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Betty Friedan, author of the groundbreaking
"The Feminine Mystique," looks back at
her life in a new memoir.

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JUDITH BOLTON-FAS MAN

Special to the Jewish News

A

synopsis of a newly pub-
lished book described the
fate of a woman who had
dropped out of Vassar at 19,
married and then had six children as "a
course that's hard to imagine now."
Certainly it is more accurate to say
that given the choice, most women
would not travel down that same road
today. But that was not always so, and
it is no exaggeration to say that Betty
Friedan played an unparalleled role in
changing women's lives in the late
20th century.
Life So Far (Simon & Shuster; $26)
is Friedan's new memoir, and it is a
dynamic recollection of an extraordi-
nary life in which the Jewish imperative
of tikkun olon has been amply fulfilled.
Friedan herself invokes the concept
when she writes, "There's something
in Jewish theology about your duty to
use your life to make life better for
those who came after. I felt that mis-
sion strongly."
That mandate made a strong
impression on Betty Goldstein Friedan
early in her life. Born and raised in
Peoria, Ill., Friedan was sensitive to
the social divisions that existed there
between Jews and non-Jews.
Friedan's father was a Polish Jewish
immigrant who owned a jewelry store.
Her mother was a first-generation
American, born and raised in St.
Louis. Early on, Betty detected her
mother's deep frustration, her unhap-
piness at being consigned solely to the
role of wife and mother. Nevertheless,
her mother occasionally rose above her
own misery, encouraging her smart
daughter to get out of Peoria.
Friedan did exactly that when she
went to Smith College in 1938 where,
Judith Bolton-Fasman is a

Massachusetts-based freelance writer.

for the first time in her life, she felt
accepted and understood. Unlike in
Peoria, she was mostly welcomed as a
Jew at Smith, editing the school news-
paper and distinguishing herself as a
student of psychology.
But World War II raged in Europe,
and news about the Holoca'ust filtered
into bucolic Smith. Friedan recalls a
petition circulated at the school calling
for relaxed immigration quotas for
Europe's Jews. She signed it but was
bitterly disappointed when four Jewish
juniors arid seniors were among those
who did not.
And so it was with a Jewish con-
sciousness that Friedan began advocat-
ing for equality and human rights in
the very town where she had felt
rejected. Shortly after college, and
with America having entered the war,
she gave a lecture at a synagogue in
Peoria about confronting antisemitism
locally as well as "its deadly evil
expression in Nazism."
It was around this time that Friedan
turned down a prestigious fellowship in
psychology at Berkeley — a road not
taken but with some regret. She married
Carl Friedan shortly thereafter and the
couple settled in New York City. It was
there that her flirtation with socialism
led to a job as a reporter for a labor
newspaper. And it was her pregnancy
with her second child that led to her ter-
mination from that position.
Another road cut off, but this time
the alternative route proved to be the
decisive one in her life.
Short on cash, Friedan helped to
maintain her family by freelancing for
women's magazines like McCalls, Ladies
Home Journal and Redbook. Ever the
social scientist, Friedan, who was now
the mother of three with a mortgage on
a house in suburban Westchester, sensed
that there was a big story about women
that was not being told.
She eventually found her story after

