*This conversation was first published in August, 1992.*

Wherever Betty Friedan goes, she gets the kind of attention normally reserved for movie stars. But the people who approach her are not autograph seekers. They represent a remarkable array of women of every race, age and background. They usually apologize for bothering her and explain that they just want to tell her one thing: “You changed my life.”  
  
Few people have affected as many lives- male or female-as Friedan, the mother of the modern-day women’s movement. In 1963 she finished “The Feminine Mystique,” a book that “pulled the trigger on history,” as Alvin Toffler put it. Amitai Etzioni, professor of sociology at George Washington University, called it “one of those rare books we are endowed with only once in several decades, a volume that launched a major social movement.  
  
The book, which sold millions of copies, gave a name to the alienation and frustration felt by a generation of women who were supposed to feel fulfilled doing what women before them had done: taking care of their homes and families. Friedan struck a nerve and received an overwhelming response, including hate mail from people who believed that a woman’s place was in the home. Many women saw Friedan as a savior who showed that they were not alone in their despair. It spurred them to demand more. As a result, life as we knew it—relationships, sex, families, politics, the workplace-began to change.  
  
“The Feminine Mystique” made Friedan the champion of the fledgling women’s movement that grew up around her and her book. In 1966 she co-founded the National Organization for Women, was its first president through 1971 and wrote its mission statement. She led the group’s fights for equal opportunities for women, equal pay for equal work, better child care, better health care and more.  
But the movement that came on so strong in the Sixties and Seventies seemed to fall out of favor during the Eighties. Headlines announced that feminism was “the great experiment that failed.” Women seemed less attracted to NOW’s agenda, and many of the movement’s goals—passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, for example—faltered as a result of anemic support. Representative Pat Schroeder in *Time* admitted, “\[Younger women\] think of feminists as women who burn bras and don’t shave their legs. They think of us as the Amazons of the Sixties.”  
  
Recently, however, the women’s movement has moved back into the fray, emerging as one of the powerful political and cultural forces of this election year. Fueled by George Bush’s move to outlaw abortion and aided by recent headlines—from Anita Hill and Justice Clarence Thomas to Mike Tyson and William Kennedy Smith—the movement has a renewed vitality and relevance.  
  
Skeptics need only look back to April, when more people marched in a pro-choice rally in Washington, D.C., than had ever marched for any other issue in American history. Noticeably absent at the rally was the women’s movement’s founder, Betty Friedan, who had not been invited.  
  
The slight was a clue that the current leaders of the women’s movement are struggling among themselves and, moreover, struggling for a new identity. Friedan represents the movement’s history, but she also speaks for a moderate branch of feminism. She has been attacked for this, most directly in a recent book about the movement, Susan Faludi’s “Backlash.” In a chapter entitled, “Betty Friedan: Revisionism as a Marketing Tool,” Faludi charges that Friedan betrayed the women’s movement. According to Faludi, Friedan believed that the women’s movement was failing because “its leaders had ignored the maternal call.” In fact, Faludi charged that Friedan was “stomping on the movement she did so much to create and lead.  
  
Such criticism is nothing new to Friedan. She’s been facing accusations and denunciations from all sides since “The Feminine Mystique” was published almost 30 years ago. Back then, Friedan was a wife, mother and homemaker, thrilled with modern appliances and recipes she clipped from McCall’s. She had grown up in Peoria, Illinois, and moved to New York when she was 18. She attended college at Smith and prepared for a life as a psychologist or journalist. After graduation she worked as a magazine writer until she was pregnant with the second of her three children. She then followed the traditional path of most women at that time, giving up her career and adopting the type of life personified by TV moms. She began to understand a quiet frustration felt by huge numbers of women, a despair she named “the feminine mystique.”

  
The movement launched by the book consumed her life. At first she was considered a radical, but as time passed, her views mellowed. She began to worry that feminism was forcing some women to exclude family life as a politically correct option. Fearing that women who were discouraged from marrying and having children would abandon the movement, Friedan wrote her second book, “The Second Stage.”  
In that book, another best seller, Friedan blamed radical elements of the feminist movement for problems that arose in American families as women attempted to be superwomen, juggling husbands, children, homes and jobs. Many women celebrated that Friedan had once again articulated their plight, though other women, particularly some strident feminists, denounced her. She had, they said, sold out.  
Friedan weathered those attacks just as she weathers the current ones, and she remains an outspoken and important leader despite her differences with such notables as Faludi and Gloria Steinem. At 71, Friedan holds academic posts at New York University and the University of Southern California, and continues to write and to speak across the country.

Given the recent resurgence of women’s issues, Friedan seemed the perfect subject for the 30th anniversary of the *Playboy Interview*. Contributing Editor David Sheff, who recently talked about death and dying with Derek Humphry for *PLAYBOY’s* August 1992 interview, flew to Los Angeles to face off with Friedan. Here’s his report:  
  
“It took nearly two years of courting Friedan to get her to make time for this interview. We met on several occasions, each time in Los Angeles, where she teaches courses at USC in feminist thought and supervises a think tank on women’s issues. To each furnished apartment she rented in L.A. she brought the same personal items to create a home away from her primary home in New York: family photos, prints, towels emblazoned with scarlet parrots and loads of books (from Carl Jung to Backlash’).  
  
“We met at one of the apartments. She gave my hand a quick shake and then moved to the bar, expertly concocting the strongest, spiciest bloody mary I have ever had.  
  
“At a nearby café we talked about political candidates and the men’s movement. She was good humored and easy to talk with until she transformed, inexplicably, and became cantankerous. She is, by nature, candid and argumentative, and her years as a controversial figure have made her fearless. It’s a potent combination.  
  
“I met with her twice more before she allowed the tape-recorded sessions to begin. We had several lunches, and I attended the USC course she taught and took notes during a think-tank session on women’s issues at which Friedan presided. She spoke briefly and then said that the forum would start after everyone introduced themselves. As the women in the room said their names and what they did for a living, it became clear that this was a group of some of the most powerful women in Los Angeles—business leaders, judges, teachers, politicians and activists. When my turn came, I announced my name and indicated that I was a representative of *PLAYBOY* magazine.  
  
“There was a collective, audible gasp, some nervous laughs and many looks of horror. The tension was slightly defused when Friedan announced, ‘Well, it’s not like I’m posing!””

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The Playboy Interview: Betty Friedan on “the feminine mystique"