Catalyst of Feminist Revolution

In 1957, she was asked to conduct a survey of her Smith classmates for their 15th reunion and found that the women who did not conform exactly to traditional notions of womanhood were happier than those who did. A light bulb went on for Friedan: "Maybe it wasn't education that was the problem, keeping American women from 'adjusting to their role as women,' " she wrote, "but that narrow definition of 'the role of women.' "

She wrote a magazine article based on that argument, but it was repeatedly rejected. Realizing that her thesis "threatened the firmament" of women's magazines, she decided to bypass that venue and put her ideas into a book instead.

She interviewed scores of suburban women, repeating many of the questions she had asked her Smith sisters. Another part of her research entailed long days in the New York Public Library, looking for shifts in the types of heroines depicted in women's magazine fiction. The results of her study were stark: Friedan found that the avid career woman who dominated the magazines in the 1930s had given way by the 1950s to a less adventuresome model: the contented homemaker.

Was the 1950s image reality, or was it a self-fulfilling fantasy cooked up by magazine editors and advertisers? Suspecting the latter, Friedan plowed on with her interviews. She was staggered by the dissatisfactions aired by wives and mothers, by their vague laments about feeling empty, anxious and incomplete. A mother of four who had shirked college for marriage and family told Friedan: "There's no problem you can even put a name to. But I'm desperate. I begin to feel I have no personality. I'm a server of food and putter-on of pants and a bed maker, somebody who can be called on when you want something. But who am I?"

"I came to realize," Friedan would later write, "that something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives today.... For the startling pattern that began to emerge as one clue led me to another in far-flung fields of modern thought and life, defied not only the conventional image but basic psychological assumptions about women."

She found that books on the psychology of women, such as those by Freudian analyst Helene Deutsch, generally adhered to traditional ideas of women's fulfillment in hearth and home. Seeking a theoretical basis for her views of women's plight, Friedan turned to the work on identity and self-realization by psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and her old Berkeley advisor, Erikson. Their ideas informed what became her central tenet: "that the core of the problem for women today is ... a problem of identity -- a stunting or evasion of growth that is perpetuated by the feminine mystique."