Influence
Friedan is credited for starting the contemporary feminist movement and writing a book that is one of the cornerstones of American feminism. Her activist work and her book The Feminine Mystique have been a critical influence to authors, educators, writers, anthropologists, journalists, activists, organizations, unions, and everyday women taking part in the feminist movement. 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.” Although there have been some debates on Friedan’s work in The Feminine Mystique since its publication, there is no doubt that her work for equality for women was sincere and committed.
Judith Hennessee (Betty Friedan: Her Life) and Daniel Horowitz, a professor of American Studies at Smith College, have also written about Friedan. Horowitz explored Friedan’s engagement with the women's movement before she began to work on her book, The Feminine Mystique and argues that Friedan’s feminism did not start in the 1950s but rather before that in the 1940s. Focusing his study on Friedan’s ideas in feminism rather than on her personal life Horowitz’s book connects Friedan to the history of American feminism.
Justine Blau was also greatly influenced by Friedan. In Betty Friedan: Feminist Blau writes about the personal and professional life of Friedan through the feminist movement. Lisa Fredenksen Bohannon in Woman’s work: The story of Betty Friedan goes deep into Friedan’s personal life and writes about her relationship with her mother. Sandra Henry and Emily Taitz (Betty Friedan, Fighter for Woman’s Rights) and Susan Taylor Boyd (Betty Friedan: Voice of Woman’s Right, Advocates of Human Rights), wrote biographies on Friedan’s life and works. Journalist Janann Sheman wrote a book called Interviews with Betty Friedan containing interviews with Friedan for the New York Times, Working Women, and Playboy, among others. Focusing on interviews that relate to Friedan's views on men, women and the American Family Sheman traces Friedan's life and explores The Feminine Mystique. Betty Friedan has influenced many individuals into writing about her and topics about women's rights and equality.
Read more about this topic: Betty Friedan
Famous quotes containing the word influence:
“They tell us that women can bring better things to pass by indirect influence. Try to persuade any man that he will have more weight, more influence, if he gives up his vote, allies himself with no party and relies on influence to achieve his ends! By all means let us use to the utmost whatever influence we have, but in all justice do not ask us to be content with this.”
—Mrs. William C. Gannett, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 5, ch. 8, by Ida Husted Harper (1922)
“My administration is pledged to follow the policies of Mr. Roosevelt in this regard, and while that pledge does not involve me in any obligation to carry them out unless I have Congressional authority to do so, it does require that I take every step and exert every legislative influence upon Congress to enact the legislation which shall best subserve the purposes indicated.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)