What a sad week, not only for the participants in all the different forms of the civil rights movement, but for everyone who has ever realized that the world isn’t quite right yet, and hoped to do something about it.

On January 31, Wendy Wasserstein died from complications of lymphoma at the age of 55. Wasserstein was a Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright, whose “plays struck a profound chord with women struggling to reconcile a desire for romance and companionship, drummed into baby boomers by the seductive fantasies of Hollywood movies, with the need for intellectual independence and achievement separate from the personal sphere.”

Writing in the late 1970s and 1980s, Wasserstein encountered a brand of feminism that seemed on the downshift. She was part of the generation that was told that women could be anything they wanted, could have anything they wanted, from careers to marriage to children. But the reality of feminism didn’t live up to the myth.

In the introduction to the NY Times’ sampling of the characters who are “Wendy Wasserstein’s Women,” the editor writes, “While Ms. Wasserstein’s plays didn’t repudiate feminism, they didn’t embrace it either. Instead, the playwright…gave voice to the emotional debate and new uncertainty ringing in women’s head.”

That debate started, for modern times anyway, with the publication of The Feminine Mystique, whose author, Betty Friedan, passed away yesterday at the age 85.

How influential was The Feminine Mystique? Well, as a barometer, it was #7 on the National Conservative Weekly’s “Top Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.” She’s placed in the same category as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Adolph Hitler, Chairman Mao, Alfred Kinsey, John Dewey, and Friedrich Neitzsche. She is the sole female representative on the list. Which would make her — to the National Conservative Weekly, anyway — the most dangerous woman of the 19th and 20th centuries. That’s pretty much the definition of influential.

But what was so dangerous about Friedan? The answer is simple. She pointed out, for all the world to see, “the problem that has no name.”

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night–she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question–”Is this all?”

Friedan told women that the first step was to say “No.” To deny the “life of a good woman” promoted in magazines and movies. To reject that fulfillment can come from matching dishware.

The second step was to realize that entering into a marriage and having children do not make a complete life, that to have a life meant to engage it on one’s own terms, not as a mother, not as a wife, and not necessarily as a woman. “Even a very young woman today must think of herself as a human being first…”

The third step was to get a job. But not just any job. The goal was not to merely work, but to do creative work, intellectual work, professional work. “The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own…If a job is to be the way out of the [housewife] trap for a woman, it must be a [professional] job that she can take seriously as a part of a life plan, work in which she can grow as part of society.”

Putting words to the desire to escape the trap of the household, to be free from the chains of domestic servitude, and to be valued by society: this was what made Betty Friedan so dangerous.

Barbara Seaman, author of Free and Female: The sex life of the contemporary woman, said, “Betty Friedan is to women what Martin Luther King, Jr. is to blacks.”

It was this shared desire for freedom and social worth that made Dr. King dangerous enough to be assassinated five years after the publication of The Feminine Mystique. On Wednesday, almost 40 years after Dr. King’s death, his widow, Corretta Scott King, followed him to heaven. Though not “a civil rights leader in the truest sense,” according to Rev. Joseph Lowery, who co-founded the Souther Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. King, “she became a civil rights figure and a civil rights icon because of what she came to represent.”

But is it right to speak of Coretta Scott King as merely a representation of her husband, especially in paragraphs that follow the words of Betty Friedan? Did not Coretta Scott have a life of her own, outside of the work of her husband, and outside of the scope of his legacy?

Before even meeting Dr. King, Ms. Scott attended Antioch College in Ohio (which, by the way, is part of the Eco League with Green Mountain College), where her sister, two years earlier, was the first black person to be admitted. Corretta Scott went on to the New England Conservatory of Music, where she studied to become a classical singer.

In 1952, before even meeting her, the young man who would go on to change the face of our country called Ms. Scott on the phone and introduced his intentions to marry her. One year later, they were married in Alabama.

“Even before the wedding, she made it clear she intended to remain her own woman. She stunned Dr. King’s father, who presided over the wedding, by demanding that the promise to obey her husband be removed from the wedding vows…After the wedding, the bridegroom fell asleep in the car while the new Mrs. King drove back to Atlanta.”

Despite the fact that she was married to a celebrity, Mrs. King suffered from a version of Friedan’s feminine mystique. She was torn between her desire to raise their four children, to be there for her tired husband, and to play an active role in the civil rights movement.

Dr. King once said, “I wish I could say, to satisfy my masculine ego, that I led her down this path, but I must say we went down together, because she was as actively involved and concerned when we met as she is now.”

After Dr. King’s death, she joined his vision of racial equality with her vision of gender equality. “She called upon American women ‘to unite and form a solid block of women power to fight the three great evils of racism, poverty, and war.’” She also joined the board of directors of the National Organization for Women (which was founded by Betty Friedan).

But at the same time as we remember Corretta Scott as an individual whose value goes beyond her relationship with her husband, we should also remember that she was his life partner. The successes of Dr. King are not his alone. They are a testament to what can be accomplished when powerful individuals combine their efforts, whether those individuals are a large group marching through the streets of Birmingham, or whether those individuals are a single couple expressing their power together in the privacy of their living room, a power that flows beyond their doorway, out into the streets of America, and into our hearts and homes.

At the end of this sad week, we should remember that everything that is good in this world was not God’s gift to humankind, but the priceless gift of good men and women to us, their children.