WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Betty Friedan, whose 1963 book "The Feminine Mystique" helped inspire the modern feminist movement and who co-founded the National Organization for Women, died on Saturday on her 85th birthday, a relative said.
Friedan died at her home in Washington of congestive heart failure, just before 3 p.m.(2000 GMT), her cousin Emily Bazelon told Reuters.
"For Betty, feminism was an aspect of humanism. And one of her sons said this morning that she demonstrated that sheer intelligence could trump lack of intelligence," Bazelon said.
Friedan was born Bettye Naomi Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois, and attended Smith College, a leading women's college in Massachusetts, where she edited a campus paper and graduated with honors in 1942. She attended the University of California, Berkeley for a year before working as a journalist. In 1947, she married Carl Friedan, a marriage that lasted 20 years and produced three children.
"The Feminine Mystique" emerged from an article about a survey she conducted of fellow graduates at Smith and focused on the restrictions on women of the role of full-time homemaker. It became a best-seller and helped invigorate the women's movement and U.S. feminism.
Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women, with Pauli Murray, the first African-American female Episcopal priest and served as its first president from 1966 to 1970.
She also helped found NARAL, originally the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws.
Her other books included "The Second Stage, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement,"nd "The Fountain of Age."
She is survived by two sons and a daughter, nine grandchildren, a brother and a sister. Her funeral is planned for 11 a.m. on Monday at Riverside Funeral Chapel in New York.
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/qu...ty_friedan.htm
Selected Betty Friedan Quotations
• A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man's advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all.
• The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own. There is no other way.
• Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.
• When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.
• The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.
• The only kind of work which permits an able woman to realize her abilities fully, to achieve identity in society in a life plan that can encompass marriage and motherhood, is the kind that was forbidden by the feminine mystique, the lifelong commitment to an art or science, to politics or profession.
• It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
• A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex but neither should she adjust to prejudice and discrimination.
• The problem that has no name — which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities — is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.
• Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffered Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — "Is this all?"
• No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
• Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgasmic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery.
• Men weren't really the enemy -- they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.
• Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework - an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.
• If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based.
• Aging is not "lost youth" but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
^^BUMP. Doesn't anyone care that Betty is gone?
so nobody cares that Betty is dead, sad.
Feminist leader Betty Friedan is dead...
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