Betty Friedan, Born in Peoria

Betty Naomi Goldstein was born in Peoria on February fourth, nineteen twenty-one, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. Her father ran a jewelry store downtown. Her mother, Miriam, had given up a newspaper career to marry, and the surrender of that ambition haunted the household. Betty noticed.

She graduated from Peoria's Central High School, having founded the school's first literary magazine and making clear, even then, that she was not going to fit comfortably into the category Peoria had prepared for her. She went to Smith College, graduated summa cum laude, and spent the next two decades living the life of a suburban housewife in the New York suburbs while simultaneously experiencing what she would later name the problem that has no name.

The Feminine Mystique, published in nineteen sixty-three, described that problem with enough precision and enough anger that it sold millions of copies and is widely credited with igniting the second wave of American feminism. The book argued that educated women were being buried alive inside domestic roles that did not use them, and that the culture had conspired to tell them they were happy when they were not.

Peoria did not celebrate the book when it came out. The city was slow to formally recognize Friedan as a hometown figure of consequence.

Friedan herself credited Peoria. She said she came from Peoria and that it put her in a position to understand the lives of real women, to reach them in a way a purely coastal career might not have allowed. Whether she meant it as gratitude or as explanation is not entirely clear.