Friedan, Betty

Betty Friedan (1921–2006) is widely considered to be the founder of modern feminism, as the “second wave” of feminism in Europe and later in the rest of the world sees its roots as emerging from the USA from the 1960s onwards. Second‐wave feminism took off in Europe and later sparked off new “first waves” in many other countries until it became a worldwide movement. It is not surprising that Friedan sometimes claimed to have changed the course of human history, granting the individual a key role in forging change, an ongoing debate. Certainly Betty, born soon after World War I, was well in advance of her era's thinking when she undertook her original project to examine empirically, not conceptually, whether housewives were happy with their lot. But her first book, containing the empirical bombshell of women's pervasive discontent, was also timely as it was published in the same year as the official Kennedy Commission on the Status of Women's report “American Women,” which also questioned women's exclusion from any nondomestic life. Discrimination against women was on the agenda, and the moment for sex equality had come.