenced by Friedan.

The New York Times obituary for Friedan noted that she was " famously abrasive " and that she could be " thin-skinned and imperious, subject to screaming fits of temperament.

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

Along with Friedan, Gloria Steinem was an important feminist leader, co-founding the NWPC, the Women's Action Alliance, and editing the movement's magazine, Ms.

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.

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.

Friedan was referencing a " movement " as early as 1964.

After completing his Ph. D., Douglas was a postdoc at the University of Chicago for one year, then moved to Rutgers University in 1989 with Dan Friedan and Steve Shenker to help start the New High Energy Theory Center ( NHETC ).

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 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.

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

In addition to these collections, the library also houses the works of Susan B. Anthony, Amelia Earhart, Betty Friedan, Adrienne Rich, and many others.

" 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.

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

The movement grew with legal victories such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court ruling of 1965 ; in 1966 Friedan joined other women and men to found the National Organization for Women.

Sandra Henry and Emily Taitz ( Betty Friedan, Fighter for Woman ’ s Rights ) and Susan Taylor Boyd ( Betty Friedan: Voice of Woman ’ s Right, Advocates of Human Rights ), wrote biographies on Friedan ’ s life and works.

Betty Friedan: Fighter For Women's Rights, Hardcover Edition, Enslow Publishers 1990, ISBN 0-89490-292-X

Betty Friedan: A Voice For Women's Rights, Hardcover Edition, Viking Press 1985, ISBN 0-670-80786-9

Betty Friedan: Voice For Women's Rights, Advocate of Human Rights, Hardcover Edition, Gareth Stevens Publishing 1990, ISBN 0-8368-0104-0

The Senate rejected his nomination 45 to 51 on April 8, 1970 following much pressure from the Civil Rights and Feminist Movements and impassioned testimony from Betty Friedan and others.

In 1970, after stepping down as NOW's first president, Friedan organized the nation-wide Women's Strike for Equality on August 26, the 50th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granting women the right to vote.

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.

However, many other feminists are opposed to censorship, and have argued against the introduction of anti-porn legislation in the United States-among them Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Karen DeCrow, Wendy Kaminer and Jamaica Kincaid.

Betty Friedan: Feminist ( Women of Achievement ), Paperback Edition, Chelsea House Publications 1990, ISBN 1-55546-653-2

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

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.

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

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.

" 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.

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

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.

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.

* 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

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

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.