Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan's 1963 book The Feminine Mystique named what she called 'the problem that has no name': the suffocation of educated American women confined to domestic roles, cut off from the public world of work, civic life, and self-determination. The book sold millions of copies and catalyzed a generation of women into political action. In 1966, Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), which became the primary institutional vehicle for second-wave feminism — pushing for the Equal Rights Amendment, reproductive rights, equal pay, and workplace anti-discrimination protections. Friedan's vision was expansive and, to many in mid-century America, genuinely threatening: she argued that women were full human beings entitled to the same range of choices, opportunities, and public participation as men. This vision had immediate political consequences. The ERA, which NOW championed, passed Congress in 1972 and appeared on track for ratification. The Religious Right's response to Friedan was not incidental — it was foundational. Phyllis Schlafly built her entire post-1972 political career as an explicit counter to Friedan's feminism. Schlafly's 'Stop ERA' campaign framed the ERA as a threat to homemakers and femininity itself; her Eagle Forum was in every meaningful sense the anti-Friedan infrastructure. Beverly LaHaye founded Concerned Women for America in 1979 explicitly as 'a Christian alternative to NOW' — naming NOW, Friedan's organizational vehicle, as the enemy to be countered. The ERA fight of 1972–1982 was, in Marjorie Spruill's framing, fundamentally a contest between two visions of American womanhood: Friedan's vision of women as autonomous public actors, and Schlafly's vision of women as protected wives and mothers. That the Religious Right won this battle — the ERA failed ratification in 1982 — is inseparable from the anti-feminist mobilization that Friedan's work provoked. Friedan continued to write and organize until her death in 2006. She was neither a villain nor a radical; she was a woman who believed women were people, and the movement that arose to prove her wrong became one of the defining forces in American politics.

Documented themes

• Opposition / Resistance
• Gender & Patriarchy

Connections from Betty Friedan

• founded → National Organization for Women (1966) — Betty Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women in 1966 at a conference of the State Commissions on the Status of Women, becoming its first president. NOW was the direct institutional expression of the political vision she had articulated in The Feminine Mystique (1963): women were full human beings entitled to equal participation in public life, and achieving that equality required organized, assertive political action. Friedan led NOW through its foundational years, establishing it as the primary vehicle for second-wave feminist advocacy on the ERA, reproductive rights, equal pay, and workplace discrimination.
• triggered → Concerned Women for America (1979) — Beverly LaHaye founded Concerned Women for America in 1979 explicitly naming Betty Friedan and NOW as the enemies to be countered — her organization was, in her own framing, a 'Christian alternative to NOW.' The founding logic was direct: Friedan had articulated a vision of women as autonomous public actors entitled to equality; LaHaye founded CWA to provide an organizational home for women who rejected that vision and embraced instead the complementarian framework of Christian womanhood as wife, mother, and helpmate. Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and NOW's political campaigns were the specific threat that CWA existed to oppose. Without Friedan, there is no CWA.

Connections to Betty Friedan

• Phyllis Schlafly opposed (1972) — Phyllis Schlafly's post-1972 political career was constructed as an explicit, sustained opposition to Betty Friedan's vision of women's liberation. Schlafly's Stop ERA campaign, Eagle Forum, and decades of writing directly countered Friedan's arguments about women's equality and public participation. The ERA fight of 1972–1982 was, in Marjorie Spruill's framing, fundamentally a contest between these two women's visions of American womanhood.

Sources

• Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics — Marjorie Spruill (2017)
• Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States — Sara Diamond (1995)