Born a century ago, on Feb. 4, 1921, Bettye Goldstein came of age when American women were participating in the workforce at record levels, aiding in the war effort and filling jobs vacated by men off fighting in Europe and the Pacific. After graduating from Smith College summa cum laude, she studied psychology at Berkeley for a time but then, discouraged from entering academia by a jealous suitor, became a journalist, signing herself Betty Goldstein. She married an advertising executive, taking his last name, and by the early 1950s, she was living in suburban New York, raising children, and otherwise living the socially codified life of a woman in that time of gray-suited company men.
The word men is used advisedly, for by that time most women had been pushed back out of the workplace. Discouraged from attending school due to the then-dominant belief that too much education meant spinsterhood, women married young and devoted their energies to family life: shepherding children to school, attending PTA meetings, and cooking dinner, ideally as neatly attired and coiffed as Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show.
Friedan found it stifling. At a 15-year college reunion, she distributed a questionnaire to find out what her classmates had been up to, and she found that they were stifled, too. For the next five years, employing her training in both psychology and journalism and expanding on a network of interviewees, she worked to put their pent-up dissatisfaction into words, and in 1963 her book The Feminine Mystique appeared, opening with a provocative question about the lives of her peers: “Is this all?”
Released during the same four-month-long newspaper strike that ushered in the New York Review of Books, Friedan’s book received little press attention. Still, McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal, two prominent women’s magazines, published excerpts, drawing their millions of readers to Friedan’s call—with not a few traditionalist dissenters who were just fine with the thought that women should stay home and unconcerned that at the dawn of the space race, as Friedan wrote, “America’s greatest source of unused brainpower was women.”
Yet the time was right for Friedan’s book. Its first paperback printing sold 1.4 million copies, the naysayers notwithstanding. At the turn of the millennium, that number stood at about 3 million. A 50th anniversary edition published in 2013 brought renewed attention to The Feminine Mystique, with Gail Collins, who wrote a foreword, noting that the book had become “the kind of best seller that defines an author’s life.”
It also changed many readers’ lives in articulating “the problem,” as Friedan called it, that inspired what has since been deemed “second wave feminism.” For a time, Friedan moved away from writing to help found the National Organization for Women and other women’s rights organizations. She wrote several other books before she died on her 85th birthday, though none was as well known as her first. Dated in some ways and utterly timely in others, The Feminine Mystique remains a foundational work of a political movement that asks that pointed question still: “Is this all?”
Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.