When Betty Friedan returned to her home town of Peoria in 1978 for a high school reunion (Peoria High School, class of 1938), she'd already covered a lot of territory.
Rachel Shteir (pronounced sh-tire) outlines much of that activity in the book, "Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter."
Friedan, of course, wrote "The Feminine Mystique," a book that one can say with some confidence helped change the world. Published in February 1963, "Mystique" helped further women's rights like nothing else had before (save the 19th Amendment which gave women the right to vote in 1920).
When "Mystique" came out in paperback in 1964 the first edition sold 1.4 million copies. Friedan automatically became a star, a crusader and a symbol of the need for change.
"Friedan was no saint," wrote Shteir. "Butshe was an oracle and an iconoclast, ahead of her time, the American activist with a Russian soul, the artist of moral and intellectual fervor, driven by a desire to change herself and others. She said things (about women, about Jews) that many people did not want to hear."
But Friedan said those things. Yet Friedan was not immune to changing her own views on things.
"It used to embarrass me, even to admit that I came from Peoria.," she wrote in the New York Times in 1978. "It was a vaudeville joke, the epitome of the hick town...the town where I was born and grew up, and knew I had to get out of. I never wanted to go home again, or so I always used to tell myself. I remembered only the pain of growing up in Peoria. I never would admit the pleasure, the delight, the sweet sure certainty of belonging in Peoria--that small, satisfied, deceptively simple, mysterious, complex heartland of America, which undeniably provided my roots, and therefore the roots of whatever vision of equality, passion for justice, or sense of possibility drove me to the women's movement in the world."
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