When Betty Friedan returned to her home town of Peoria in 1978 for a high school reunion (Peoria High School, class of 1938), she'd already covered a lot of territory.
Rachel Shteir, a professor at the Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago, outlines much of that activity in the new book, Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter.
As the author of The Feminine Mystique, a book published in February 1963 that Shteir said helped change the world, Friedan became one of the leaders of the women’s movement, a cause she fought for throughout her life. Friedan died in 2006 at the age of 85.
Shteir covers Friedan’s rise to famous feminist through her time in Peoria — when she was known as Bettye Naomi Goldstein — her time in college and her early writing career in New York. When "Mystique" was released in paperback in 1964 and the first edition sold 1.4 million copies, she became a star, a crusader and a symbol of the need for change.
Friedan was one of the founders of the National Organization for Women (NOW) who fought for the Equal Rights Amendment, universal childcare, and workplace protections for mothers.
She also disagreed with leaders of the women’s liberation movement when it came to “sexual politics.” She was not shy about stating her views and if some of her stands proved polarizing, she wasn’t fazed.
"Friedan was no saint," wrote Shteir. "But she was an oracle and an iconoclast, ahead of her time, the American activist with a Russian soul, the artist of moral and intellectual fervor, driven by a desire to change herself and others. She said things (about women, about Jews) that many people did not want to hear."
While Friedan said those things, she was not immune to changing her own views on things. Shteir noted that in the later '60s and '70s, having become a celebrity due to the success of her book, Friedan sometimes was impatient to move beyond being told about the impact “Feminine Mystique” had on a reader.
“I hear that a lot,” Friedan would say when someone told her how the book changed their life. While the response may have seemed ungracious, said Shteir, Friedan was focused on moving beyond the stereotypes established for women in the 1950s — a large focus of “Mystique.”
"It used to embarrass me, even to admit that I came from Peoria.," Friedan wrote in the New York Times in 1978. "It was a vaudeville joke, the epitome of the hick town...the town where I was born and grew up, and knew I had to get out of. I never wanted to go home again, or so I always used to tell myself.
"I remembered only the pain of growing up in Peoria. I never would admit the pleasure, the delight, the sweet sure certainty of belonging in Peoria — that small, satisfied, deceptively simple, mysterious, complex heartland of America, which undeniably provided my roots, and therefore the roots of whatever vision of equality, passion for justice, or sense of possibility drove me to the women's movement in the world."
