First-year female students arrive at Duke University, 1960s. They shared what became a tumultuous marriage, caused in part by Carl’s discomfort with his wife’s success. In 1947, she married Carl Friedan, a theater producer and advertising executive with whom she bore three children. In both positions, she reported on the struggles of women workers and working-class families.

In 1943, she moved to New York City and found writing jobs, first with a socialist news service that advocated for the working class, and subsequently with a left-wing union publication.

She went on to Smith College, where she studied psychology and completed a year of graduate work at the University of California-Berkeley. Raised in a middle-class Jewish family in Peoria, Illinois, Elizabeth Goldstein thrived in high school as a successful student, writer for the student newspaper, and co-founder of the school’s literary magazine. A 1963 edition of The Feminine Mystique (right).Īlthough she was a white, middle-class suburban wife and mother sharing many of the characteristics of the readers whom she set out to attract, Friedan was not exactly like the frustrated women she portrayed in the book. This small figure proved grossly inadequate as sales quickly exceeded the million mark, helping to spark a mass movement that transformed women’s legal status.įriedan’s book encouraged women to break free of what she called “the feminine mystique,” a concept insisting that women’s true fulfillment was to be found through dedication to household labor and their roles as wives and mothers. Norton published Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in February 1963, it printed just 3,000 copies.

The feminine mystique original cover