Friedan was, in other words, the kind of woman she wrote her book about.

NEWYORKER: Books as Bombs

Mrs Friedan determined to write a book, and in 1963 threw a firebomb into American society whose effects are still reverberating.

ECONOMIST: Betty Friedan

One glance at Mrs Friedan, though, suggested that matters were more complicated.

ECONOMIST: Betty Friedan

Harrington was a socialist, who, to his subsequent regret, and much like Friedan, chose to elide that fact when he wrote his book.

NEWYORKER: Books as Bombs

Oddly enough, since Mrs Friedan had been a keen Freudian at college, much of the problem lay with Freud, whose theories were now so popular.

ECONOMIST: Betty Friedan

Meanwhile, Betty Draper (played by January Jones), always appears perfectly coiffed, while exhibiting all of the signs of unhappiness Betty Friedan unearthed in The Feminine Mystique.

FORBES: The 'Mad Men' Fashion Effect

Most women, Mrs Friedan believed, felt the same.

ECONOMIST: Betty Friedan

In 1999, the political scientist Alan Wolfe pointed out that much of the scholarship Friedan relied on in her diagnosis of the feminine mystique work by Margaret Mead, Alfred Kinsey, and Bruno Bettelheim has since turned out to be suspect.

NEWYORKER: Books as Bombs

By all accounts, Friedan was not a person inclined to share the credit. (Some men have been known to be this way as well.) The implication that she had diagnosed a condition no one else had even managed to identify that the problem she wrote about had no name until she named it was a pretty open invitation to revisionism.

NEWYORKER: Books as Bombs