In 1946, just three years after graduating from college and three years into her career as a labor journalist in postwar New York, a twenty-five-year-old Smith College alumna named Betty Naomi Goldstein was hired by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) to write for the union’s tabloid newspaper.At the time, the UE represented around 500,000 industrial workers nationwide and was widely regarded as the most radical major union in the American labor movement. It was also the union facing the most intense scrutiny from the federal government over suspected Communist ties.
The UE News was a four-page weekly tabloid, and Betty Goldstein was its newest reporter.For the next six years, she covered the standard beats of union journalism: strikes, contract talks, anti-labor bills, plant shutdowns, and layoffs. Beyond that, she also wrote articles and pamphlets — topics largely overlooked by mainstream labor reporters at the time — focusing on the specific challenges faced by the union’s female members working on assembly lines at companies like General Electric, Westinghouse, and Bendix.In 1952, she authored the pamphlet UE Fights for Women Workers. Using statistics and firsthand worker testimonies, it exposed the widespread wage discrimination women faced, showing they were typically paid about seventy cents for every dollar earned by men doing identical work.
The pamphlet argued forcefully that this gap was not a natural result of women’s family duties, but a conscious corporate strategy to cut costs — and that the union should actively fight it.A year later, she published Women Fight for a Better Life, a photographic history of American women’s labor over the previous two centuries. It gave significant attention to the experiences of Black women workers, whom she described as suffering a double burden of discrimination — both as women and as Black Americans — something white women often failed to acknowledge.In 1948, Betty had given birth to her first child, a son. The UE had a formal maternity leave policy, which she used before returning to her job.In 1952, while pregnant with her second child, she was let go by the union. She later claimed it was because of her pregnancy. The full documentary record is more complicated: by then, the UE was reeling from McCarthy-era investigations, membership had plummeted, and the newspaper was forced to cut staff. Another mother at the paper had taken maternity leave twice without issue. Betty was one of several reporters laid off during the downsizing.What is certain is that she did not return to paid work in labor journalism — or any newsroom — for the next eleven years.She and her husband left Queens for a spacious Victorian home in the suburban community of Grandview-on-the-Hudson in Rockland County, New York.
There she raised her children, wrote occasional freelance pieces for women’s magazines (which she often didn’t regard highly), and quietly observed the lives of postwar suburban housewives.By that point, she had already spent six years documenting industrial wage discrimination, racial inequality, union organizing, and the systematic exclusion of women from jobs.She knew exactly how to analyze a labor market.In 1957, when she prepared a detailed survey for her former Smith College classmates, she was not simply a bored or confused housewife who accidentally noticed a social pattern, as the popular narrative often suggests. She was a trained former labor journalist who had herself been pushed out of the workforce — now watching a different group of women being sidelined by different forces.The book she published six years later, The Feminine Mystique, made no mention of her union job or the UE. That part of her past would only be fully uncovered decades later by her biographer, Daniel Horowitz, in the 1980s.To reach a wide audience in 1963, she wrote the book her editors and readers were ready to hear — one centered on the lives of suburban housewives. It became a runaway bestseller, selling over a million copies.
