Paillant,+R.

Before the 1960s, traditional American society encouraged young women to find happiness and fulfillment through marriage and homemaking. ." The new suburban lifestyle prompted many women to leave college early and pursue the "cult of the housewife." Magazines such as //Ladies Home Journal// and //Good Housekeeping// and television shows such as "Father Knows Best" and "The Donna Reed Show" reinforced this idyllic image this idyllic image. In 1963, ** Betty Friedan ** published a book called **// The Feminine Mystique //** that identified "the problem that has no name." Amid all the demands to prepare breakfast, to drive their children to activities, and to entertain guests, Friedan had the courage to ask: "Is this all there is?" Within three years of the publication of her book, a new feminist movement was born, the likes of which had been absent since the suffrage movement. In 1966, Friedan, and others formed an activist group called the ** National Organization for Women **.

. .As everyone has been saying, the icons of another era are fast leaving us. The latest, of course, is Betty Friedan, who died Saturday at 85. Almost everyonfirst with her extraordinary book // __Feminine Mystique of 1963__ // and then with her pivotal role in founding the National Organization for Women [NOW] three years later. e in the feminist blogosphere has written about her passing, and there is much that is good and interesting to read.Friedan, like a number of conservative feminists, saw her movement as calling for a reconfiguring of heterosexual relationships along more egalitarian lines.Rather than build feminist solidarity between women with a different orientation and hetoreosexual women, Friedan sought to purge NOW of those women who did not share her orientation. A Rather than build feminist solidarity between women with a different orientation and hetoreosexual women, Friedan sought to purge NOW of those women who did not share her orientation. To be fair, it was written right after the election of Ronald Reagan, and Friedan was trying to reconfigure her movement to be successful in a more conservative era.Dworkin, like Friedan, quarreled with and horrified a number of erstwhile allies. Indeed, Andrea was almost a mirror image of Betty Friedan: almost everything Friedan embraced, Andrea rejected. Dworkin was so eager to include the marginalized and the wounded that she frightened folks with her powerful rhetoric; Friedan was so eager not to frighten middle America that she tried, time and again, to purge the feminist movement of its more radical voices.