Betty Friedan is dead
There are very few writers or thinkers who can be said to have entirely changed the way a culture thinks of itself: for better or worse, Betty Friedan was one of them.
Her 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. made it possible for women to move beyond the 50’s housewife model. There will be a fair bit of retrospective whinging as to whether the choices women have made have been all that brilliant; but Friedan’s contribution was to articulate the need for such a choice.
I have no time at all for her politics yet I have no choice but to recognize her arrival at the very instant where wealth, technology and cultural change allowed women to explore other options for their lives.
Her work was essential to the creation of the dilemmas which face Western societies. For the last forty years it has been central to our own debate about who we are.