Betty Friedan died at her home of congestive heart failure today.
She was the author of the much-heralded The Feminine Mystique.
She was 85. She founded NOW (the National Organization for Women) in 1966.
The Feminine Mystique is still a great book, calling as it did for women to have a life and personality independent of being a wife & mother. Sadly, a lot of what she had to say about women being autonomous is still quite relevant today.
Though there’s a part of me that hopes, somewhere in the universe, Susan B. and Cady Stanton and Wendy Wasserstein and Coretta Scott King and now Betty Friedan are conspiring to get these boys to stop pulling these stupid-ass moves.