Feminist Pioneer Betty Friedan Dies at 85

[whimsicaldeb]

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Remembrances
Feminist Pioneer Betty Friedan Dies at 85

NPR.org, February 4, 2006 · WASHINGTON (AP) -- Betty Friedan, whose manifesto The Feminine Mystique became a best seller in the 1960s and laid the groundwork for the modern feminist movement, died Saturday, her birthday. She was 85.

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

Friedan's assertion in her 1963 best seller that having a husband and babies was not everything and that women should aspire to separate identities as individuals, was highly unusual, if not revolutionary, just after the baby and suburban booms of the Eisenhower era.

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 said.

"That book changed women's lives," Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, which Friedan co-founded, said Saturday. "It opened women's minds to the idea that there actually might be something more. And for the women who secretly harbored such unpopular thoughts, it told them that there were other women out there like them who thought there might be something more to life."

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.

As the first president of NOW in 1966, she 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.

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

To more radical and lesbian feminists, Friedan was "hopelessly bourgeois," Susan Brownmiller wrote at the time.

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.

As a girl, Friedan watched her mother "cut down my father because she had no place to channel her terrific energies, a typical female disorder that I call impotent rage," she said.

From high school valedictorian in 1938 to summa cum laude graduate of Smith College in 1942, "I was that girl with all A's and I wanted boys worse than anything," she said.

She won a fellowship in psychology to the University of California, Berkeley, but turned down a bigger fellowship there so as not to outdo a boyfriend.

The romance broke up anyway and Friedan moved to Greenwich Village in New York and became a labor reporter.

She lost one job to a returning World War II veteran but found another before marrying Carl Friedan, a summer-stock producer and later an advertising executive, in 1947. The marriage, which produced three children, ended in divorce 22 years later.

Friedan got a maternity leave to have her first child in 1949, but was fired and replaced by a man when she asked for another leave to have the second child five years later.

The family had moved to a big Victorian house in the suburban Rockland County village of Grandview-on-the-Hudson, N.Y., where Friedan cranked out freelance magazine articles while bringing up her brood.

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. The book was listed at No. 37 on a 1999 New York University survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the century.

---end of article

Thank you Ms. Friedan
Godspeed

[judih]

fabulously inspiring human being. Loved her courage, her joy, her strength.

Fountain of Age is a classic volume and will revolutionize popular thinking about our elderly, if only everyone would read it!

Thank you deb. The day is new and I hadn't yet heard till you told me here.

May Betty's family be comforted knowing that her influence is neverending.

[stilltrucking]

To more radical and lesbian feminists, Friedan was "hopelessly bourgeois," Susan Brownmiller wrote at the time.

Lenin told Emma Goldman, "Free speech is such a bourgeois notion."

It is amazing how many men are still frightened of Betty. I know she was right. She spoke for the women of my mother's generation.

You done good Betty, rest in peace.

[Zlatko Waterman]

Freidan had the courage to tell the truth, and do so in an articulate manner. Better yet, she looked beyond herself to the needs of others.

Like Simone de Beauvoir,


http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/beav.htm



she was tired of smiling and filling glasses for people at parties.

It's easy to make fun of her, as The National Review has, but she was an original and helped women pursue their own originality.


--Z

[e_dog]

Betty no likey the lesbos. called em the lavender mob or some such phrase. lesbos make nice hetero fems seem weird.

its a shame the women's revolution has been such a failure. perhaps
feminists need a real Bolshevik faction.

[stilltrucking]

It's easy to make fun of her, as The National Review has, but she was an original and helped women pursue their own originality

She is constantly attacked on men's rights websites. Usualy for being inauthentic. She was not your typical New Jersey housewife they paint her as a communist agitator or something like it. Also they are sure to mention her middle name (Goldman, so we know she was another ball busting Jewish bitch) and for changing her name from Friedman to sound less Jewish. I think she helped men because there was less for women to be resentful about.

I don't know what you mean by failure e-dog. You mean the free love thing. Sexual liberation? Just wondering

[e_dog]

failure in the sense that women are still subordinate to men.

women are a majority and yet men hold almost all the power.

Che Guevara, in a different context, spoke about liberal-democratic social reform as an instance of seeking a lighter ball for the end of the chain, i.e. a prisoner's chain.

the women's movement even at its height was seeking to sit at the table with men. they should have sought to overturn it. i'd like to see a world in which men, rather than women as today, are largely excluded from powerful positions in politics, industry.

that's why i say the women's movement lacked and desperately needed/needs a Bolshevik wing. Betty wasn't radical enough.

[whimsicaldeb]

the women's movement even at its height was seeking to sit at the table with men. they should have sought to overturn it. i'd like to see a world in which men, rather than women as today, are largely excluded from powerful positions in politics, industry.

I wrote this to Still Trucking in another thread, but as I was writing it, I realized I was thinking of this comment: responding to this comment. Here's what I wrote:

Men only can’t do it as a group – and that’s ditto for women as well. If you switch one group out for another all you’ve done is changed the tone - the surface - of the problem, but not the problem itself.

It’s about working together/with, not lording over – and that’s the same for men and women & women and men.

...

I'm going to add - exclusion doesn't work. Excluding women hasn't worked -- switching places and excluding men isn't going to work any better. Seeking to sit at the table with men is the correct goal... however ... as Jefferson said ...

A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.
Thomas Jefferson
Rasselas Ch. 41

and I have no problem with women walking in, overturning the tables and then saying ... okay, now lets get down to business.

[e_dog]

strategically, no women's mvt. will succeed by totally alienating men b/c men hold power. so, yes, the women have to first say 'we wanna be EQUAL' and then take power and subordinate the men.

men and women are no equal by nature. men are much more cruel and sadistic and violently aggressive. many more rapists, serial killers, war criminals, dictators, agents of genocide amongst the male sex than female., historically. this may be biological. women should rule. marijuana should be legal. this is the only way for worldpeace.

[whimsicaldeb]

I agree with everything you wrote except with the "subordinating” part.

Yes women need to take more control, need to step more fully into having, holding, and yielding power – and as we do, it will balance out the overly aggressive tendencies of males. On the flip side (cause & effect), as we do this, (and it's happening) the effects on men will continue, which is they will continue to learn how to transform their aggressive tendencies into more healthy assertive expressions … and gain more confidence in assertiveness effectiveness, rather than keeping their confidence grounded in overly aggression as being the only means of effectiveness. Aggression is effective, but only temporarily.

In the end, effectiveness is the measure of truth.

And the truth about subjugation of an entire group of people, especially used as a long term solution is that it doesn’t work – never has and never will, and history proves this to be so. Eventually, all ‘subjects’ end up rising up and over-throwing; as they should.

So the best way is to break this repeating pattern of aggression over others … is replacing our subjugating thoughts and tendencies with equality, which will accomplish the same task.

All this takes time… takes work, dedicated effort … and that’s still happening. So, it’s not a dead issue, nor a failure. It’s still a work in progress. And that's my view.