The Feminine Mystique

Born Bettye Naomi Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois, Betty Friedan was an influential writer and feminist thinker of the mid-twentieth-century women’s rights movement. Although Friedan excelled in her psychology studies at Smith College, she did not pursue a professional career, choosing instead the life of a homemaker. After interviewing women who had graduated from Smith, she developed her widely read critique of the social expectation that women ought to be content with domestic work. Subsequently, she became a major figure in the burgeoning women’s liberation movement, helping to found the National Organization for Women and continuing to organize and advocate for women’s political rights for the rest of her life.