Cold Open - College Reunion

It’s midsummer 1957, on the grounds of Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts.

36-year-old Smith alumna Betty Friedan smooths the creases from her dress and takes a deep, settling breath. Through the gate in front of her, a wide lawn stretches out. Groups of women cluster beneath the trees, laughing and talking.

Today is the 15th anniversary reunion for the Smith College class of 1942.

Betty forces a smile and then steps through the gates.

As she crosses the lawn, she recognizes faces she’s not seen since the day they graduated. She smiles a little awkwardly, unsure of which group to join first—but then a cheerful voice calls Betty’s name.

A small group of former classmates waves her over. They reach for her hands in greeting, some compliment her hair, some her clothes. Someone presses a cold drink into her palm. They talk of husbands and homes, children and schools. And at first, Betty just listens, sipping from her glass. But she’s not here to make small talk. So eventually, she puts down her drink and reaches into her purse for a small reporter’s notebook and a pencil. The movement draws glances, and the chatter falters.

Wasting no more time, Betty launches into a series of questions she's prepared earlier. She asks her former classmates who is working and who is not. Who feels fulfilled. Who feels restless. Who feels proud of the life they are living. Who feels happy?

At first, the answers are careful. Everyone is fine. Everyone is married. Everyone is grateful.

But Betty pushes for more. Some of the group drift away. The circle tightens. And eventually, voices lower and the smiles fade.

Finally, one of them admits she feels tired all the time. Another says she feels anxious. A third says she feels ashamed for wanting something more than she already has.

Suddenly, the women's words are tumbling out faster than Betty can write them down. It’s like a dam has broken, and Betty can’t keep up with the flood.

But all around them, the reunion continues as before. Glasses clink. Old friends greet one another. The afternoon hums with celebration. But Betty keeps writing. Despite her nerves when she arrived here, she knows that her former classmates are just like her. Beneath their dresses and smiles and perfectly styled hair, none of them are happy.

The short conversations at her college reunion give Betty Friedan plenty to think about. They confirm that what she has experienced in her own life is far from unique. It’s in fact a common problem—but it’s one without a definition or a name. So inspired by what she’s heard from her classmates, Betty will be determined to change that, and her crusade will help kickstart a new era of feminist thinking and campaigning when she publishes her first book on February 19th, 1963.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham, and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is February 19th, 1963: The Feminine Mystique.

Act One: A Problem With No Name

It’s September 1957, in Rockland County, New York, two months after the Smith College reunion.

Sitting at her dining room table, Betty Friedan licks the flap of a manila envelope and presses it shut with her thumb. She then places on top of a large pile of identical envelopes, all addressed in the same careful hand.

Each one contains a survey with questions like “Who makes decisions in the household?” “Do you have interests outside of your home?”, and “Do you agree with your husband’s politics?”

It’s not the kind of quiz that's printed in popular women’s magazines. But Betty has always had interests and ambitions that were a little out of the ordinary.

She was born in Illinois to progressive parents who believed girls should have just as good an education as boys. They ensured Betty grew up surrounded by books, and when she got older, she went to a good school. At Smith College, Betty’s professors recognized her talents, and after graduating summa cum laude in 1942, she planned to go on to study for a doctorate in psychology.

She moved west to the University of California, Berkeley. But not everyone in her life was as supportive as her parents had been. Under pressure from a boyfriend who resented her academic ambitions, Betty dropped out and returned east. Settling in New York’s Greenwich Village, she instead built a career in labor journalism. She had long been active in left-wing politics and began writing about strikes, wages, and working conditions. She learned to listen to people and really hear what they had to say.

In 1947, Betty married an advertising executive and quickly had three children. Nine years later, the family moved upstate to Rockland County. And while her husband continued his work in the city, Betty became a stay-at-home mother.

But it didn’t take long for her to grow bored with life in the suburbs. By her mid-thirties, Betty’s once-promising career in journalism had been reduced to writing occasional articles for women’s magazines. And her commissions were almost exclusively about homemaking or domesticity.

So as her 15-year college reunion approached, Betty began wondering if her classmates were as dissatisfied with life as she was. And like any good journalist, she decided just to ask. And on the college lawn that summer, she saw something she could not ignore. From the outside, the women around her seemed to have it all. But inside, many of them were just like Betty—increasingly frustrated and unhappy.

Betty's instincts told her it was worth pursuing further, so she put together a survey for her former classmates to gather more proof. Now, it’s ready to be mailed. Within days of sending out the envelopes, she starts getting responses. Betty stacks them up, unopened, resisting the urge to rush ahead before she has a large enough sample.

But when she finally sits down to read them, she finds to her relief that the women have taken the survey seriously. The answers are long, detailed, and often sad. Betty spreads the pages across the table. She marks margins, circles phrases, draws connecting lines. Not all of the women are unhappy, but Betty notices a pattern.

The women who describe themselves as most content are the ones who have resisted the stereotypical role of the housewife and mother. The women who conform most are the ones who feel the most trapped, who feel that they’re wasting their potential, their education, and their lives.

Betty can’t ignore what she’s found, and she begins to shape the material into an article, tapping back into the kind of journalism work she craves to do. She reaches out to more women through some old contacts and local community groups—steadily collecting more and more data.

And when the article is written, she gives it a blunt, punchy title: “Are Women Wasting Their Time in College?” She sends it to her agent, who advises her to keep her expectations low—this isn't the kind of thing magazine editors are usually interested in.

And as predicted, the rejections come quickly. One male editor even sends the article back with a note saying, “Friedan must be going off her rocker. Only the most neurotic housewife will identify with this.”

Soon after, Betty’s agent concludes that no major women’s magazine will touch it. But Betty doesn’t back down. If her article can’t get published, she decides to raise the stakes by turning it into a book.

Betty has no illusions about what she is attempting. Turning a short article into a book will take time. It will mean working around the demands of family life, squeezing in research and writing late at night or early in the morning.

But Betty won’t be deterred. And once she begins, she’ll find she cannot stop.

Act Two: A Manifesto

It’s February 1959, in Rockland County, two years after Betty Friedan decided to turn her rejected article into a book.

The now 38-year-old Betty draws a firm line through a sentence on a yellow legal pad. She flips the page and rewrites it. The house around her is quiet. The children are at school, and the baby is asleep—for now, at least. So she continues to write longhand, at the dining room table, filling the pages line by line.

Over the past two years, this project has grown far beyond its original shape. Betty has interviewed white, middle-class women across suburban America. She recognizes that her interviewees are undeniably privileged in many ways. They are not uneducated. They don’t suffer racial discrimination or the gnawing anxiety of wondering where their family’s next meal might come from. In fact, they live in circumstances that postwar America holds up as the ideal. And yet, it's clear that many of them feel empty.

Betty has noticed how often the women frame this unhappiness as a personal failure. They assume something is wrong with them, and many have resorted to self-medicating to cope—drinking alone in the afternoon or taking prescription tranquilizers. Betty recognizes this reflex. She's felt the same way. But if so many women blame themselves for the same distress, then the problem cannot be individual. It must be systemic.

Since Betty had that realization, her work has shifted. She believes many feminists of earlier generations promoted women’s suffrage and education as a way to create better wives and mothers. Those campaigners achieved some great things—but they also essentially propped up the existing social structure. And now Betty is convinced it’s precisely that structure which is holding women back. So, in her writing, she starts questioning wider American culture more deeply. She writes about Sigmund Freud and the way his ideas have been used to argue that women are happier in traditional feminine roles. She examines popular women’s magazines that celebrate domestic devotion while quietly discouraging ambition. And she critiques educators who steer young women and girls away from careers and toward marriage as a final goal.

Of course, Betty is still part of the social structure she is condemning. She’s still a housewife. She still has to write between dropping off her kids at school, household errands, and preparing meals. But despite all those challenges, steadily, her manuscript thickens. The legal pads pile up. It takes years, but by the early 1960s, Betty is finally ready to submit her book to publishers.

She knows that her argument is controversial, but she hopes that the evidence she’s assembled will make it impossible to ignore. But when the responses arrive, they are depressingly familiar. Some publishers tell Betty that the book is too provocative and urge her to soften her language. Others suggest the dissatisfaction she describes won’t be of interest to a wide enough readership. A few even question whether the problem exists at all.

But eventually, New York publishing company W.W. Norton agrees to print the book, which Betty titles The Feminine Mystique. But even then, W.W. Norton's commitment is limited. The initial print run will be small—just two thousand copies. There will be no marketing campaign to support its release, and the publisher seems to have little confidence that the book will ever be read beyond a niche audience.

Still, Betty agrees anyway—she's come too far to abandon the book now. The most important thing is that it's published. That the argument she is making is put out to the public.

So as the final galleys are prepared, she reads through the manuscript one more time. She still believes every word. Women have been taught to seek self-worth outside themselves, whether it’s their husbands, their children, or their homes. Their own development, education, and ambition have been neglected and even treated as dangerous or unfeminine.

Her book does not promise readers’ happiness, and it suggests no neat solutions to the problem Betty identifies—what it offers instead is only recognition. The publishing industry doesn't think there’s much of a market for that. But all the editors and executives who doubted her will be proved wrong. The book will not land quietly, and it won’t be forgotten. Instead, the world will discover just how many women have been waiting to see their lives in print.

Act Three: A Problem Named

It’s February 19th, 1963, in New York City, six years after Betty Friedan first began interviewing American housewives.

Betty pauses beside a newsstand as the morning crowd streams past her along the sidewalk. She buys a copy of the New York Times and flicks deliberately to the book review section, scanning column after column until she reaches the piece she’s looking for.

The review of The Feminine Mystique is unsparing. The New York Times critic dismisses the central claim in Betty’s book, arguing that women’s dissatisfaction reflects individual weakness rather than any cultural constraints. If the women Betty interviewed are unhappy, they have no one to blame but themselves.

Betty shakes her head. By now, that argument is an all too familiar one. Editors have been raising similar objections for years. Even now her book has been released, senior figures at her own publishing house have been careful to distance themselves from the book.

But the reactions Betty is more interested in are those of her readers. Because not long after publication, letters start arriving for Betty. Women wrote to her to say that the book has named feelings they once believed were shameful. Some admit they thought something was wrong with them. Others say they had assumed that they were alone.

Book sales climb quickly. The initial print run is soon exhausted, and more copies are ordered. Women read it on buses, in bedrooms, and late at night after their households have gone quiet. They start sharing the book and talking about the book. They begin to describe their own feelings not as a weakness or something to be ashamed of, but as a condition shaped by American culture, law, and expectations.

Not everyone sees themselves reflected in the book. Many point out that Betty has focused on white, middle-class interviewees, and she’s left the experiences of women of color and the working-class largely unexamined.

But Betty’s book is just the start. In the years that follow, others will expand on her arguments and research. This “second wave” of feminism will look beyond the narrow question of legal equality between men and women to shift the focus toward creating a level playing field in people’s everyday lives—at work, in education, and in the home.

By naming a problem earlier generations experienced but never fully articulated, Betty Friedan helped make that shift possible. And a new chapter in the fight for equality in America began with the publication of The Feminine Mystique on February 19th, 1963.

Outro

Next on History Daily. February 20th, 1939. Thinly disguised as a demonstration for “true Americanism”, a Nazi rally takes place in Madison Square Garden.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shahzaib.

Sound design by Mollie Baack.

Music by Thrumm.

This episode is written and researched by Olivia Jordan.

Edited by William Simpson.

Managing producer Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are William Simpson for Airship and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.