I don’t really have a Friedan story – I first read The Feminine Mystique in a battered secondhand copy about 1985, but having read the fictional but immensely powerful The Women’s Room a few years early, it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, and seemed already rather moderate and meek.
But she was revolutionary for her time. In The Guardian this morning a group of feminists provide their memories. I won’t point you to the Greer piece; it is one of her less attractive efforts.
The Times’s obit plays it straight, while suggesting that her “moderation” was, at least to some degree, a political front.
If Mystique was before your time, the Guardian has also published an extract.
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