Betty Friedan

While millions of women spent the sixties supporting civil rights for African Americans and protesting against the war in Vietnam, there was still inequality between the sexes in movements dominated by men. After the protests, the marches, and the sit-ins, women were still assigned the ageold tasks of cooking, childcare, and office work. The feminist movement, while not widely popular until the 1970s, was formed in the bedrock principles of equality and individual rights that were forged in the sixties.

One of the earliest and most well-known voices calling for equal rights for women was Betty Friedan. In 1957, Friedan took a survey of her former classmates of the Smith College class of 1942 and found a profound unhappiness with many of the responses. In 1963, she published her findings in the groundbreaking Feminine Mystique which warned...