Betty Naomi Goldstein was born in 1921 in Peoria, Illinois. She graduated from Smith College in 1942, and then received a research fellowship to study psychology as a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley. She married Carl Friedan in 1947, and worked as a freelance writer while raising their three children. Friedan began to feel repressed in her role as a housewife and decided to send out questionnaires to her Smith classmates. The results of the questionnaires indicated that many of the women were not satisfied with being wives and mothers. This event influenced Betty Friedan to write The Feminine Mystique in 1963, which would change the lives of women forever.
             The Feminine Mystique was a wakeup call to all women. It resulted in a social revolution. The book introduced the readers to nature versus nurture debate and helped some women to identify what she referred to as "the problem that has no name," and the only way to prevent it was to work. Friedan also compared the life of a "happy housewife" living in suburbia, something that Friedan experienced herself in the 1950s, to life in a Nazi concentration camp. Ironically, Friedan was not an average housewife. Friedan was an activist. Yet she wrote The Feminine Mystique in a way that suggested that she was not academic but rather a nonworking woman, writing about the miserable conditions of women. Friedan described in her book The Feminine Mystique that women could only work in the post World War II mystique. Which consisted by defining women as solely wives, mothers, and housekeepers. Friedan argued that this would shape and eventually destroy wives and husbands and harm the national economy. Her book can be said to have, "changed the face of American politics and family life for good, creating a whole generation of militant women who looked for scapegoats to denigrate. Beginning with their mothers, and then moving to the
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