Betty Friedan Books

Betty Friedan offers an intimate reflection on her life and career, detailing the personal and political challenges she faced while leading the women's movement. She shares her journey from a lonely childhood to becoming a pivotal figure in founding the National Organization for Women (NOW), navigating political infighting and societal discrimination. Friedan candidly addresses her tumultuous marriage, the struggles within the movement, and her commitment to maintaining its integrity. Her memoir is rich with personal anecdotes and insights into the broader fight for women's rights.

Defying accepted wisdom about love and work in old age, and about conventional male and female roles as we get older, Betty Friedan weaves together her own experience of age and a radical look at research studies and interviews. Her aim is to show that ageing is a new stage - a time of growth, not the final slide from youth.

When Betty Friedan produced The Feminine Mystique in 1963, she could not have realized how the discovery and debate of her contemporaries' general malaise would shake up society. Victims of a false belief system, these women were following strict social convention by loyally conforming to the pretty image of the magazines, and found themselves forced to seek meaning in their lives only through a family and a home. Friedan's controversial book about these women - and every woman - would ultimately set Second Wave feminism in motion and begin the battle for equality. This groundbreaking and life-changing work remains just as powerful, important and true as it was forty-five years ago, and is essential reading both as a historical document and as a study of women living in a man's world. 'One of the most influential nonfiction books of the twentieth century.' New York Times 'Feminism ...... began with the work of a single person: Friedan.' Nicholas Lemann With a new Introduction by Lionel Shriver

Betty Friedan argues that once past the initial stages of describing and working against politcal and economic injustices, the women's movement should focus on working with men to remake private and public tasks and attitudes.

'What if she isn't happy - does she think men are happy in this world? Doesn't she know how lucky she is to be a woman?' The pioneering Betty Friedan here identifies the strange problem plaguing American housewives, and examines the malignant role advertising plays in perpetuating the myth of the 'happy housewife heroine'. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.