Her father, Harry Goldstein, emigrated from Russia in the 1880s, and built a successful jewelry business in the United States. 1 She was born Bettye Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois, on February 4, 1921. Gillespie, 'Anything that gets women and men thinking about these issues of inequality as they relate to gender, that's important.IN 1963, BETTY FRIEDAN (1921–2006) published The Feminine Mystique, a founding text of modern feminism that is considered one of the most influential books of the twentieth century.

'The issues are still with us,' echoes Ms. Gillespie, 'Anything that gets women and men thinking about these issues of inequality as they relate to gender, that's important.' 'I was struck by how little had changed in some ways - in terms of the ways that consumer culture shapes a narrative about women's worth their sexuality, their fertility, this kind of cult of parenthood - the ways in which women are blamed for being mother's that are not good enough or too good.' When freelance journalist Anna Holmes, founder of the website Jezebel, recently reread the book, she says even fifty years after its publication, some of its concerns felt a little too familiar. 'Taking Friedan's message and reworking it- putting it through the lens of our experience- created our way of addressing those same issues,' she says. According to her, the book served as a starting point for African American women to address those inequities. We were brought here to be workers.'ĭespite its shortcomings, Gillespie believes that aspects of 'The Feminine Mystique' spoke to the gender inequality in the African American rights movement. 'We come from a tradition in which we have always been here as workers. 'The world she was describing was not the world I knew,' says Gillespie. When Gillespie read 'The Feminine Mystique' for the first time in the late 1960s, she found the book to be a powerful testament to the struggles of middles class and upper-middle class white women - but not necessarily women of color. Magazine and freelance journalist Anna Holmes, founder of the website Jezebel, explain how Friedan's book resonated with women of color and the ways in which it has influenced the feminist movement. Marcia Ann Gillespie, the first African American editor in chief of Ms.

However, there were serious shortcomings in her analysis, especially as it pertained to women of color in the US. It was a call to action.įriedan's revolutionary book is widely credited with bringing women's issues to the attention of mainstream America. Fifty years ago this week, Betty Friedan published 'The Feminine Mystique.' The groundbreaking feminist text proclaimed that the stalled rigidity of sexual roles was out of step with the other transformations taking place in the 20th century.

The feminine mystique was written by