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Betty Friedan and the Women’s Movement in America
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By host Tom Ashbrook:

On the front of eulogizing retrospection, it’s been the week of Coretta Scott King, and rightly so. But there’s another woman — another super woman — who died last Saturday having changed the world.

Feminist Betty Friedan blew the doors off the lives of quiet desperation of American women of the 1950s. Her earth-shaking book “The Feminine Mystique” pulled the trigger on history, said Alvin Toefler, and sent a generation of women storming out of the kitchen and into the political and economic fray.

Now, a new generation of women is picking and choosing from the feminist revolution.

Hear a conversation with women, across generations, on the legacy of Betty Friedan.

Guests:

Caryl Rivers, professor of journalism, Boston University and author of “Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children, And Our Jobs” with Rosalind Barnett. Her forthcoming book is “Monsters, Mommies and Madonnas” about the representation of women in the media.

Megan Greer, a 23-year-old first-year law student at Harvard Law School and a member of the Alliance of Independent Feminists, a campus organization of moderate, conservative and libertarian women.

Masum Momaya, 28-year-old doctoral student in the Harvard School of Education. She is on the board of the Third Wave Foundation, an organization that supports young women and transgender activism.

 
 

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