‘Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter’
By Rachel Shteir
Yale University Press, 384 pages

During a break in the recording of Virginia Graham’s television show, “Girl Talk,” Betty Friedan screamed at the audience: “If you don’t let me have my say I’m going to say the word ‘orgasm’ ten times.”

The words scream, yell, and shout occur many times in Rachel Shteir’s biography.  What made Friedan so angry? She raged at how women often subverted themselves by subordinating themselves to husbands who expected them to stay at home and mind the children, at men for creating “the feminine mystique,” the title of her 1963 epoch-making book. Men made women a kind of sanctuary of male fantasies about “The Second Sex,” so titled in Simone de Beauvoir’s classic book, first published in 1949.

Friedan, one of the founders of the National Organization of Women and a stalwart supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment, spearheaded the second wave of feminism until challenged by women’s liberationists such as Kate Millett, author of “Sexual Politics” (1970) and Gloria Steinem, founder in 1971 of Ms. Magazine, against whom Friedan also railed. 

Friedan is a difficult subject to encompass, given her changing and conflicting positions on what constituted equality for women and also because in her private life she was an abused wife — albeit one who fought back physically against an unfaithful husband.

Certain lesbian liberationists and others attacked Friedan as too middle class, too white — too removed, in other words — from the concerns of women who did not have her privileges, such as her Smith College background and her work as writer to rely on. Such criticisms, however valid, miss the point that Ms. Shteir’s subtitle emphasizes: disruption can be spectacularly effective.

I also wonder if Friedan’s rages were not sometimes a ploy, depending on the person or the audience she encountered. Ms. Shteir reports that during the promotion of “The Feminine Mystique,” Friedan appeared on Merv Griffin “without incident,” was a “hit on the Pierre Berton show in Canada,” before her eruption on “Girl Talk,” which Ms. Shteir deems “one of the most raucous talk shows on television, and Friedan made sure it lived up to its reputation.”

As a polemicist, Friedan achieved her mission by destroying complacent attitudes about a woman’s place in the home and the dictates of male hegemony.  Whereas some critics saw in Friedan a woman out of control, Ms. Shteir often portrays her subject’s outbursts as a mark of her valor. 

Friedan’s stridency alienated certain women and men, and her own life can be exposed for a failure to live by her own principles. Her own daughter, at one point, disavowed feminism, but gradually mother and daughter reconciled and Friedan tried, fitfully, to acknowledge the contributions of adversaries such as Millett and Ms. Steinem, especially after a period when NOW did not invite Friedan to important events. 

A fascinating aspect of this biography, part of the Yale Jewish Lives series, is Friedan’s evolving attitude toward Judaism and women’s place within it.  As she grew older, the secular Friedan saw more value in a faith that now included female rabbis. Her role in Israel, where at first she seemed to encounter indifference, expanded as a new generation of feminists welcomed her insights. 

If no other book Friedan wrote could rival the impact of “The Feminine Mystique,” her work as a founder of NOW still puts Friedan in a class by herself, relentless in putting the case for women’s rights and making huge efforts to make her words in support of feminism a reality. 

Friedan has been compared unfavorably to de Beauvoir and criticized for simply applying the ideas of “The Second Sex” to American society.  Yet it is not the originality of Friedan’s book that is honored in Ms. Shteir’s biography, but, rather, the persuasive force that inspired generations of women at a time when the density of “The Second Sex” had yet to penetrate the American psyche.

The paradox of Betty Friedan is that her famous book inspired a movement, institutionalized as NOW, that Friedan did not know how to weld together very well, and yet thrives as an organization that, in the end, cannot do without her, and a legacy, her biographer shows, that continues to motivate and bedevil successive generations.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Female Icons: Marilyn Monroe to Susan Sontag.”