Rewind marks the 50th anniversary of a book that ignited the women's movement of the 1960's and 70s- Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, with interviews and discussion. 
It was first published in 1963 and in it Friedan described the deep dissatisfaction many women felt in their roles as wife and mother to the exclusion of all else. Here's a brief passage:

"The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning [that is, a longing] that women suffered. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries ... she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question -- 'Is this all?"

The Feminine Mystique dropped like a bombshell and quickly became a magnet for discussion and controversy. Friedan was everywhere, being interviewed on talk shows, as the topic of newspaper columns and on the lecture circuit.

CBC Radio too addressed the topic of how women felt. The first piece is from the program Take Thirty from 1964. The host was Anna Cameron.

After that, an interview from about the same time, 1964, when Peter Twydale talked to Betty Friedan for Assignment.

After the book was released, the women's liberation movement took off, with women joining groups, marching in the streets and demanding equality. At the forefront of it all was Betty Friedan. In the next clip, you can hear how she almost trips over her own words in her excitement to articulate her vision of the future. Adrienne Clarkson had asked her about the many groups, including the National Oragnization of Women, or NOW, that had emerged in recent years, and she went from there.

Friedan was a polarizing figure. Her opponents saw her as strident, loud and uncompromising. Even some of her supporters criticized her for ignoring the needs of anyone who wasn't a middle class, married, white woman.

She was well known for being thin skinned and abrasive. She took exception to anyone who she thought didn't see the world her way. The next piece illustrates that. It's a conversation she has with Peter Gzowski in 1982 shortly after her book The Second Stage came out.  

Friedan didn't mind being known as prickly. In her autobiography Life So Far, she says of herself, and I quote: The truth is that I've always been a bad-tempered bitch. Some people say that I have mellowed some. I don't know...

In 1985, the program Sunday Morning decided to take a look at feminism in the 80s, and what better place to start that by talking to Friedan herself? They sent Mary Ambrose to New York in interview her.

Friedan talked about working on a book about aging in that clip. That book came out in 1993 and was called The Fountain of Age. In 1986, when she talked to Erika Ritter on the program Dayshift, the writing and thinking about it was very much on her mind.

Friedan's last book was her autobiography called Life So Far. It was released in 2000. Betty Friedan died on her 85th birthday in 2006. We ended the program with one more quote. It was one she gave to Life Magazine in 1963. 

"Some people think I'm saying, 'Women of the world unite -- you have nothing to lose but your men. It's not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners."