But before she was a face of and a symbol for one kind of middle-class feminist reckoning, she was employed at the United Electrical Workers union, where she kept very, very busy. Coontz lists Friedan’s activities as including editing the community newsletter, assisting with the babysitting co-op, and working as an organizer for a 1952 rent strike. Her early writings championed the experiences of workers, and the first few drafts of The Feminine Mystique apparently included shows of solidarity for the ways Black, Jewish, and immigrant workers experienced their own forms of oppression. The published version, which Coontz justifiably refers to as watered down, still has a few offhand references to Friedan’s connection to the civil rights and labor movements.

Daniel Horowitz, who has studied Friedan’s political affiliations, believes that her feminism is, at its core, part of her left-wing politics. But publishing Mystique as a mainstream work in the 1960s was not anything like publishing a workers’ newsletter coming out of the 1930s and 1940s. Even if she couldn’t have known what a blockbuster her book would become, she did want it to reach as many people as possible, and that meant avoiding being blacklisted, no matter the cost. The Red Scare came for all manner of people, and no one was completely safe. Rebecca L. Davis pointed out in her book More Perfect Unions that just a few decades earlier, in the 1920s, when America was considering federal divorce laws, the comparison between that and the “easy divorce” available in Russia made lawmakers consider a simpler process as “equivalent to atheistic communism.” In the early 1950s even the avowedly left-wing magazine The Nation felt compelled to qualify, when writing about the release of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (to which Friedan owed a tremendous but barely acknowledged debt; Friedan reportedly considered de Beauvoir disappointing), that the book had “certain political leanings.” Friedan’s own paranoia meant that she refused to credit her secretary, Pat Aleskovsky, for the work she did on Friedan’s manuscript because Aleskovsky’s husband had been publicly suspected of being a communist; Horowitz’s research itself has since been used to suggest that feminism in America was all part of a “communist plot.”