Jewish American activist and author
As we commemorate Jewish American Heritage Month, we celebrate Betty Friedan (February 4, 1921 – February 4, 2006) — a Jewish American writer, thinker, and activist who reshaped the conversation around gender equality in the United States.
Friedan’s activism was deeply rooted in her identity as both a woman and a Jewish person. Born Bettye Naomi Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois, she grew up in the 1920s and 1930s under the dual pressures of antisemitism and rigid gender expectations.
As a Jewish girl in a predominantly Christian town, she was excluded from social clubs, and, saw her father’s jewelry business targeted for being Jewish-owned – painful experiences of being marginalized and othered that shaped her life’s work.
After graduating from Smith College in 1942, Friedan studied psychology on a graduate fellowship at UC Berkeley. Like many women of her time, she left the graduate program after a year, not because of a lack of talent, but due to the overwhelming pressure to choose marriage and domestic life over intellectual ambition.
In the mid-1940s, Friedan worked as a journalist at the Federated Press. Despite being a progressive news service, it fired her when she became pregnant with her second child.
Undaunted, while raising her family in the suburbs during the 1950s, she shifted to freelance writing for mainstream women’s magazines such as McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal. As she researched and wrote articles, she began to see a growing dissatisfaction being expressed by white middle class housewives living in the suburbs, like herself.
She wondered … Why were so many white, middle-class women, living what appeared to be the American Dream, quietly miserable? Why did a generation of women feel unfulfilled by lives centered solely around domesticity? … And set out to find answers, publishing her findings in the ground breaking book The Feminine Mystique (1963). Her answer was revolutionary: the problem wasn’t with individual women — it was with a society whose culture and institutions denied women their full humanity, stifled their ambitions, and confined them to roles far beneath their potential.
By naming white suburban women’s widespread unhappiness “the problem that has no name,” Friedan helped launch a national reckoning and the second-wave feminist movement. Her work revealed that liberation could not be partial or personal — it had to be collective, and grounded in the belief that all people deserve the freedom to shape their own lives.
In 1966, frustrated by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s refusal to enforce Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act regarding gender discrimination in the workplace, Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) alongside more than 20 other advocates. Their vision was bold and inclusive: to bring women into full and equal participation in American society — in the workplace, in education, in politics, and in the home.
Friedan’s work encourages us to recognize that personal experiences often reveal deeper systemic barriers, and reminds us that the struggle for gender equality is about dignity, respect, and inclusion, and is inextricably connected to the broader fight for human rights.
History is not behind us — it’s the ground we stand on. Let’s honor Betty Friedan by continuing to push for equity across all communities.
