Betty Friedan is dead!

Many liberated women believe that feminism remains in the death throes of a backlash because NOW was hijacked in the 1970s from pioneering women like Betty Friedan - who thought the movement should focus on issues like equal pay, sex-neutral help-wanted ads, maternity leave, child-care centers for working parents and legal abortion, by bra-burning women like Gloria Steinem - who Freidan thought "focused too many resources on lesbian issues...and hated men."

Nonetheless, I have no doubt that even the conservative women in the vanguard of the backlash against "militant" feminism recognise the indispensable role Freidan played in advancing equal rights for women in America.

Click here for more on her obituary in the Washington Post .

Note: Last week, in my previous obits on Wendy Wasserstein and Coretta Scott King, I specualated about whether a third prominent woman would die in short order according to the superstition that such deaths occur in 3s. Well, Friedan makes 3!

Betty Friedan, feminism