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Who says one man can't make a difference? Or one woman.

Betty Friedan was a housewife, mother, and sometimes freelance writer when, in 1963, she published The Feminine Mystique.

The bestseller changed our world:

The feminine mystique, she said, was a phony bill of goods society 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 struck a nerve. Suddenly women realized that other women felt just like they did, that it was ok to want something more out of life than the stereotyped, 50s expectation of womanhood — or if not something more, then at least something else.

Suddenly, women realized there wasn't something wrong with them. There was something wrong with the society that repressed them.

But I have to wonder how successful the book would have been if today's ultra-conservative talk-radio and cable-TV opinion factories had existed back then, with Limbaugh hammering away daily at this "femminazi" and her radical little book, and Hannity, Coulter, O'Reilly and the rest of the reactionary crew spitting their venom into the stew.

Betty Friedan, co-founder of NOW, died yesterday on her 85th birthday. Let's hope there are more just like her on the way.