Life So Far: A Memoir

It was Betty Freidan herself, in Life So Far, who spoke about her life and career and told us what it was all like from the inside. With the unsparing frankness that made The Feminine Mystique one of the most influential books of the century, Friedan looked back and told us what it took, and what it cost, to change the world. She took us on an intimate journey through her life, from her lonely childhood to the founding of NOW and her brilliant, contentious, and brave leadership of the Movement.

Life So Far chronicles the secret underground of women in Washington in the early sixties who drafted Friedan to spearhead an "NAACP" for women, and the daring of many who spoke out against discrimination. Friedan recounts the political infighting and dirty tricks that occurred within the Movement as well as the forces that tried to destroy it and how hard she fought to keep the Movement practical and free of extremism, including "man-hating." Friedan is equally frank about her twenty-two-year marriage to an advertising entrepreneur, which deteriorated into physical abuse. They later reconciled as friends.

Life So Far is forthright, full of stories and larger-than-life characters, and it is the scope of Friedan's vision and achievements that makes her memoir so important and compelling.

It was Betty Freidan herself, in Life So Far, who spoke about her life and career and told us what it was all like from the inside. With the unsparing frankness that made The Feminine Mystique one of the most influential books of the century, Friedan looked back and told us what it took, and what it cost, to change the world. She took us on an intimate journey through her life, from her lonely childhood to the founding of NOW and her brilliant, contentious, and brave leadership of the Movement.

Life So Far chronicles the secret underground of women in Washington in the early sixties who drafted Friedan to spearhead an "NAACP" for women, and the daring of many who spoke out against discrimination. Friedan recounts the political infighting and dirty tricks that occurred within the Movement as well as the forces that tried to destroy it and how hard she fought to keep the Movement practical and free of extremism, including "man-hating." Friedan is equally frank about her twenty-two-year marriage to an advertising entrepreneur, which deteriorated into physical abuse. They later reconciled as friends.

Life So Far is forthright, full of stories and larger-than-life characters, and it is the scope of Friedan's vision and achievements that makes her memoir so important and compelling.

Publishers Weekly

Sisterhood may be powerful, but it's always nice to have the last word--or at least to try. Viewed by many as the logical leader of the women's movement ushered in by the publication of her bestseller The Feminine Mystique, Friedan became a controversial figure as her often conservative positions led to clashes with other feminists. Her impetus for penning her memoirs is to "correct" the "mistakes" of two biographies that were published last year (Judith Hennessee's Betty Friedan: Her Life and Daniel Horowitz's Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique). Writing in a chatty style that rambles all over the place (she is apt to detail room decor in less focused moments), she is sometimes insightful, as when explaining her early attraction to Marxism in Freudian and Jewish theological terms. Unfortunately, Friedan is fighting old battles in much of the memoir, occasionally sounding bitter or paranoid: in her view, the discussions of lesbianism at the 1977 NOW conference in Houston were promoted and funded by "enemies of the women's movement"; La Leche is a fringe group that makes a "fetish of breast-feeding"; the FBI and CIA may have been behind moves to replace Friedan as president of NOW; and Kate Millett's feminist classic Sexual Politics "has a lot of warped stuff" in it. Friedan also minimizes or ignores her biographers' criticisms of her personal life or style, including criticism of her views on race, her drinking habit and what some contend is a tendency toward character assassination of other feminists. While it's important to hear Friedan's version of her history, readers will be well aware that hers is a one-sided view of the women's movement. (May) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

A founder of NOW and a vanguard leader of the Women's Movement, Betty Friedan was the author of The Feminine Mystique, It Changed My Life, The Second Stage, Beyond Gender, and The Fountain of Age. She taught at Northwestern University, Yale, Temple, Harvard, and USC. She died in 2006.