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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.
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.
400 pages, Paperback
First published May 24, 2000
About the author
Betty Friedan
31 books637 followersAmerican feminist Betty Naomi Friedan (née Bettye Naomi Goldstein) wrote
The Feminine Mystique
in 1963 and cofounded the National Organization for Women in 1966. This book started the "second wave" of feminism.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
August 9, 2007
A fascinating account of the women's movement, from the woman who started it all. It's amazing how much truly has changed in the last half century, and how much impact one person can have on the world. Friedan admits regrets, explains aspects of her life and work that she thinks are often misunderstood, and throws in a good deal about her sex life (including many affairs with married men) to boot. She's thoughtful but matter-of-fact, and unapologetic in that she knows she always did what she thought was right at the time. That's really all you can hope for in the end, right? Knowing you did the best you could? Friedan makes an inpiring case for following your gut, and doing all you can to leave the world a little better than you found it.
November 1, 2010
Really interesting read. Its always hard to see the humanity of one of your idols. I was surprised by both Friedan's nonchalance regarding her husbands long term physical abuse and her admitted homophobia within the woman's movement she helped launch. I enjoyed getting a front row seat from her perspective from some of the major moments in women's herstory. I cried when I recognized the name Shirley Johnson, one of my econ prof's at Vassar, as a woman who shared a commune with Betty in the 70's. Fascinating to see the circles we choose to walk in and how any "housewife" facing "the problem that has no name" can go one to achieve great things in the name of sisterhood.
January 1, 2012
Autobiography of Betty Friedan, one of the founders of the modern feminist movement. I lightly skimmed parts of it. It contains some juicy tidbits concerning an affair she carried out for 10 years with David Manning White, my uncle.
January 9, 2008
I learned so much about the women's liberation movement, and greatly enjoyed Betty Friedan's writing style. A great book to remind yourself how far women have come, and how far they have to go.
July 1, 2014
This is a great book that reminds me there is still much work to be done.
August 2, 2025
A FRANK, VERY REVEALING, AND VERY INFORMATIVE MEMOIR
Betty Friedan (1921-2006) wrote in this 2000 book, that she was not very close to her mother: “Nothing I did was ever right, ever satisfied her.” (Pg. 19) “I did not want to be a woman like my mother… But what other kind of woman was there to be?” (Pg. 47) She notes, “my mother didn’t want me to even think of myself as Jewish.” (Pg. 24)
At Smith college, “[I] knew by then that I wasn’t just a scholar, observer, writer. I had to march… I now thought of myself as a revolutionary.” (Pg. 55-57) “I realized the whole Marxist concept of labor and economic value was male… [It] didn’t really send me after I discovered the reality of women’s lives, and men’s, on those assembly lines.” (Pg. 65)
She met Carl Friedan: “I began to be very happy with Carl [Friedan] in my life… [Soon] Carl… decided we would indeed get married.” (Pg. 67-68) “My daughter Emily says I try to deny now that I ever loved Carl. I did, of course.” (Pg. 69) “[But I] remember a sense of unspeakable horror… [when] one night, he hit me. And he cried afterward, that first time.” (Pg. 87)
She recalls, “I was fired from my job on the union newspaper… because I was pregnant, not because my work wasn’t good.” (Pg. 79) She began writing for women’s magazines. She reports, “My [first] book grew out of a Smith alumnae questionnaire I was asked to do for our 15th college reunion in 1957.” (Pg. 97) “If I hadn’t been so immersed in the women’s magazine world… I wouldn’t have become so sharply aware of ‘the feminine mystique’ in the first place.” (Pg. 110)
“But it was … awesome, the way the writing of ‘The Feminine Mystique’ took me over. It’s as if my whole life… had prepared me for this… it seems almost … as if some divine hand were guiding me, if I believed in such things.” (Pg. 133) She reflects, “I had no idea that my book would start a revolution… But I did understand that … the feminine mystique was no longer a valid guide to women’s lives.” (Pg. 135) “I was surprised … that my book was more threatening to some women than to men.” (Pg. 141) She observes, “Carl wouldn’t let me enjoy… the fame, the SATISFACTION of the spreading fire I had started… Underneath, I guess I began to realize I would have to get a divorce.” (Pg. 146)
She reports, “I tried, without success, to convince publishers that a new magazine that took women seriously would sell… But it was too early… they didn’t get it then, as they would a few years later when Gloria Steinem proposed Ms.[magazine]… The magazine I had in mind was not a trumpet blast from the feminist barricades… I would still have covered … the women’s magazine staples… But I would cover them in a CONTEXT where the woman is her own person…” (Pg. 157-158)
She concluded, “I knew in my gut that the new pattern had to transcend that no-win either-or of marriage and family versus career… that a … job outside the home was that every woman needed now… I started down the road that would lead to the women’s movement.” (Pg. 163)
She reflects, “I didn’t confront Carl… I think if I had made it clear that I would leave him if he didn’t stop hitting me, he probably would have stopped. But I didn’t… Was Carl really a vicious wife-beater? Or… did the slightest hint of taunt from me, when we were both drinking as much as we were drinking every night… bring out pent-up rage?... I taunted him into finally beating up on me and giving me those black eyes… But I would not consider getting divorced.” (Pg. 166) Later, she adds, “I finally got a divorce in Mexico, which you could do then very quickly if it were uncontested.” (Pg. 227)
She states, “There was this sense of history we all shared as we began to make things happen. Here women… were finally doing it for… ourselves … There were only thirty of us but we were certain we spoke for millions.” (Pg. 176) “I knew … that women needed a movement to break through the visible and invisible barriers they faced.” (Pg. 179)
She recounts of the early days of NOW: “We didn’t have money in the early years for… an office staff or even supplies… The ideology of those of us who started the women’s movement was … simply the ideal of equality, of American democracy… This was not a mere matter of an oppressed group seizing power from its oppressors… This was… a women’s movement for equality in truly equal partnership with men…” (Pg. 183-185)
She acknowledges, “It was hard to convince young black women to join NOW… It was true, of course, that black women were already strong. They were forced to be… I understood why … For a black person, the battle against racism took priority. But black women suffered the same sex discrimination as white women did… Male chauvinism was indeed color-blind… But black male leaders seemed to resent the women’s movement and made black women feel guilty about joining it… Let it not be said… however, that the women’s movement was only a white, middle-class movement. While it is true that the majority of the first organizers were white… we had exemplary black leaders as well.” (Pg. 187)
She explains, “I was particularly concerned when some extremists began using abusive language and a style that alienated the middle-class women from the establishment and the church with their … man-hating, down-with-motherhood stance. Here we were, trying to organize a massive women’s movement … and the majority of women still chose to marry men and have children.” (Pg. 190) “I couldn’t even convince the members of NOW to make child care a priority, or even an issue.” (Pg 197)
She admits, “Ideologically, I was never for abortion. Motherhood is a value to me, and even today abortion is not. I would be the happiest woman in the world if RU-486 or something equivalent would make abortion unnecessary, and I think that’s going to happen very soon…. I believed… that women should have the right of chosen motherhood. For me.. [that] has never been primarily the choice of abortion.” (Pg. 200-201)
She points out, “Lesbians… started disrupting the lectures I was giving in the late sixties… I didn’t want to discuss lesbianism. And neither did the audience. The audience had come to hear about the issues and changes facing all women.” (Pg. 221)
Later, she adds, “I didn’t agree with Ms., the ‘feminist’ magazine Gloria created in 1971. The early issues were filled with all these anti-male dictums: women… weren’t supposed to do anything that would make them attractive to men... It was so annoying to me that Gloria would preach this kind of doctrine in Ms., and at the same time be dating some very glamorous men and having her hair streaked… But then, I was never into radical chic.” (Pg. 249-250)
She explains, “The National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) would be in keeping with the mainstream… Ironically, the only woman who resisted me was Bella Abzug… I was convinced we were well on our way to a … broader political force… that spoke to most contemporary Americans. But there were already trouble signs within the caucus leadership… The ideological differences among the NWPC leadership were growing… I think Gloria and Bella wanted me to just disappear, though I’ve never really understood why… They were trying to maneuver me out, which forced me … to try and fight back..” (Pg. 250-255) Later, she adds, “NOW was so wracked by divisiveness and internal power struggles by the 1975 convention… that it seemed on the brink of imploding.” (Pg. 285) She laments, “The pattern was always the same. I would start one organization, it would be taken over. I’d start another organization, it would be taken over… And I’d get forced out. I either didn’t know how to fight that or wasn’t able to.” (Pg. 256
She observes, “People liked to ascribe the rift between Gloria and me to jealousy on my part of Gloria’s looks… indeed it has always been a bane in my existence that I wasn’t pretty… But I always saw Gloria’s looks as an asset to the movement. She contributed a positive image of beauty and glamour which was invaluable in refuting the movement’s negative image of man-haters and lesbians.” (Pg. 255)
She also acknowledges a 10-year affair with a married man, David Manning White (‘It was hardly a secret”; (Pg. 272-273), and later, “I had a great crush … On Jeremiah Kaplan… [who] was married too, but his wife had Alzheimer’s…” (Pg. 312)
She notes, “The ‘post-feminist generation’… was struggling with new problems and pressures… [But] the women struggling with these new problems … no longer looked to the movement for solutions. No wonder the movement had stalled. ‘Feminism’ was becoming a dirty word because so many of this … generation felt they had been sold a bill of goods by the women’s movement and then abandoned.” (Pg. 336)
Later, she adds, “I’ve been thinking recently that we’ve come as far as we can or need to go in terms of women alone or women versus men… NOW and the other women’s organizations seem to me to be stuck a little in the … rhetoric of earlier years… the main concerns of women today … are always jobs and family; issues like abortion and pornography are way down on the list.” (Pg. 376-377)
This book will be absolute ‘must reading’ for anyone studying the history of the U.S. women’s movement.
Betty Friedan (1921-2006) wrote in this 2000 book, that she was not very close to her mother: “Nothing I did was ever right, ever satisfied her.” (Pg. 19) “I did not want to be a woman like my mother… But what other kind of woman was there to be?” (Pg. 47) She notes, “my mother didn’t want me to even think of myself as Jewish.” (Pg. 24)
At Smith college, “[I] knew by then that I wasn’t just a scholar, observer, writer. I had to march… I now thought of myself as a revolutionary.” (Pg. 55-57) “I realized the whole Marxist concept of labor and economic value was male… [It] didn’t really send me after I discovered the reality of women’s lives, and men’s, on those assembly lines.” (Pg. 65)
She met Carl Friedan: “I began to be very happy with Carl [Friedan] in my life… [Soon] Carl… decided we would indeed get married.” (Pg. 67-68) “My daughter Emily says I try to deny now that I ever loved Carl. I did, of course.” (Pg. 69) “[But I] remember a sense of unspeakable horror… [when] one night, he hit me. And he cried afterward, that first time.” (Pg. 87)
She recalls, “I was fired from my job on the union newspaper… because I was pregnant, not because my work wasn’t good.” (Pg. 79) She began writing for women’s magazines. She reports, “My [first] book grew out of a Smith alumnae questionnaire I was asked to do for our 15th college reunion in 1957.” (Pg. 97) “If I hadn’t been so immersed in the women’s magazine world… I wouldn’t have become so sharply aware of ‘the feminine mystique’ in the first place.” (Pg. 110)
“But it was … awesome, the way the writing of ‘The Feminine Mystique’ took me over. It’s as if my whole life… had prepared me for this… it seems almost … as if some divine hand were guiding me, if I believed in such things.” (Pg. 133) She reflects, “I had no idea that my book would start a revolution… But I did understand that … the feminine mystique was no longer a valid guide to women’s lives.” (Pg. 135) “I was surprised … that my book was more threatening to some women than to men.” (Pg. 141) She observes, “Carl wouldn’t let me enjoy… the fame, the SATISFACTION of the spreading fire I had started… Underneath, I guess I began to realize I would have to get a divorce.” (Pg. 146)
She reports, “I tried, without success, to convince publishers that a new magazine that took women seriously would sell… But it was too early… they didn’t get it then, as they would a few years later when Gloria Steinem proposed Ms.[magazine]… The magazine I had in mind was not a trumpet blast from the feminist barricades… I would still have covered … the women’s magazine staples… But I would cover them in a CONTEXT where the woman is her own person…” (Pg. 157-158)
She concluded, “I knew in my gut that the new pattern had to transcend that no-win either-or of marriage and family versus career… that a … job outside the home was that every woman needed now… I started down the road that would lead to the women’s movement.” (Pg. 163)
She reflects, “I didn’t confront Carl… I think if I had made it clear that I would leave him if he didn’t stop hitting me, he probably would have stopped. But I didn’t… Was Carl really a vicious wife-beater? Or… did the slightest hint of taunt from me, when we were both drinking as much as we were drinking every night… bring out pent-up rage?... I taunted him into finally beating up on me and giving me those black eyes… But I would not consider getting divorced.” (Pg. 166) Later, she adds, “I finally got a divorce in Mexico, which you could do then very quickly if it were uncontested.” (Pg. 227)
She states, “There was this sense of history we all shared as we began to make things happen. Here women… were finally doing it for… ourselves … There were only thirty of us but we were certain we spoke for millions.” (Pg. 176) “I knew … that women needed a movement to break through the visible and invisible barriers they faced.” (Pg. 179)
She recounts of the early days of NOW: “We didn’t have money in the early years for… an office staff or even supplies… The ideology of those of us who started the women’s movement was … simply the ideal of equality, of American democracy… This was not a mere matter of an oppressed group seizing power from its oppressors… This was… a women’s movement for equality in truly equal partnership with men…” (Pg. 183-185)
She acknowledges, “It was hard to convince young black women to join NOW… It was true, of course, that black women were already strong. They were forced to be… I understood why … For a black person, the battle against racism took priority. But black women suffered the same sex discrimination as white women did… Male chauvinism was indeed color-blind… But black male leaders seemed to resent the women’s movement and made black women feel guilty about joining it… Let it not be said… however, that the women’s movement was only a white, middle-class movement. While it is true that the majority of the first organizers were white… we had exemplary black leaders as well.” (Pg. 187)
She explains, “I was particularly concerned when some extremists began using abusive language and a style that alienated the middle-class women from the establishment and the church with their … man-hating, down-with-motherhood stance. Here we were, trying to organize a massive women’s movement … and the majority of women still chose to marry men and have children.” (Pg. 190) “I couldn’t even convince the members of NOW to make child care a priority, or even an issue.” (Pg 197)
She admits, “Ideologically, I was never for abortion. Motherhood is a value to me, and even today abortion is not. I would be the happiest woman in the world if RU-486 or something equivalent would make abortion unnecessary, and I think that’s going to happen very soon…. I believed… that women should have the right of chosen motherhood. For me.. [that] has never been primarily the choice of abortion.” (Pg. 200-201)
She points out, “Lesbians… started disrupting the lectures I was giving in the late sixties… I didn’t want to discuss lesbianism. And neither did the audience. The audience had come to hear about the issues and changes facing all women.” (Pg. 221)
Later, she adds, “I didn’t agree with Ms., the ‘feminist’ magazine Gloria created in 1971. The early issues were filled with all these anti-male dictums: women… weren’t supposed to do anything that would make them attractive to men... It was so annoying to me that Gloria would preach this kind of doctrine in Ms., and at the same time be dating some very glamorous men and having her hair streaked… But then, I was never into radical chic.” (Pg. 249-250)
She explains, “The National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) would be in keeping with the mainstream… Ironically, the only woman who resisted me was Bella Abzug… I was convinced we were well on our way to a … broader political force… that spoke to most contemporary Americans. But there were already trouble signs within the caucus leadership… The ideological differences among the NWPC leadership were growing… I think Gloria and Bella wanted me to just disappear, though I’ve never really understood why… They were trying to maneuver me out, which forced me … to try and fight back..” (Pg. 250-255) Later, she adds, “NOW was so wracked by divisiveness and internal power struggles by the 1975 convention… that it seemed on the brink of imploding.” (Pg. 285) She laments, “The pattern was always the same. I would start one organization, it would be taken over. I’d start another organization, it would be taken over… And I’d get forced out. I either didn’t know how to fight that or wasn’t able to.” (Pg. 256
She observes, “People liked to ascribe the rift between Gloria and me to jealousy on my part of Gloria’s looks… indeed it has always been a bane in my existence that I wasn’t pretty… But I always saw Gloria’s looks as an asset to the movement. She contributed a positive image of beauty and glamour which was invaluable in refuting the movement’s negative image of man-haters and lesbians.” (Pg. 255)
She also acknowledges a 10-year affair with a married man, David Manning White (‘It was hardly a secret”; (Pg. 272-273), and later, “I had a great crush … On Jeremiah Kaplan… [who] was married too, but his wife had Alzheimer’s…” (Pg. 312)
She notes, “The ‘post-feminist generation’… was struggling with new problems and pressures… [But] the women struggling with these new problems … no longer looked to the movement for solutions. No wonder the movement had stalled. ‘Feminism’ was becoming a dirty word because so many of this … generation felt they had been sold a bill of goods by the women’s movement and then abandoned.” (Pg. 336)
Later, she adds, “I’ve been thinking recently that we’ve come as far as we can or need to go in terms of women alone or women versus men… NOW and the other women’s organizations seem to me to be stuck a little in the … rhetoric of earlier years… the main concerns of women today … are always jobs and family; issues like abortion and pornography are way down on the list.” (Pg. 376-377)
This book will be absolute ‘must reading’ for anyone studying the history of the U.S. women’s movement.
December 27, 2022
I read Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique in high school and felt my mind blown by how much history was accomplished in such a short period of time, and how recent it was! This led me to her memoir - which has been on my shelf for two decades. Well, I finally read it. The question of what it means to be a feminist is really quite simple - all of us women living our independent lives today can’t really say we are anything other, for how many of our freedoms were won (that we aren’t even aware of!) by hard working, forward thinking women like Betty Friedan. Her blunt, straightforward writing style is refreshing as she delves into her many adventures and accomplishments over the years, including her regrets - all in the name of women’s rights. Reading her memoir made me feel like I knew her, including her self-proclaimed, “I’m a bad-tempered bitch”. But there is no doubt her accomplishments were unending, her passion unrelenting, and her contributions to women’s personhood was unsurpassed by any other. My one critique is all her name dropping (which was extensive and impressive) just got in the way of my flow.
March 16, 2026
Betty Friedan, of course, is a giant in the feminist movement. The book chronicles most of her life, from childhood to old age. (She was nearly 80 years old when she wrote the book.) The book recounts how her childhood, her college years, and her early career provided the context for her later work as a founder of the feminist movement. She even recounts how she was strongly influenced by pre-feminist social norms. For example, when she was a graduate student at U-C Berkeley, she was awarded a very prestigious fellowship. Her boyfriend at the time, broke up with her because he felt he would never receive such a prestigious fellowship. Rather than saying "F*ck you", his rejection prompted her to drop out of graduate school, never to return. As a married woman, she was repeatedly subjected to beatings at the hand of her husband, a situation she tolerated for many years.
Read
February 21, 2021Not a great book, but definitely interesting to get her spin on things, many years after reading The Feminine Mystique.
Read
October 24, 2008I loved reading this book, it made me remember the thrill of reading "The Feminine Mystique" many years ago. Betty has guided my life, rest her soul. This is a memoir, but deals with the same issues.
August 11, 2008
A view at a truly phenomenal life written by the woman herself. She is an inspiration.
September 24, 2009
An amazing woman and an amazing life. Who would have thought someone this strong and influential would be caught up in domestic violence?
October 11, 2011
I didn't think I would like this book but I ended up loving it. It's very inspirational and tells great stories about the time period in history.
April 16, 2013
Interesting inside story of the women's movement . Took a while to finish though .
November 19, 2014
Friedan's portrayal of casual (and not so casual) sexism is so relatable. Her warm recounting of her life and ideas makes the whole issue less polarizing and "radical". Loved the writing.
November 29, 2014
*Read for school
December 22, 2012
opening days of NOW.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews