New York ? Betty Friedan, whose manifesto “The Feminine Mystique” helped shatter the cozy suburban ideal of the post-World War II era and laid the groundwork for the modern feminist movement, died Saturday, her birthday. She was 85.

Friedan died at her Washington, D.C., home of congestive heart failure, according to a cousin, Emily Bazelon.

Few books have so profoundly changed so many lives as did Friedan’s 1963 best-seller. Her assertion that a woman needed more than a husband and children was a radical break from the Eisenhower era, when the very idea of a wife doing any work outside of house work was fodder for gag writers, like an episode out of “I Love Lucy.”

Independence for women was no joke, Friedan wrote. The feminine mystique was a phony deal sold to women that left them unfulfilled, suffering from “the problem that has no name” and seeking a solution in tranquilizers and psychoanalysis.

“A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, ‘Who am I, and what do I want out of life?’ She mustn’t feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children,” Friedan said.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said Friedan’s activism and writing “opened doors and minds, breaking down barriers for women and enlarging opportunities for women and men for generations to come. We are all the beneficiaries of her vision.”

Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, publisher of Ms. magazine and a former president of the National Organization for Women, praised Friedan’s legacy.

Friedan, she said, “was a giant for women’s rights and a leading catalyst of the 20th century whose work led to profound changes improving the status of women and women’s lives” worldwide. “The Feminine Mystique” helped to “define the lesser status of women,” she said.

In the racial, political and sexual conflicts of the 1960s and ’70s, Friedan’s was one of the most commanding voices and recognizable presences in the women’s movement – stocky and big-eyed with a personality to match, clashing even with Gloria Steinem and other feminists.

As the first president of NOW in 1966, Friedan staked out positions that seemed extreme at the time on such issues as abortion, sex-neutral help-wanted ads, equal pay, promotion opportunities and maternity leave.

But at the same time, Friedan insisted that the women’s movement had to remain in the American mainstream, that men had to be accepted as allies and that the family should not be rejected.

Betty Friedan speaks regarding a national women's strike in this Aug. 26, 1966, file photo. Friedan, who wrote The

“Don’t get into the bra-burning, anti-man, politics-of-orgasm school,” Friedan told a college audience in 1970.

Friedan, deeply opposed to “equating feminism with lesbianism,” conceded later that she had been “very square” and uncomfortable about homosexuality.

“I wrote a whole book objecting to the definition of women only in sexual relation to men. I would not exchange that for a definition of women only in sexual relation to women,” she said.

Nonetheless she was a seconder for a resolution on protecting lesbian rights at the National Women’s Conference in Houston in 1977.

“For a great many women, choosing motherhood makes motherhood itself a liberating choice,” she told an interviewer two decades later. But she added that this should not be a reason for conflict with “other feminists who are maybe more austere, or choose to seek their partners among other women.”

By then in her 70s, Friedan had moved on to the issue of how society views and treats its elderly.

She said that while researching her last book, “The Fountain of Age,” published in 1993, she found those who dealt with old people “talk about the aged with the same patronizing, ‘compassionate’ denial of their personhood that was heard when the experts talked about women 20 years ago.”

She had not stopped being a feminist, she said, “but women as a special separate interest group are not my concern any more.”

Friedan, born Feb. 4, 1921, in Peoria, Ill., was a high achieving Jewish outsider growing up in middle America. Her father, Harry Goldstein, owned a jewelry store; her mother, Miriam, quit a job as a newspaper women’s page editor to become a housewife.

Hoping to get a magazine piece out of a Smith College 15-year reunion, Friedan prepared an in-depth survey of her classmates.

What she found was that these well-educated women of the class of 1942, now largely suburban housewives, were asking, in effect, “Is this all?”

Friedan couldn’t get the article published in a magazine, but five years of more research and writing turned it into “The Feminine Mystique.”

If some women read it as a call to arms, others were outraged, Friedan recalled. Dinner invitations stopped; she was out of the school car pool.

But the first printing of 3,000 eventually grew to 600,000 copies hardcover and more than 2 million in paperback.

Survivors include her sons, Daniel Friedan of Princeton, N.J., and Jonathan Friedan of Philadelphia, and daughter Emily Friedan of Buffalo, N.Y.; nine grandchildren; a sister, Amy Adams of New York; and a brother, Harry Goldstein of Palm Springs, Calif.