Betty Friedan Gender Equality

Gender equality isn’t something that can easily be achieved. Throughout the decades, women have fought long and hard to be considered equal to their male counterparts. One of feminism's most prominent writers made waves during the sixties by publishing her book: The Feminine Mystique. In the paper, I would like to discuss the life of Betty Friedan. Who she was and what she contributed to the feminist movement as well as what led her to write The Feminine Mystique and why this book is so important to the movement and it’s target audience: women .
Women’s Rights leader and Activist, Betty Friedan was born in 1921 to two Russian immigrants in Peoria, Illinois. Her Father worked at a jewelry store while her mother gave up her job as the editor of a women’s page in the …show more content…
She ended getting married five years after graduating college. While working as an editor Friedan has her first two children, however, while pregnant with the second she was fired because they knew she would take another maternity leave. She would’ve had to prioritize work over her children and nothing is more important than being there for your children. Throughout the course of the interview her husband was barely mentioned, probably due to the fact that their marriage ended in divorce in 1969. After becoming a housewife, Friedan was restless and began thinking if if other women like her mother felt the same way that she did.
Betty Friedan began observing her peers and that research was used in her book that was called the : The Feminine Mystique. The Feminine Mystique, according to the New York Times says that it began as a survey Ms. Friedan conducted in 1957 at a reunion with other Smith College graduates. Based on their responses she discovered that like herself each woman felt something described as a "nameless, aching dissatisfaction". In the book she would go on to refer to this as " The Problem with No