A contemporary of Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush, who attended Smith about the same time, she became editor of the campus newspaper and quickly established a reputation for brilliance. Friedan finished summa cum laude in psychology in 1942 and entered graduate studies at UC Berkeley.
At Berkeley, she won a prestigious science fellowship that had never been given to any psychologist, much less a woman. But she turned down the award when it became apparent that a physicist she was dating felt threatened by her success. Although she said she had little, if any, awareness of it at the time, she was fearful of being "brighter than the boys" and violating the mystique she would later so studiously dissect. Against the advice of her professors, who included the eminent theorist Erik Erikson, she gave up psychology all together.
Having discovered Marxism in college, Friedan decided that she would work for the "revolution." By 1943, she was immersed in popular-front journalism, first at the Federated Press in New York and later at UE News, the official newspaper of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, then one of the nation's most radical unions.
In 1947 she married theatrical producer Carl Friedman, who later dropped the m in his last name to create the more distinctive "Friedan." In 1948 the Friedans had the first of three children, Daniel. Four years later when she became pregnant with her second child, Jonathan, and requested maternity leave, she was fired from her job at the union paper, an event she later would call a "formative experience" in her evolution as a feminist. Her third child, Emily, was born in 1956.
As the family expanded, the Friedans settled in prosperous Rockland County, N.Y. Though she was determined to be a happy housewife, she suffered renewed attacks of her childhood asthma and resumed psychotherapy. Urged by her therapist not to waste her education and training, Friedan began to write for women's magazines. What commenced for the unwitting Friedan was an education in the feminine mystique.
She had wanted to write a profile of a woman who had given up a successful career as an advertising executive, married and become a serious sculptor, but editors were doubtful that their housewife-readers would be interested in such a woman. They accepted the article but only after deleting references to the woman's career. Within a few years, Friedan said, "I began to lose my zest" for writing the rigidly formulaic articles that women's magazines seemed to want.
