Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique at 50

It’s the 50th anniversary this year of the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. According to the quote on the cover of my Penguin edition, ‘Feminism … began with the work of a single person: Friedan.’ Quite something, then.

In fact any mention of Betty Friedan brings out something like post-traumatic stress symptoms in me, even though she died in 2006. When I was a student I invited her to take part in a Cambridge Union debate on feminism. She came, and frankly it was like entertaining Cleopatra. She was heroically grand, heroically ugly and with a brilliantly American, unabashed sense of her own importance. She asked me what subject I was reading and I said clumsily that I was ‘in history’. ‘You’, she said kindly, ‘are studying history. I am in history.’

Of course, she was right. She carried the day on a motion that ‘Feminism is Good for Men’, and in passing savaged poor Mary Kenny, who gamely spoke for the other side.