'Feminine Mystique' author Friedan dies

Betty Friedan, author of "The Feminine Mystique" and the first president of the National Organization for Women, has died. She was 85.

Friedan died at her home of congestive heart failure, the Associated Press reported, citing a cousin, Emily Bazelon.

"The Feminine Mystique," first published in 1963, helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the feminist movement. Friedan, calling it "the problem that has no name," used the book to detail the frustration of American women with the lack of equality in the home and the workplace.

The mystique is a problem that "lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women," Friedan wrote in the best- selling book. The book grew out of her own experience working as a journalist and raising three children in Rockland County, New York, she recalled.

Friedan co-wrote the National Organization for Women's founding statement, calling for "true equality for all women in America, and toward a full equal partnership of the sexes," and was elected its first president in 1966. The organization was established that year by 28 people attending the Third National Conference of the Commission on the Status of Women, NOW says on its Web site.

Seeds of Book

"Betty led NOW when we were challenging every orthodoxy about what it means to be a woman," said the organization's president, Kim Gandy, today in an e-mailed statement.

NOW currently has 500,000 members throughout the U.S.

In an interview with the Public Broadcasting System in 2000, Friedan recounted working as an editor for a trade union newspaper when she was fired after getting pregnant with her third child. The seeds of her book were planted when she did an alumni questionnaire for Smith College 15 years after graduating.

She used themes she discovered from the questionnaire for articles she wrote for McCall's, Redbook and The Ladies Home Journal and eventually wrote "The Feminine Mystique."

In 1993, Friedan published "The Fountain of Age" and in 2000, a memoir called "Life So Far."

Friedan was born in Peoria, Illinois, and graduated from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1942. She married Carl Friedan in 1947.

Friedan is survived by a daughter, Emily Friedan of Buffalo, New York; her sons, Daniel Friedan of Princeton, New Jersey, and Jonathan Friedan of Philadelphia, nine grandchildren, a brother and a sister, AP said.

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