Perhaps the strangest is Condon, who has directed decidedly grown-up biopics on sex researcher Alfred Kinsey and James Whale, the man who brought Frankenstein to the screen.

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She has played a protective single mother in You Can Count on Me, a scheming, malevolent Bertha Dorset in The House of Mirth, and the wife of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in Kinsey, among many other diverse characters.

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In 1999, the political scientist Alan Wolfe pointed out that much of the scholarship Friedan relied on in her diagnosis of the feminine mystique work by Margaret Mead, Alfred Kinsey, and Bruno Bettelheim has since turned out to be suspect.

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