The exact same choices that exist today were available to women before Friedan was born: marriage, consecrated life or being a loser.
And, parenthetically, men have and have had the exact same three choices.
IMO it's total B.S. that those are the only three choices in life. Not everyone desires to breed, or to be surrounded by a crowd 24 x 7. Some of us like peace and quiet but aren't nuns either (I'm not Catholic).
It wasn't that long ago that women who aspired to go on to professional school were basically advised to give up the seat to a man--for whatever bullsh*t reasons they were told. Now, of course, women are take it for granted that, for example, they can be doctors instead of nurses if that's what they want, or they can be attorneys instead of secretaries or paralegals, which *I* think is a positive change.
I have visited three different veterinary schools in this country... nowadays women make up the majority of many of the entering classes; but that's only happened within the last decade or so. At UC Davis and Colorado State, their graduating classes were nearly all men until fairly recently... you can see their class pictures in the hallways.