Betty Friedan: Creative Work and Feminist Awakening

“The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own”. Betty Friedan, feminist author and icon who’s most famous work came to be known as The Feminine Mystique (1963), was not always aware of the impact she would have on the feminist cause, but after requesting a maternity leave to raise her three children, she was terminated from her job and replaced by a man. This event made Friedan conscientious of the fact that women struggled with the choice of having a family or a career, while their male counterparts could juggle both with ease. Although some critique Friedan for keeping the Women’s Rights movement in the mainstream, and believe she mainly focused on middle class white

Additionally, after leaving UC Berkeley, Friedan dropped everything in California and moved to New York, where she got a job at a news company as a reporter. Friedan had always been an editor for the school newspaper during college and had hastily discovered her profound love and passion for writing, but had yet to put it to use as momentum for the feminist cause until she published The Feminine Mystique. The book took five years of researching what roles women exactly and actually have in society. The qualities of the novel that make it so exceptionally effective, are how Friedan was able to combine her psychological knowledge from her studies and her desire to write into a piece of work full of anecdotes and interviews from various ordinary and some influential women. The Feminine Mystique discussed how women were not pleased with being housewives and had feelings of worthlessness and helplessness. Friedan often refers to this emotion of feeling stuck throughout the novel as “the problem that has no name” or the “Housewives Syndrome”. Friedan exclaimed “sometimes a woman would tell me that the feeling gets so strong she runs out of the house and walks through the streets. Or she stays inside her house and