Life So far: A Memoir Horror Book Review

In Her Own Words

At last it is Betty Friedan herself who speaks about her life and career and tells us what it was all like from the inside. With the same unsparing frankness that made The Feminine Mystique one of the most influential books of the century, Friedan looks back and tells us what it took and what it cost to change the world.

In Life So Far, Friedan takes us on an intimate journey throughout her own life, from her lonely childhood to the founding of NOW and her brilliant, contentious, and brave leadership of the movement.

Friedan chronicles the secret underground of women in Washington in the early sixties who drafted her to spearhead an “NAACP” for women, and the daring of many who spoke out against discrimination for the first time. She 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 frank about her twenty-two-year marriage to an advertising entrepreneur, which deteriorated into physical abuse.

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.