The Personality of Betty Friedman Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

The Personality of Betty Friedman - Essay Example It was Betty Friedan, who brought the problems and difficulties, faced by women, to the limelight, and worked Day-in and day-out to win equal status for them. Betty Friedan is universally regarded as one of the founding mothers of feminism's Second Wave. In The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, Friedan aimed to expose the sexist underpinnings of America's post-World War II complacent prosperity. Friedan argued that millions of American housewives found the destiny of mother and housewife which society mapped out for them stifling, repressive and even dehumanizing. (Boucher, 2003) Hence, Friedan serves as the torch-bearer of the protection of feminist rights and privileges at an equal level to those of male stratum of society, who fought against the female exploitation at the hands of a male dominating set of society at a global level. She not only pointed out the problems faced by women including wife battering, discouragement while seeking jobs and working in a competitive atmos phere with men and sexual exploitation and harassment of the female folk but also wrote essays, books, articles and poems for the projection of feminist cause before the world. In addition, she also infused new ray of hope in the members of her community. While making an analysis of the history of the world at large, it comes to the account that social groups are not only divided into divergent religious, ethnic, cultural and racial groups but also the distribution of a society is based on age, gender and socioeconomic status too.