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developed remained within a mainstream context, which gave visibility to a few privileged women.
Moreover, in The Feminine Mystique Friedan still kept in high regard the institutions of marriage,
motherhood and family, not considering other possible choices.
After the publication of The Feminine Mystique, the American Historian Gerda Lerner wrote to
Friedan to congratulate, regretting however for the focus on white middle‐class women,
remembering how this narrow perspective had been for a long time one of the limits of the suffragist
movement; the working women, especially black, could not be ignored because of their number,
economic strength and double experience of oppression. What Friedan had instead done, was
marginalizing a foreground reality in full political ferment. While much of white America retreated to
the suburbs, conformed to the consumer, corporate way of life, and avoided political activism at time
when anti‐Communist crusaders could easily destroy the lives of political dissenters, black America
was busy marshaling the most important grass‐roots political movement of the century. 20 The Civil
Rights Movement – who captured the attention of the nation in 1955 with the Montgomery,
Alabama, bus boycott – symbolically began when an African‐American woman, Rosa Parks, refused
to give up her seat to a white person on a bus. According to bell hooks 21 and Angela Davis 22 – the two
leading exponents of Black Feminism – Friedan ignored the existence of all non‐white and poor
women, representing paradigmatically the more general tendency of western white liberal
conservative feminism – perceived by African‐American women and by the new radical feminists as
extremely racist, classist and heterosexist. It’s possible to recognize other limitations of Friedan’s
analysis. One issue she never raised, for example, was the question of why women alone should have
been held responsible for housework and child care, perpetuating in this way a lasting stereotype.
The interpretation extremely victimizing of the condition of suburban women in ‘50s offered by The
Feminine Mystique – which crystallized the image of a non‐political period, without considering the
complexity of suburban reality and the different forms of feminine activism and fight beyond that
reality – was revised by the new leading exponents of feminist historiography within the new
department of women’s studies of ‘70s. 23
In 1966 Betty Friedan founded in Washington the National Organization for Women (NOW),
expected to become one of the major liberal feminist organizations in the USA, particularly active
against sex discrimination and in the battle for increasing women’s participation within all the
institutional spheres of power. NOW pressured Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, to
include women in his affirmative action policies, endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment and made
reform of abortion laws a national priority. NOW concentrated on destroying obstacles that defined
women as different in rights or abilities from men: integration, not separation, and reform, not
revolution, were its goals. Friedan always promoted the importance of a partnership between the
two sexes, rejecting severely the separatist and the consciousness‐raising practices which
characterized instead the feminist experience of the new Women’s Liberation groups, ‘’the braburning,
anti‐man, politics of orgasm school.’’ The name – National Organization for Women –
expressed a commitment to recruit both men and women who shared a belief in gender equality. As
Friedan always remarked, the use of “for” in place of “of” wasn’t accidental. According to radicals
feminists NOW’s narrow focus on formal equality with men not only ignored the fundamental
problem – women’s subordination within home – it also assumed that equality in an unjust society
was worth fighting for. If male‐dominated institutions and values were the problem, women must
develop their own institutions – reflecting their owns values – and make these the cornerstone
independence. The concept of “sexual politics”, theorized by Kate Millet in 1969, was criticized and
averted by Friedan for all her life, refusing to “reduce” politics to sexuality. She denied for a long time
– until she was president – and in a strong way the support of NOW to the cause of lesbianism,
proving to have a rigid and dogmatic political vision: young feminists were "man‐haters," lesbians
were "the lavender menace" which could have alienate support for broader women’s rights
objectives. 24 For their part radical feminists defined negatively NOW as an ‘’Aunt Tom organization»,
which fought exclusively for the “four Ms: Middle‐Class, Middle‐Aged, Moderate matrons’’ 25 ,
accusing it of “collaborationism”.