Betty Friedan

(1921 - 2006)

After graduating from Smith College in 1942, Betty Friedan worked as a journalist in New York City. In 1947 she married and moved to suburban Rockland County, where she took freelance writing assignments and sporadic teaching jobs while keeping her family’s house and raising children. Inspired by a 1957 questionnaire that revealed that most of her Smith classmates were—like her—dissatisfied with their lives, she began work on The Feminine Mystique, publishing it six years later. In 1966 Friedan cofounded the National Organization for Women.

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