Betty Friedan would like to develop a quality of life measure -- let's call it QOL -- similar to economic measures like the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that we've created to plumb our nation's economic health.

A QOL index would not only be used to measure success in individuals; Friedan would like to see it applied to companies and communities as well. "It's not impossible to do," said the woman who has made a career of making the difficult look easy. In the early 1960s, when she was fired from her job as a news reporter because she was pregnant, she used the free time to write a book, The Feminine Mystique, that launched a feminist revolution.

She has been going strong ever since. At 77 the founder of the National Organization for Women has just returned from a whirlwind lecture tour of Europe, where she discovered a group of young women in Budapest who had been so inspired by her book that they began a feminist network in their native Hungary, despite opposition from the then-prevailing Communist regime. "I was very moved," Friedan said. "We really are living in a global village."

Friedan, a distinguished visiting professor at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations who will be speaking on the university's Ithaca, N.Y., campus Dec. 2 and 3, credits the women's movement with playing a transformative role in American society. "I feel very lucky and almost awed to have been part of it. If we look back -- although who has time? -- we have to realize that we have changed the way women look at themselves and the way society looks at women, and that's been all to the good. Women's lives are no longer defined solely by marriage and children. These may be important to them, but they may only be part of the picture. Women now have choices."

It gratifies Friedan to see women working in every profession today and legislation in place prohibiting gender discrimination in the workplace.

So what's next? Friedan's most-recent book, Beyond Gender: The New Politics of Work and Family (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1997), points the way to a new revolution. This time she aims to transform the world by using the feminist ideals of equality and justice to shape a broad societal and workplace agenda for men as well as women.

Now the director of "New Paradigm: Women, Men, Work, Family and Public Policy," a project sponsored by the Cornell ILR School's Institute for Women and Work, Friedan already has brought together policy-makers and researchers to talk. The Cornell sponsorship, plus a $1 million Ford Foundation grant, led her to develop monthly seminars and symposiums in Washington, D.C., on critical workplace issues.

"I'm trying to take the dialogue that I've helped shape and change the focus from women's rights to how jobs are structured for both men and women," explained Friedan. Although the workplace has changed radically since women began entering it in large numbers in the 1970s, jobs, career lines, training and professional advancement are all still based on the model of the employee with a non-working partner who takes care of life's details.

That model is out of step with reality, observed Friedan. "No one has moved to shorten the work week. In fact it's getting longer. That's ridiculous. We're co-opted by a culture of greed, as if the only measure of worth is how much someone earns."

New Paradigm's Oct. 28 symposium focused on men, with Friedan pointing out: "Men who play an active role in parenting live longer," a finding she saw as an incentive for them to achieve a better balance between work and life. The program's next symposium, Dec. 10, will look at trends among companies to contract out, rather than hire new staff, and its impact on working families. Friedan also co-teaches a course, "The New Paradigm: The Changing American Workplace and Family Life," with Francine Moccio, director of the ILR School's Institute for Women and Work and principal investigator for the New Paradigm Project. The course gives Cornell students in Washington, D.C., an interdisciplinary look at such issues as the gender gap in wages and such workplace trends as privatization and downsizing, and features talks by practitioners as well as scholars.

Friedan has a strong response to biographer Daniel Horowitz's take on her life. In Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique (University of Massachusetts, 1998), the Smith College professor faulted her for portraying herself as merely a suburban housewife who discovered feminism while peeling potatoes at the kitchen table. He declared that she wasn't candid about her work as a reporter for union newspapers.

"He's got it so wrong it annoys me," she said. She made it clear that her feminism did not arise from exposure to left-wing ideologists during her reporting days. "They were every bit as male chauvinist as the rest of the world." She also turned on its head Horowitz's claim

that she exaggerated her role as a housewife: "I was a suburban housewife. When I got fired from my newspaper job, my husband and I bought a big, old house overlooking the Hudson. I personally took off five coats of paint by hand and went to auctions hunting for furniture bargains. I enjoyed it." But she never presented herself as just a housewife. "That was the gestalt of the times."

While wheeling her first child in his stroller, she canvassed for Democratic candidates in Rockland County. And before writing her world-changing book, she wrote for such women's magazines as Redbook and Ladies Home Journal to help pay the grocery bills. That experience, as much as anything, helped shape her feminist consciousness. A former psychology student, she sensed a prevailing dissatisfaction among her female contemporaries that wasn't reflected in the magazines. "I realized I could use all my experience to challenge the ethos that I had been part of creating." She was recently named one of the hundred most important women in the 20th century in a book published under the Ladies Home Journal's name, and she enjoys the irony of that honor -- she is unlikely to have made the list had she remained just a freelance writer for the magazine.

The self-described "American revolutionary" has three grown children, all in established careers, and seven grandchildren -- but don't expect her to settle into grandmotherhood when the New Paradigm project ends in four years. "Maybe I'll write a whodunit," she said, "with a bumptious feminist sleuth" whose simplistic feminist values are challenged at every turn. "Life," Friedan said, "is more complex than that."

During her two-day visit to Cornell's campus, Friedan will take part in a faculty panel discussion, "Work and Family Issues in the Workplace," on Wednesday, Dec. 2, at 4 p.m. in 105 Ives Hall. She also will deliver a lecture titled "Does America Need a Values Revolution," Thursday, Dec. 3, at 7 p.m. in the Pepsico Lecture Hall, 305 Ives Hall, and she will meet with faculty and students. The discussion and the lecture are free and open to the public. For more information, contact Professor Francine Blau at (607) 255-4381.