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preserving family, motherhood and professional life was not only possible, but also the right way for
their own liberation.
A radical biography, a controversial choice
Since the publication of The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan has constantly argued that her
political consciousness of women's issues have emerged not before the late ‘50s from her own
personal experience as “alienated suburban housewife”, presenting herself as ‘’a sort of naive and
apolitical suburban housewife who stumbles onto a startling discovery.’’ 12 In 1998 historian Daniel
Horowitz showed that Friedan’s feminism had much deeper roots. In rebuilding Friedan’s past –
through interviews and researches, also in private sections of Friedan’s archives – Horowitz became
convinced that this freelance journalist had deliberately omitted and hidden her radical militancy as
labor journalist and Popular Front Feminism for two reasons: the first one specifically political:
protecting herself from the ideological persecution of McCarthyism and Red‐baiting, which
marginalized the most extreme tips of political radicalism; the second one linked instead to a specific
will to gain a large middleclass female public, eager to identify itself into an accessible feminist
model. 13
Can we really affirm that Betty Friedan had consciously removed part of her young radical
engagement to embrace a more comfortable liberal feminist discourse? Who really was the author of
The Feminine Mystique?
Bettye Naomi Goldstein was born on the 4th of February 1921, in Peoria (Illinois), from a middleclass
Jewish family. Between 1938 and 1942 she attended the Smith College in Northampton, where
she began to develop a progressive and radical social vision and a feminist sensibility, turning from a
provincial outsider into an advocate of trade unions, labor movement, and Marxist theory;
particularly attentive to the racial and wage discriminations among working class women. In 1942
she moved to Berkeley (California) to attend a graduate course in psychology where she began to
master the Freudian theory. At Berkeley Goldstein began to be controlled by the FBI for her relation
with a communist Jew, involved in nuclear energy research. The lack of political activism in Berkeley’s
context, drove her to move in 1943 to New York, where she began to work for the Federated Press,
the most important press agency of the American left, where she continued to support political
radical activities, celebrating in particular in 1946 the birth of the Congress of American Women, a
progressive organization involved in the fight against racism, and in favor of the “equal pay for equal
work” and the social protection for the working mothers. After being fired for her feminist
enthusiasm and for promoting the reinsertion of a wealthy veteran, Goldstein found a job as reporter
at ‘’UE News’’, the official publication of the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of
America, one of the most radical unions of the 40s. In these years became even more central the
commitment to promote the rights of working women, thanks in particular to her rapprochement to
the most important figures of progressive‐labor feminism, as Betty Millard, Elizabeth Hawes and
Sylvia Cohen Scribner. After some interviews in the factories of New Jersey, she published in 1952 an
extremely strong pamphlet – which focused especially on double oppression of black women, and
influenced the famous work of the radical Eleonor Flexner: Century of Struggle (1959). In the same
year she was fired because of her second pregnancy. After a so radical journalistic experience, Betty
Goldstein get married with the theatrical producer Carl Friedan, and moved into suburban reality,
where she began to work as free‐lance journalist for women's magazines, leaving the old political
passions and obliterated her past. The regret of being discriminated, and the rampant anti‐radical
and anti‐feminist climate, determined in these years a turning point. Starting from this moment,
Friedan began in some public interviews to circumscribe the importance of her radical past, affirming
for example: ‘’we had considered ourselves part of the vanguard of the working‐class revolution,
even if we still read Vogue under the hair dryer, and spent all our salaries on black cashmere clothes
and Gucci gloves’’ 14 , and also: ‘’I probably would have been much happier as a society reporter on
the women’s page of The New York Times than covering worker’s strikes for UE News. But I learned a