Betty Friedan, Mother of Feminism

Hailey Doyle and Kristin Muench

Junior Division
Group Website
Student Composed Words- 1,200
Words in Process Paper- 500
 Being a woman in todays society can be hard at times. When we were choosing our
topic, we were both eager to learn more about a women who had done things to improve the
equality of men and women. After briefly learning about several other women who worked
towards equality, we decided that Betty Friedan was the most inspiring to us because of how
strong her opinion was and began learning more about her.

To begin our research process, we added sources to Pearltrees, a data and thought
collecting website that our history teacher showed us. After collecting several primary and
secondary sources from newspapers, search engines, our local library, and the online database
Badgerlink, we started reading them to learn more about Betty Friedan. We also analyzed many
photos and watched several videos and interviews that we found. In search of learning more
about Betty Friedan, we tried contacting one of her family members, but were not successful. Of
the sources that we found, the interviews were the most helpful to us because they helped us
understand what Betty Friedans opinion on feminism was and what changes she hoped to make.
Watching or reading interviews was also very eye opening about how womens rights have
changed over time.

Starting our project was quite easy. We instantly knew we wanted to create a website
because we are both good with technology and wanted to try something different than the classic
tri-fold board that most of our classmates chose to do. We use Weebly in History class, so
website creation was familiar to us. One of the pros to creating a website was that we could
personalize it to our liking, but could also change it as many times as we wanted. The most
challenging part of creating our website was figuring out how to set up the different pages to
make them easiest to navigate. Throughout the process of creating our National History Day
website, we both learned about several new features that Weebly had to offer, and both became
more knowledgeable about technology and website creation.

Betty Friedan was a feminist, and stood up for womens rights. Starting in 1957, Betty
Friedan began to observe the lives of average American women and found that many women
were limited to being housewives. After realizing this, she began standing up for womens rights
by cofounding the National Organization for Women, helping to organize the Womens Strike
for Equality, and becoming the director of the First Womens Bank and Trust Company. Betty
Friedan had a very large impact on womens equality since she was one of the first women who
were not afraid to tell people that change needed to be made. Betty Friedan spent much of her
life fighting for the equality between men and women and if it were not for her, we believe that
people living in the United States would still live unequally and many women would not have
the education and career opportunities that they have today.