the problem finds a name
“Her book inspired me as a young wife and mother to become involved in the women’s empowerment movement. I still am in my 80’s.” Ann Smith, Green Tent Circle
She had done everything right.
Bettye Naomi Goldstein grew up in Peoria, Illinois, the daughter of a Russian immigrant jeweler and a Hungarian immigrant mother who had worked as a journalist — until Bettye was born, after which she stopped. That detail would stay with Bettye for a long time.
She graduated summa cum laude from Smith College in 1942. She earned a prestigious graduate fellowship in psychology at Berkeley. She moved to New York and spent years as a political journalist and labor reporter — writing, arguing, pushing, advocating for workers’ rights and women’s workplace equality at a time when neither was particularly fashionable.
Then she got married, had three children, and moved to the suburbs.
And something happened that she could not, for a long time, explain.
By the late 1950s, Betty Friedan — as she now called herself — was a housewife in Rockland County, New York, doing freelance writing for women’s magazines to supplement the family income. She was, by every external measure, living the life American women of her era were told they should want: a husband, children, a house, security. She had all of it.
She was deeply, quietly, persistently unhappy. And she had no words for why.
In 1957, she attended her fifteen-year reunion at Smith College and handed out a survey to her former classmates. What came back stunned her. Woman after woman — educated, middle-class, suburban, married — described the same formless frustration she felt. The same sense of something missing that had no name, no recognized diagnosis, no public language.
She spent the next five years interviewing women across the country, filling notebooks, building a case.
In 1963, she published The Feminine Mystique.
The book argued that postwar American society had constructed a suffocating image of femininity — the perfectly fulfilled wife and mother who needed nothing beyond her home — and that this image was quietly destroying the inner lives of millions of women who had been educated and capable and ambitious, and were now being told that ambition itself was unfeminine. She called the pervasive unhappiness she had documented “the problem that has no name.”
It became an instant bestseller. Women wrote to her in the thousands saying they had wept reading it — not from sadness, but from recognition. From the relief of finally seeing their own experience described in print.
It is still regarded as one of the most influential nonfiction books of the twentieth century.
Three years later, in 1966, Friedan joined with Pauli Murray and Aileen Hernandez to co-found the National Organization for Women — writing its mission statement herself, calling for women’s “full participation in the mainstream of American society…in truly equal partnership with men.” NOW’s first campaign successfully ended the decades-long practice of sex-segregated job advertising — the practice of listing jobs separately under “Help Wanted — Male” and “Help Wanted — Female.”
She organized the Women’s Strike for Equality in 1970 — a nationwide demonstration that drew tens of thousands of marchers into the streets on the 50th anniversary of American women’s right to vote. She co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971 alongside Congresswomen Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm and Gloria Steinem.
Her legacy is not without honest complexity. The Feminine Mystique spoke powerfully to white, middle-class, educated women — and largely did not speak to the experiences of women of color, working-class women, or LGBTQ+ women, a limitation scholars and fellow activists have rightly documented. Her relationships with more radical voices in the movement were often fractious and difficult. History holds both things as true.
What is also true is this: she named something millions of people were living but couldn’t say.
And once a thing is named, it can never again be quietly suffered in isolation.
Betty Friedan died in 2006 on her 85th birthday — her actual birthday — of congestive heart failure.
A woman who did everything right, found herself silently miserable anyway, and spent the rest of her life making sure no one else had to feel that alone.
Her name was Betty Friedan. And “the problem that has no name” finally had one. – From Facebook Group What Did I Just See?
Time for the Next Step
I would argue that it is not the “full participation [of women] in the mainstream of American society…in truly equal partnership with men” that is needed but a return to MATRIARCHY a system of governance that takes into account the needs of all, that acknowledges that life is meant to be lived intergenerationally and communally, that acknowledges we are more than the paycheck we bring home and our lives must be addressed ‘holistically’ with respect to these bodies we occupy: singing, laughing, coming TOGETHER in circles, listening, finding our voices and more.
Have you ever cooked with a group of people laughing and singing?
Did you raise your children with breaks where other adults kept a capable eye on them?
And had the chance to influence them?
Do your elders, who have the time, sit around and talk to the younger generation, blessing them with their wisdom?
Have you explored all sides of yourself? not just that of a worker, but also that of a lover, a friend, a nurturer, a creator?
Have you sat in a Circle underneath a full moon in front of a fire sharing, talking, singing?
Do you steward the Land you live on?
Understanding its natural gifts and plant and animal allies living with not conquering them?Do you honor your Ancestors?
THIS. This.
The Sacred Feminine must be invited back in. – Caryn MacGrandle, theDivineFeminineApp.com
take a moment to rise
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