Betty Friedan, author and activist, died at the age of 85 on her birthday, Saturday February 4, 2006.

From this article on CBS News online:

She irritated both the right and the left as she helped launch the women's movement: asserting a woman's right to personal goals, while rejecting bra-burning and the view of men as the enemy.

But most of all, she shook the world.

Funeral services are being held Monday in New York for free-thinking Betty Friedan, whose book "The Feminine Mystique" became a best seller in the 1960s and helped lay the groundwork for the modern feminist movement, died Saturday on her 85th birthday.

Friedan's assertion in her 1963 best seller that having a husband and babies was not everything and that women should aspire to separate identities as individuals, was highly unusual, if not revolutionary, just after the baby and suburban booms of the Eisenhower era.

The feminine mystique, she said, was a phony bill of goods society sold to women that left them unfulfilled, suffering from "the problem that has no name" and seeking a solution in tranquilizers and psychoanalysis.

"A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, 'Who am I, and what do I want out of life?' She mustn't feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children," Friedan said.

In the racial, political and sexual conflicts of the 1960s and '70s, Friedan's was one of the most commanding voices and recognizable presences in the women's movement.

As a founder and first president of the National Organization for Women in 1966, she staked out positions that seemed extreme at the time on such issues as abortion, gender-neutral help-wanted ads, equal pay, promotion opportunities and maternity leave.

Friedan also insisted that the women's movement had to remain in the American mainstream, that men had to be accepted as allies and that the family should not be rejected.

I have to say, personally, I have really identified with this view of feminism. The Feminine Mystique has inspired me over the years, and I pay tribute to it and to Betty Friedan in Plane Crazy.

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