Betty Friedan Facts
Betty Friedan Facts
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Interesting Betty Friedan Facts: |
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Betty became active in Marxism as a child. |
Despite being known as a good writer and winning awards for her writings later in life, Friedan was rejected as a writer for her high school's newspaper. |
She studied psychology for a year at the University of California, Berkley graduate school in 1943, but chose to pursue a full-time career as an activist instead. |
Many of her friends and associates in college were committed Marxists and communists who were investigated by the FBI. |
She worked as a journalist for pro-labor periodicals during the 1940s. |
While writer for the pro-labor magazine UE News in 1947, Betty met her future husband Carl Friedan. |
Friedan was known for having a caustic personality that sometimes drove a wedge between her and likeminded people. |
Carl and Betty had three children, but divorced in 1969. |
Friedan began research on her opus magnum, The Feminine Mystique, in the late 1950s and published the book in 1963. |
Betty also wrote five other books and hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles. |
Some of her unpublished works are now housed at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University. |
Friedan was one of the National Organization for Women's (NOW) original founders in 1966. |
She helped organize the Women's Strike for Equality on August 26, 1970, which happened to be the fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth. Amendment (Women's Suffrage/right to vote) to the United States Constitution. |
After abortion was legalized by the Supreme Court through Roe v. Wade, Friedan organized the National Abortion Rights League in 1973. |
Despite sharing virtually the same beliefs and working in many of the same circles, Friedan had a lifelong rivalry with fellow feminist Gloria Steinem. |
Betty was one of the primary driving forces behind the failed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) push in the late 1970s and early 1980s. |
Unlike many feminists of her era, Friedan never actively opposed pornography. |
Although she was never outspoken against homosexuality, Frieden rarely advocated on their behalf and did not believe that their lifestyles should be politicized. |
Friedan died of heart failure on February 4, 2006 at the age of eighty-five. |
Carl Friedan once said that Betty "changed the course of human history almost single-handedly." |
Despite often being overlooked in favor of Steinem by the mainstream, many scholars of feminism argue that Frieden was the primary impetus behind the Second Wave feminist movement. |
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