Bettye Naomi Goldstein was born in 1921, in Peoria, Illinois, the first child of Harry and Miriam. By the time they’d had another daughter and the main event of the longed-for son, Betty’s parents were beginning to find their eldest’s braininess worrisome. They learned, Shteir writes in her conscientiously researched book, “that to control Betty, they had to threaten to take away her books.” Her father forbade her from checking out volumes from the library because the sight of her shlepping a pile of them up the hill was “unladylike.” Such censure did its damage. Later, she’d write: “I was that girl with all the As and I wanted boys worse than anything.… With all that brilliance, I saw myself becoming the old maid college teacher.”
At a tender age, female intellectual achievement seemed to her incompatible with heterosexual love. It took time for Friedan to acquire the fundamental second-wave insight, that her experience was by no means shameful or anomalous, but instead a symptom of the organization of society. Meanwhile, there is a clear premonition of the radical woman author-to-be in the image of the scrappy schoolgirl who instigated “the ‘Baddy Baddy’ Club”—whose agitations included “a series of protests against a substitute teacher by dropping books on the floor and coughing en masse.” Young Friedan disrupted, in other words, unmagnificently. Later, this baddy baddy would find worthier subjects for organized protest.
Friedan rampaged through Marx and Freud at Smith College and excelled, not yet aware that the point of the institution, as it saw itself, was to prepare young women for breeding, not thinking. Upon her graduation summa cum laude with a major in psychology, a college administrator told her mother: “Betty has the most outstanding record of any student ever matriculated at Smith.” After graduation, she abandoned a prestigious psychology fellowship at Berkeley because she was in love (as she later recalled) with an intellectually inferior man who warned her, “You can take that fellowship, but you know I’ll never get one like it. You know what it will do to us…” The depression that followed this decision only dissipated after she began working as a labor journalist in New York. By the mid-1950s, mother to three small children, in a periodically violent (mostly him, sometimes her) marriage (to some other jerk, not the Berkeley guy), Friedan was working sporadically as a writer for women’s magazines. As such, she was less attuned to the capital-labor relation and more attuned to a different social problem, the male-female relation.