Nancy Friday facts for kids

Nancy Colbert Friday (August 27, 1933 – November 5, 2017) was an American author. Her writings argue that women have often been reared under an ideal of womanhood, which was outdated and restrictive, and largely unrepresentative of many women's true inner lives, and that openness about women's hidden lives could help free women to truly feel able to enjoy being themselves. She asserts that this is not due to deliberate malice, but due to social expectation, and that for women's and men's benefit alike it is healthier that both be able to be equally open, participatory and free to be accepted for who and what they are.

Biography

Nancy Friday was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Walter F. Friday and Jane Colbert Friday (later Scott). She grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, and attended the only local girls' college-preparatory school, Ashley Hall, where she graduated in 1951. She then attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she graduated in 1955. She worked briefly as a reporter for the San Juan Island Times and subsequently established herself as a magazine journalist in New York City, England, and France before turning to writing full-time.

Her first book, published in 1973, was My Secret Garden, a compilation of her interviews with women, which became a bestseller. Friday regularly returned to the interview format in her subsequent books on themes ranging from mothers and daughters to relationships, jealousy, envy, feminism, and beauty. After the publication of The Power of Beauty (released in 1996, and then renamed and re-released in paperback form in 1999), she wrote little, with her final book being Beyond My Control: Forbidden Fantasies in an Uncensored Age, published in 2009.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s she was a frequent guest on television and radio programs such as Politically Incorrect, Oprah, Larry King Live, Good Morning America, and NPR's Talk of the Nation. She also created a website in the mid-1990s, to complement the publication of The Power of Beauty. Initially conceived as a forum for the development of new work and interaction with her diverse audience, it was not updated in later years.

Despite the judgment of Ms. magazine ("This woman is not a feminist"), she predicated her career on the belief that feminism and the appreciation of men are not mutually exclusive concepts.

Personal life

Friday married novelist Bill Manville in 1967, separated from him in 1980, and divorced him in 1986. Her second husband was Norman Pearlstine, formerly the editor in chief of Time Inc. They were married at the Rainbow Room in New York City on July 11, 1988, and divorced in 2005.

In 2011, Friday sold her home in Key West and moved to New York City.

Nancy Friday died at her home in Manhattan from complications of Alzheimer's disease on November 5, 2017, at the age of 84.

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