BETTY FRIEDAN

The tumultuous life of a tireless activist for women’s rights.

A drama critic and cultural historian, Shteir offers a corrective to negative images of noted feminist Betty Friedan (1921-2006) that accuse her of classism, racism, and homophobia. Drawing on more than 100 interviews, newly available archival sources, and private papers, Shtier provides a more nuanced perspective, portraying her as an idealistic, determined, and complex woman whose explosive temper and anger permeated personal and professional relationships. The eldest daughter in an upper-middle-class family of Reform Jews, she was a sickly, intellectually precocious child prone to rages. At 14, the “short, pudgy bibliophile” began high school, where she became drawn to theater. “Acting,” Shteir writes, “gave her a sense of how she could move audiences as well as craft an identity.” Accepted to many top colleges, she decided on Smith, where she excelled, becoming editor-in-chief of the Smith College Associated News. She was inspired further to pursue journalism after attending the Highlander Folk School, in Tennessee, which offered workshops on writing about labor and union issues. Shteir recounts Friedan’s many love affairs, her work as a reporter for the Federated Press news agency in New York, her estrangement from her family, and her encounters with antisemitism. In 1947, she married Carl Friedan, a theater producer; by 1956, they had three children, and in 1969, they divorced. In 1963, The Feminine Mystique, a book that “universalized female unhappiness,” catapulted Friedan to international fame. Shteir describes Friedan’s role in the founding of the National Organization of Women; her ongoing disputes with other members of the group as well as with noted feminists; and her unwavering support of abortion rights and the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Her second book, the essay collection It Changed My Life, revealed her as both a visionary and a “paranoid braggart slaying radical enemies.”

An evenhanded biography of a pugnacious revolutionary.