Betty Friedan

Noteworthy events from our shared experience

Fifty years ago this month, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan was published. Even the husband she divorced conceded that Betty "almost single-handedly changed the course of human history. It took a driven, super-aggressive, egocentric, almost lunatic dynamo to rock the world the way she did."

Words may strive to appeal to the logical portion of our minds. But the images captured by photojournalists - from Robert Capa's photos of heroic GIs struggling to reach shore on D-Day to UPI photographer Johnny Jenkins's outrage-provoking photo of African American high school student Elizabeth Eckford being harassed by a mob in Little Rock in 1957 - often take hold of our hearts and reach us on a more primal emotional level.