A leading figure in the women's movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century.

The national strike was successful beyond expectations in broadening the feminist movement; the march led by Friedan in New York City alone attracted over 50,000 people.

[8][9] Harry owned a jewelry store in Peoria, and Miriam wrote for the society page of a newspaper when Friedan's father fell ill.

The strongest were able to cope more or less well, but it wasn't that easy for a woman of forty-five or fifty to move ahead in a profession and make a new life for herself and her children or herself alone.

[15] In her book, Friedan described a depressed suburban housewife who dropped out of college at the age of 19 to get married and raise four children.

[17] She spoke of her own 'terror' at being alone, wrote that she had never once in her life seen a positive female role-model who worked outside the home and also kept a family, and cited numerous cases of housewives who felt similarly trapped.

From her psychological background she criticized Freud's penis envy theory, noting a lot of paradoxes in his work, and offered some answers to women desirous of further education.

It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning [that is, a longing] that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States.

"[19]Friedan asserted that women are as capable as men for any type of work or any career path against arguments to the contrary by the mass media, educators and psychologists.

[3] Her book was important not only because it challenged hegemonic sexism in US society but because it differed from the general emphasis of 19th- and early 20th-century arguments for expanding women's education, political rights, and participation in social movements.

The book became a bestseller, which many historians believe was the impetus for the "second wave" of the women's movement in the United States, and significantly shaped national and world events.

[24] Friedan originally intended to write a sequel to The Feminine Mystique, which was to be called Woman: The Fourth Dimension, but instead only wrote an article by that title, which appeared in the Ladies' Home Journal in June 1964.

Her other books include The Second Stage, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement, Beyond Gender and The Fountain of Age.

[30] Some of the founders of NOW, including Friedan, were inspired by the failure of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; at the Third National Conference of State Commissions on the Status of Women they were prohibited from issuing a resolution that recommended the EEOC carry out its legal mandate to end sex discrimination in employment.

NOW lobbied for enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the first two major legislative victories of the movement, and forced the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to stop ignoring, and start treating with dignity and urgency, claims filed involving sex discrimination.

They successfully campaigned for a 1967 Executive Order extending the same affirmative action granted to blacks to women, and for a 1968 EEOC decision ruling illegal sex-segregated help want ads, later upheld by the Supreme Court.

[43] In 1970 NOW, with Friedan leading the cause, was instrumental in the U.S. Senate's rejection of President Richard M. Nixon's Supreme Court nominee G. Harrold Carswell, who had opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act granting (among other things) women workplace equality with men.

[44][45][46] While the march's primary objective was promoting equal opportunities for women in jobs and education,[47] protestors and organizers of the event also demanded abortion rights and the establishment of child-care centers.

[48]So I think individual women will react differently; some will not cook that day, some will engage in dialog with their husband[s], some will be out at the rallies and demonstrations that will be taking place all over the country.

That year at the DNC Friedan played a very prominent role and addressed the convention, although she clashed with other women, notably Steinem, on what should be done there, and how.

[34][52][53] She pushed the feminist movement to focus on economic issues, especially equality in employment and business as well as provision for child care and other means by which both women and men could balance family and work.

"[57] While opposing all repression, she wrote, she refused to wear a purple armband as an act of political solidarity, considering it not part of the mainstream issues of abortion and child care.

"[72] She asked, "Why don't we join forces with all who have true reverence for life, including Catholics who oppose abortion, and fight for the choice to have children?

[79] Allan Wolf, in The Mystique of Betty Friedan writes: "She helped to change not only the thinking but the lives of many American women, but recent books throw into question the intellectual and personal sources of her work.

[25][84] The New York Times obituary for Friedan noted that she was "famously abrasive", and that she could be "thin-skinned and imperious, subject to screaming fits of temperament".

Media focus would fall on feminists grading each other on personality and appearance, the source of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem's well-documented antipathy.

This belief was the key to a good deal of Betty's behaviour; she would become breathless with outrage if she didn't get the deference she thought she deserved.

Carl denied abusing her in an interview with Time magazine shortly after the book was published, describing the claim as a "complete fabrication".

[Note 4] Some of Friedan's papers are held at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

A fictionalized version of her was a character in the Britney Spears jukebox musical Once Upon a One More Time as the 'Original Fairy Godmother' who gives the fairytale princesses 'The Feminine Mystique' to empower themselves.