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Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan

Feminism Pioneer Betty Friedan Dies at 85

Betty Friedan, whose manifesto "The Feminine Mystique" helped shatter the cozy suburban ideal of the post-World War II era and laid the groundwork for the modern feminist movement, died Saturday, her birthday. She was 85. Friedan died at her Washington, D.C., home of congestive heart failure, according to a cousin, Emily Bazelon.
Ref. https://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060205/ap_on_re_us/obit_friedan

Friedan Betty

Her death made me look back at some of the things she has accomplished in her lifetime.

1. She wrote several books including, The Feminist Mystique, The Second Stage, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement, and recently The Fountain of Age.

2. She founded NOW (National organization for women.

3. She also helped to create NARAL (originally National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws).

4. She was active in Marxist and Jewish radical circles. She attended Smith College, where she edited a campus newspaper and graduated summa cum laude in 1942.

You see, she was many things to women that they no longer recognize. Feminism to her was something that not only gave women equality with men, but stop the injustices allowed to happen upon women. When the feminist movement started, they understood abortion for what it was, a horrible injustice to women and children visited on them by the oppressive inconvenienced male dominated society. They believe that women in the work force should be allowed, but understood that women cannot do all the same things men can, much as men cannot do all the same things as women. She believed that women should not be treated as slaves or lesser beings or sexual objects, but as human beings of equal stature. The death of this marxist, jewish, woman is a huge loss to what feminism was supposed to be. She stood for it her entire life, and even at the end, criticized the feminist movement for becoming what it is today.