Books about Friedan from Amazon.com

The book that changed the consciousness of a country—and the world. Landmark, groundbreaking, classic—these adjectives barely describe the earthshaking and long-lasting effects of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. This is the book that defined "the problem that has no name," that launched the Second Wave of the feminist movement, and has been awakening women and men with its insights into social relations, which still remain fresh, ever since. A national bestseller, with over 1 million copies sold..
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The classic that needs no introduction The book that started the feminine revolution..
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Struggling to hold on to the illusion of youth, Friedan wrote, we have denied the reality and evaded the new triumphs of growing older. We have seen age only as decline In this powerful and very personal book, Betty Friedan charted her own voyage of discovery, and that of others, into a different kind of aging.

Friedan found ordinary men and women, moving into their fifties, sixties, seventies, discovering extraordinary new possibilities of intimacy and purpose. In their surprising experiences, Friedan first glimpsed, then embraced, the idea that one can grow and evolve throughout life in a style that dramatically mitigates the expectation of decline and opens the way to a further dimension of "personhood."

The Fountain of Age suggests new possibilities for every one of us, all founded on a solid body of startling but little-known scientific evidence. It demolishes those myths that have constrained us for too long and offers compelling alternatives for living one's age as a unique, exuberant time of life, on its own authentic terms.

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Scholar, journalist, activist, and noted author, Betty Friedan led a public campaign for equality in American society that stretched from 1950’s suburbia to the close of the 20^th century.

 

Friedan’s personal experiences motivated her to rally against anti-Semitism at Smith College, reveal wage discrimination as a reporter for labor unions, define domestic dissatisfaction in The Feminine Mystique, and organize women for equality with the founding of the National Organization for Women.  That public persona also affected her private life in marriage, motherhood, and eventual divorce.  This newest addition to Longman’s Library of American Biography Series follows Friedan through nearly 50 years of championing equality, mapping the successes and shortfalls of her agenda.

 

The titles in the Library of American Biography Series make ideal supplements for American History Survey courses or other courses in American history where figures in history are explored. Paperback, brief, and inexpensive, each interpretative biography in this series focuses on a figure whose actions and ideas significantly influenced the course of American history and national life. At the same time, each biography relates the life of its subject to the broader themes and developments of the times.

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Writer, teacher, and public intellectual, Betty Friedan has been in the spotlight almost continuously since the publication of The Feminine Mystique, her landmark book, in 1963.

Transforming Friedan into the mother of modern feminism, that book challenged the prevailing gender ideology in the country and ultimately led to one of the most profound movements for social change in American history. Friedan has been a passionate advocate of social and economic justice in America for nearly four decades.

Interviews with Betty Friedan is the first collection of her public discussions. Combative, witty, sly, and unrestrained, Friedan was often her own worst enemy in interviews. Early in her public career she avoided them, distrusting the way media portrayed her. Journalists, she complained, wrote as often about her appearance--droopy-eyed, messy, frumpy, drunk--as they did about what she said.

"It is ironic," notes editor Janann Sherman, "that the genre she resented for misrepresenting her serves so well in this volume in letting her speak for herself."

In Interviews with Betty Friedan, Sherman has gathered interviews spanning the thirty-six years at the heart of Friedan's career as a public intellectual. While Friedan's body of published work spells out her positions on a host of important public matters, these interviews cover a much broader range of social, political, and personal topics.

Though she spawned a movement, the tenor of feminism quickly changed, and Friedan battled to regain ground lost to radicals and lesbian feminists, whom she called "the lavender menace." Throughout these interviews the logic of her arguments about equity and fairness--as well as the remarkable consistency of her views about men, women, and the American family--provide a rich resource for scholarly research.

In showing her political and philosophical development, the interviews reveal Friedan as one of the twentieth century's most significant thinkers.

Janann Sherman is an associate professor of history at the University of Memphis. Her previous books include No Place for a Woman: A Life of Senator Margaret Chase Smith and, with Carol Lynn Yellin, The Perfect 36: Tennessee Delivers Woman Suffrage..
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It was Betty Freidan herself, in Life So Far, who spoke about her life and career and told us what it was all like from the inside. With the unsparing frankness that made The Feminine Mystique one of the most influential books of the century, Friedan looked back and told us what it took, and what it cost, to change the world. She took us on an intimate journey through her life, from her lonely childhood to the founding of NOW and her brilliant, contentious, and brave leadership of the Movement.

Life So Far chronicles the secret underground of women in Washington in the early sixties who drafted Friedan to spearhead an "NAACP" for women, and the daring of many who spoke out against discrimination. Friedan recounts the political infighting and dirty tricks that occurred within the Movement as well as the forces that tried to destroy it and how hard she fought to keep the Movement practical and free of extremism, including "man-hating." Friedan is equally frank about her twenty-two-year marriage to an advertising entrepreneur, which deteriorated into physical abuse. They later reconciled as friends.

Life So Far is forthright, full of stories and larger-than-life characters, and it is the scope of Friedan's vision and achievements that makes her memoir so important and compelling.

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This biography of Betty Friedan traces the development of her feminist outlook from her childhood in Illinois to her marriage. Horowitz offers a reading of "The Feminine Mystique" and argues that the roots of Friedan's feminism run deeper than she has led us to believe. The links between the "Popular Front" of feminism of the "Old Left" and the "New Left" feminism of the 1960s is delineated, thereby casting doubt on the claims of novelty that many have made about social movements of the 1960s. He illuminates important details by mining everything from her papers while a student as Smith College, to her articles for the labour press. Horowitz advances the historiography with descriptions of women's experiences of left-wing politics and culture in the 1940s and 1950s and by limning Friedan's place within that context..
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Europe's leading existential thinkers -- Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus -- all felt that Americans were too self-confident and shallow to accept their philosophy of responsibility, choice, and the absurd. "There is no pessimism in America regarding human nature and social organization," Sartre remarked in 1950, while Beauvoir wrote that Americans had no "feeling for sin and for remorse" and Camus derided American materialism and optimism. Existentialism, however, enjoyed rapid, widespread, and enduring popularity among Americans. No less than their European counterparts, American intellectuals participated in the conversation of existentialism. In Existential America, historian George Cotkin argues that the existential approach to life, marked by vexing despair and dauntless commitment in the face of uncertainty, has deep American roots and helps to define the United States in the twentieth-century in ways that have never been fully realized or appreciated.

As Cotkin shows, not only did Americans readily take to existentialism, but they were already heirs to a rich tradition of thinkers -- from Jonathan Edwards and Herman Melville to Emily Dickinson and William James -- who had wrestled with the problems of existence and the contingency of the world long before Sartre and his colleagues. After introducing this concept of an American existential tradition, Cotkin examines how formal existentialism first arrived in America in the 1930s through discussion of Kierkegaard and the early vogue among New York intellectuals for the works of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus. Cotkin then traces the evolution of existentialism in America: its adoption by Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison to help articulate the African-American experience; its expression in the works of Norman Mailer and photographer Robert Frank; its incorporation into the tenets of the feminist and radical student movements of the 1960s; and its lingering presence in contemporary American thought and popular culture, particularly in such films as Crimes and Misdemeanors, Fight Club and American Beauty.

The only full-length study of existentialism in America, this highly engaging and original work provides an invaluable guide to the history of American culture since the end of the Second World War.

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