• Author of The Feminine Mystique
• Co-founder of the National Organization for Women
• Onetime member of the Young Communist League
• Longtime veteran of professional journalsm in the Communist Left
• Referred to the American household as “a comfortable concentration camp”
• Co-founded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, which would later change its name to NARAL Pro-Choice America

Co-founder of the National Organization for Women, Betty Friedan was an American feminist and a longtime member of the Communist left. She is credited with starting the "Second Wave" of feminism by authoring the 1963 book The Feminine Mystique.

Friedan was born Betty Goldstein on February 4, 1921, in Peoria, Illinois. Her father was a jewelry store owner while her mother stayed home to raise her children, having quit her job as the women's-page editor of a newspaper. Later in life, Friedan would describe her mother as someone who suffered from “impotent rage” because she had “no place to channel her terrific energies.”

In 1942 Friedan graduated summa cum laude from Smith College, where she received a degree in psychology. She thereafter won a fellowship in psychology to UC Berkeley, where she became the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects with J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Friedan became politically active in the 1930s and 1940s, aligning herself with the American Communist left. In 1940 she endorsed the Popular Front strategy of starting idealistic movements in order to lure well-meaning people into advocating Communist objectives. From 1942-43, she was a member of the Young Communist League. In 1944 she sought to join the American Communist Party but was turned down because, according to her FBI files, “there already were too many intellectuals in the labor movement.”

After completing her graduate studies, Friedan moved to New York City and worked in a variety of jobs until 1947, when she married Carl Friedan, a theatre producer and advertising executive.

For the first five years of her marriage, Friedan was a housewife and mother who also worked as a journalist for the Communist-controlled media, including The Federated Press from 1943-46, and a publication of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (IUE) from 1946-52. Historian Ronald Schatz described the IUE as “the largest Communist-led institution of any kind in the United States.”

Friedan continued to write while raising her three children. In 1957 she penned a magazine article reflecting on the recently held 15-year reunion of her Smith College graduating class. Based on a survey Friedan had conducted of her female classmates, the piece alleged that most of those young women had become disillusioned suburban housewives suffering from protracted melancholia. Friedan concluded that a deep sense of dissatisfaction was extremely widespread among American women.

With the results of this survey in mind, in 1963 Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, which launched the modern women’s movement. The book’s theme was that women as a class were victimized not only by many forms of discrimination, but also by the socially transmitted message that they could find a sense of identity and fulfillment solely by living vicariously through husbands and children -- while sublimating their own aspirations to be something other than wives and mothers.

In her book, Friedan ignored her status as a veteran of communism (which promoted the idea that American women were “oppressed”) and instead depicted herself as an average housewife who never previously had given any thought to the status of women in society.

In 1959, while doing research for The Feminine Mystique, Friedan copied into her notes the following quote from Frederick Engels’ famous 1884 essay, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: “The emancipation of women becomes possible only when women are enabled to take part in production on a large, social scale, and when domestic duties require their attention only to a minor degree.”

An almost instant best-seller, The Feminine Mytique would sell 600,000 hardcover copies and more than two million in paperback.

In his 1998 book Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique, Smith College professor Daniel Horowitz would establish conclusively that Friedan’s famous description of the American household as “a comfortable concentration camp” was a result of her Marxist leanings rather than her experience as a housewife.

In October 1966 Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women, and she would serve as the group's President until March 1970.

In 1969 Friedan helped establish the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, which would later change its name to NARAL Pro-Choice America. This same year, Friedan and her husband Carl divorced.

Friedan helped organize the August 26, 1970 “Women's Strike for Equality” in New York City, where tens of thousands of women followed Friedan in a march down Fifth Avenue while they carried signs and banners bearing such slogans as “Don’t Cook Dinner — Starve a Rat Tonight!” and “Don’t Iron While the Strike Is Hot.”

Friedan also led the unsuccessful campaign to ratify the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and in 1971 she was a founding member of the National Women's Political Caucus. Two years later she became Director of the First Women's Bank and Trust Company.

Friedan published several books, including It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement (1976); The Second Stage (1981); The Fountain of Age (1993); Beyond Gender (1997); and her memoir Life So Far (2001).

Friedan gave occasional contributions to Democratic political candidates (Carl Levin, Bill Bradley, Daniel Patrick Moynihan) and leftwing organizations (EMILY’s List, the Democratic National Committee, and the Hollywood Women's Political Committee).

She died of congestive heart failure on February 4, 2006, her 85th birthday.