Almost a year before the 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique—the zeitgeist-shattering book that would launch second-wave feminism and change the life of millions of women—author Betty Friedan wrote a confession in the pages of the Writer, a craft magazine for literary people:
My most successful article concerned an act of intellectual discovery—the discovery of “The Coming Ice Age.” I am not a science writer. The complex theory that explains why glaciers have come and gone over the earth the past million years and that predicts the dawn of another ice age is a far cry from suburban pioneering, natural childbirth, suicidal loneliness and love.
In “The Coming Ice Age,” which was published five years before The Feminine Mystique in the September 1958 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Friedan told how Maurice Ewing, a prominent oceanographer and founder of the Lamont Geological Observatory (now Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, located in the Palisades in Rockland County, N.Y.), and William L. Donn, a geologist-meteorologist, had developed a new explanation for why the world alternates between ice ages and so-called interglacial periods.
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At the time, there was no consensus as to why ice ages form and why they disappear. Some scientists thought it could be caused by changes in ocean circulation or Earth’s orbit; others gravitated toward some sudden impact, such as dust from volcanic eruptions or a meteor strike. Ewing and Donn rejected the sudden impact theory. In 1953 they had taken sediment samples from beneath the floor of the Caribbean Sea using a new giant corer. In a number of samples, the color of the sediment changed from gray to pink at the same line. At Lamont the scientists used radiometric dating and found that the line indicated the ocean heating up sharply approximately 11,000 years ago—not gradually from 16,000 to 10,000 years, as scientists had previously surmised. This “abrupt” increase in temperature—over about 1,000 years—marked the end of the last ice age, they said: the so-called Wisconsin glacial episode had not ended millions of years ago as some scientists previously thought.
Given this more rapid timeline, Ewing and Donn proposed that the cycle of ice ages was linked to “polar wandering,” which is the migration of Earth’s magnetic poles, caused by shifts in Earth’s crust. When the North Pole “wandered” from the Arctic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean a million years ago, they posited, the Arctic Ocean became free of ice and open to warm currents, which in turn creates evaporation. This scenario, the scientists theorized, eventually starts an ice age. But the most sensational part of their theory was that a new ice age would be coming in a few hundred years.
Some geographers, such as Carl Sauer, initially endorsed Ewing and Donn’s theory; others were more skeptical. Soon enough, their first stab at explaining the ice age (they would publish several adjustments to the theory) was overturned. But Betty Friedan homed in on the theory’s significance for a general audience—it was the first time the public at large was made aware of climate change. Sensing why the backstory would be captivating to a lay audience, Friedan captured the process of science in a narrative, character-driven style that was radical for its time.
The experience of reporting and writing this sweeping yet intimate piece of science journalism has long been framed by Friedan biographers as a blip; a random excursion that occurred between Friedan’s articles for women’s magazines and The Feminine Mystique. But in reading Friedan’s letters, memoir and other archival material, it becomes clear that this article was not just an outlier: it was the result of a crucial education in how to embrace complexity and advance new ideas.
Friedan’s pursuit of “The Coming Ice Age” was born of proximity and instinct. In the spring of 1956 she and her family moved to Palisades, N.Y. (then called Sneden’s Landing), which was just around the corner from Lamont Observatory. That spring, Ewing, who taught at Columbia University, and Donn, who taught at Brooklyn College, published what they described as a “preliminary report” of their theory of the ice age in Science. Friedan learned about Ewing and Donn from the mother of one of her son’s playmates; the mother mentioned the scientists as noteworthy locals.
Friedan’s journalistic curiosity was piqued. She’d been drawn to science in high school, where she was inspired by Marie Curie. A teacher discouraged her from pursing a path of scientific research and told her that girls grew up to become nurses. In an early example of proving her naysayers wrong, Friedan graduated from Smith College in 1942 with a degree in psychology. She then went to the University of California, Berkeley, to pursue a Ph.D. in psychology, where she studied with Erik Erikson (and dated some of Robert Oppenheimer’s protégés). It was at Berkeley, she famously wrote in The Feminine Mystique, that a man she was dating first dumped her because of her brilliance: “We walked in the Berkeley hills and [he] said: ‘Nothing can come of this, between us. I’ll never win a fellowship like yours.’”
Friedan left school during the spring of her first year. She became a journalist—first as a staffer for newspapers, then as a freelancer for women’s magazines. She felt she could make a more active impact on the world in journalism than she could in the academy. Her coverage areas included unions, Jim Crow laws and sexism but rarely dealt with science.
Friedan did not immediately pursue a magazine story about Ewing and Donn; she assumed that some big-name reporter would pounce on it. No one did. When she brought up the idea to her agent, Marie Rodell (who was also the agent of Rachel Carson and Martin Luther King, Jr.), Rodell did not think Friedan had a sufficient science background to write a piece about the ice age. Friedan insisted that she send it out to editors and was insulted when many responded that the subject was too abstract.
Collier’s magazine, however, was interested. And on November 2, 1956, Friedan—along with Ewing and Donn—signed a contract to do a joint story. Friedan would write, and the scientists would fact-check and, of course, be the subjects. “The Ice Age Paradox,” as it was first titled, would be co-bylined. The trio would split additional monies from syndication and other media.
Friedan, a mother of three children, swiftly got to work. As she recalls in her memoir, she would read geological textbooks at night and then “go up in the morning to Lamont and interview scientists then come back to breast feed Emily,” her then six-month-old daughter. But shortly after Friedan submitted her draft, Collier’s folded in January 1957. It paid the scientists all of their money and Friedan half of hers, with an agreement that she could resell the story.
On the advice of Rodell, Friedan began to revise and punch up the draft. In an early example of “new journalism,” she inserted herself into the narrative, joking that she had irritated the scientists with her pesky questions. She described Ewing and Donn as though they were politicians or celebrities and included their missteps and doubts. She didn’t shy away from characterization: Ewing, “a tall and powerful Texan who speaks in a gentle voice, was white-haired before he was fifty, a fact his friends attribute to the pace at which he has lived his life as a scientist,” she wrote.
Friedan was working on other stories at the time, one of which was based on revelations she’d had at her 15-year Smith reunion in June 1957. She wanted to document a trend she’d first noticed five years ago at the previous reunion: women who had excelled in college had abandoned work to become a traditional wife and mother. She wrote an article entitled, “Are Women Wasting Their Time in College?” Several magazines—McCall’s, Redbook and Ladies’ Home Journal—rejected it.
A year passed before she finally sent an updated draft to Ewing and Donn. In early January 1958 Ewing replied, sharing his concern about her sensational tone. He explained that she did not display the gravitas that he and Donn were entitled to as professional scientists. In a second letter than arrived a few weeks later, his tone was far angrier. He wrote that he had found hundreds of errors in her “paper” and chastised her for having “livened up” their theory. He wanted to exit their agreement to collaborate as co-authors. If Friedan took the piece out of the first person, he wrote, she might proceed by herself—as long as he and Donn could still vet it.
Three days later Friedan tore off a three-page, single-spaced response. She expressed astonishment that Donn and Ewing found the article sloppy because they had read a previous draft and not mentioned any misgivings. Perhaps, she speculated, the errors were their fault, considering that they were constantly changing their theory. Friedan defended herself as a writer: If she’d cut a few sentences or rearranged a few paragraphs, it was in the service of making dense scientific theory understandable to the lay reader. She was doing her job as a journalist, in other words. She was counting on the scientists to correct errors in the article, not to run away from them.
Despite the friction, Friedan made some of the changes Ewing asked for: She took herself out of the piece and put it into the first-person plural by changing the “I” to “we.” She asked to meet with the scientists to get corrections before Ewing flew to Argentina to do research. It’s not clear whether this meeting occurred, though Friedan continued to correspond with the scientists’ secretary for fact-checking. “The Ice Age Paradox” looked like it had a new home: Harper’s was interested in publishing it.
Then in March an article entitled “Another Ice Age Is on the Way” appeared in This Week, a popular Sunday supplement that was widely syndicated. It was written by publicist and journalist Leslie Lieber, who had seen Ewing and Donn discussing their theory on a CBS segment.His story took a straight-ahead approach and wasn’t particularly illuminating. (The scientists would later claim that the Lieber story was a clip job and that they had not given Lieber any interviews.) But according to a note scribbled on Rodell’s notepad, Friedan was crushed and enraged by Lieber’s article. Friedan complained that Ewing and Donn had violated the old Collier’s agreement. She catastrophized, worrying that Harper’s would kill her story. As Rodell would later write in a scolding letter to the scientists, they were lucky that John Fischer, the esteemed editor of Harper’s, was too generous to think that Friedan had been scooped.
Harper’s did ultimately run“The Coming Ice Age”—in the prestigious spot of cover story—in September 1958. The byline was Friedan’s alone. Unlike Lieber, who had framed the scientists as “leaders in their field” in a generic piece filled with clichés,Friedan had made abstract ideas accessible. She encouraged readers to identify with the scientists who were advancing those ideas. While describing technical processes, Friedan gave readers a close-up view at how the scientists were thinking—and rethinking—those processes.
The article was a success—Reader’s Digest reprinted it in November. The following year, “The Coming Ice Age” was published in an anthology, Gentlemen, Scholars, and Scoundrels: A Treasury of the Best of Harper’s Magazine from 1850 to the Present, alongside essays by writers William Faulkner, Mark Twain, Aldous Huxley and George Bernard Shaw. That’s when George Brockway, then editor in chief of W. W. Norton, first read Friedan’s article. “I thought [Friedan] might have a book in her, although perhaps not on this particular subject,” he recalled in an interview with writer Patricia Bradley. “So I wrote her.”
Friedan remembered it differently, that Brockway approached her specifically to develop “The Coming Ice Age” into a book and that she had responded, “If I ever write a book, it’s going to be about my own work.” Soon after, she started in earnest on The Feminine Mystique.
Writing about the drama of a new scientific theory—one with potentially big implications for the future—had given Friedan the courage to write about complex research and the ways it affects people’s life. Many of the reporting techniques and writing styles Friedan first experimented with in “The Coming Ice Age” are abundant in The Feminine Mystique. In the article, Friedan uses the language of the detective novel: “They had to track down the circumstantial evidence of what happened 11,000 years ago; they had to find geological witnesses to confirm their reconstruction of the crime,” she writes, as if Ewing and Donn were gumshoes. The same style appears in The Feminine Mystique when Friedan talks about getting access to market research files in an advertising agency.
“The Coming Ice Age” ranges across time and space, just as The Feminine Mystique later did, rather than presenting a linear chronology. And although it was the scientists’ preference to cast most of the long quotes in “The Coming Ice Age” in first-person plural, that choice gave the article an added power. Friedan used first-person plural in The Feminine Mystique to show individual suffragists as a united group.
Unlike other journalists who were writing about scientists, Friedan openly showed Ewing and Donn’s indecision—she did not ignore or try to hide the ways in which scientific inquiry often stalls and stumbles. She treated her sources as humans, not infallible idols. In one scene, the men find “proof” of their theory while paging through “dusty old volumes” of National Geographic. To Ewing and Donn, the shape of an Arctic beach in a photograph proved that the water there had once been warmer.
Despite, or perhaps because of, Ewing and Donn’s idiosyncratic methods, Friedan identified with them—just as she would to some extent with ideological outliers that she wrote about in the Feminine Mystique, such as Margaret Mead and Abraham Maslow. Ewing and Donn defied what they called “the compartmentalization of science,” Friedan wrote in “The Coming Ice Age.” In Friedan’s article, scientists aren’t lone geniuses. She described how Ewing and Donn called up anthropologists late at night to ask them whether, 11,000 years ago, humans might have migrated because of the ice age. With this granular type of reporting, she captured the power of an interdisciplinary approach—one in which researchers collaborated across specialties and operated as sleuths. This, Friedan had leaned, is how paradigms shift.