Homage to Betty Friedan...But Look At All That’s Left To Do
I first met Betty Friedan at a mutual friend’s Thanksgiving dinner. She had just endorsed Walter Mondale for president and was upset (to put it mildly) that some others at the table were supporting Jesse Jackson. Shortly thereafter I began to work with Betty. I was directing a national commission on Jewish women, which she was co-chairing (another member of the commission was Bella Abzug, suffice it to say, with these two titans of feminism, it was always interesting, but never for the faint of heart). Betty was, as the NYTimes’ obit points out, not an easy personality. And as a younger feminist, I was at the time, somewhat taken aback by her gruffness, but in retrospect, I have great affection for her engagement in the world and her fierce determination to use her ideas, her writing and her activism to change society. Her book The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963 and became the book that helped spark the feminist revolution to ride alongside the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement of that same time period. It was a sociological book, not a memoir, although had it been published today, it’s likely that she would have ended up on Oprah’s couch—and as part of the book club—and the trails of the overeducated, frustrated housewife from Rockland County would have been transmitted to all the television viewers. Since there was no Oprah then, however, Friedan’s book found its life in a political movement, at a time when movements like feminism, anti-war, and civil rights were converging and coalescing as a nation went through the convulsions of a partial revolution, from which we are still reeling today.
There must have been something in the drinking water in 1963 because that was the year that no only saw the publication of Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, but also the novel The Golden Notebook, by British writer Doris Lessing. That novel, famously written as five notebooks to symbolize the fragmentation of a modern woman’s life, was more explicitly left wing and political. Lessing, after all, thought she was writing a novel about the Cold War and loss of faith in Stalinism and the Soviet Union, but like Friedan’s non-fiction, The Golden Notebook was really about the situation of present-day women, who were trying to navigate through a dailiness that was changing in profound ways.
Friedan was attacked by more radical feminists for being too bourgeois, not sufficiently supportive of gay rights, and more. And, she was extremely frustrating at times. But she had her pulse on the zeitgeist and could intuit trends even before they happened. Though the housewife from the suburbs, she was also a strong union supporter, and always argued for higher wages for women and a more equitable balance between work and family. But the fact is that the revolution spawned by her book didn’t get us to that point. There was a revolution created by feminists like Freidan, Abzug and legions of others that brought profound changes to our social and cultural ways of being. But, politically and economically we still have a far way to go. Women are more equal and less equal every day. Perhaps the next phase will take up this mantle of economic equality to add to the social and cultural equality that several generations of women now, have inherited from Friedan and others like her.
Lessing ends The Golden Notebook in a sort of post-feminist haze. Her protagonist, Anna Wulf, rebels against her revolutionary mother. She asks to attend a “conventional boarding school.” Anna writes that her daughter “had taken a look at the world of disorder, experiment, where people lived from day to day, like balls perpetually jigging on top of jets of prancing water, keeping themselves open for any new feeling or adventure, and had decided it was not for her.”
Indeed, change can be frightening, and when society hasn’t acclimated itself enough to new forms of change, it can appear to be chaotic. From the early 1960s to today is 43 years, almost half a century. At a time when progressives are trying to rethink and reconfigure the liberal or progressive project, the passing of an icon like Friedan offers us an opportunity to look back on our victories—but with the Alito appointment to the Supreme Court, women doing double time in the workplace and with family, the wage crunch, and more—it also gives us an opportunity to chart where we need to lead the revolution moving forward.
Comments (12)
I started out highly sypathetic to feminism, having read her Mystique in my early teens, and gradually found myself alienated by some of the ... excesses, we'll call them, of the movement she founded as it became radicalized. Friedan herself, however, was one feminist I could always respect, someone who never forgot that feminism was about people, not just women. She lived a great life and will be missed.
February 5, 2006 6:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
But, politically and economically we still have a far way to go. Women are more equal and less equal every day. Perhaps the next phase will take up this mantle of economic equality to add to the social and cultural equality that several generations of women now, have inherited from Friedan and others like her.
I think it's pretty likely that women will take up the mantle, but what would this social and cultural equality look like?
February 5, 2006 8:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Salon" has an article about Betty Friedan and "choice feminism." What most movement feminists seem to ignore is how complicated almost all the issues they say are black and white really are.
It was Phillys Schafly and other women who really sunk the ERA precisely because they liked the leverage of a more patriachical society.
I have a daughter and wish to have as many choices as she wants. However, I am also aware that all of my wife's friends, college educated, lawyers etc, wanted children and stopped working because they wanted to be with their chidlren. The class arguments though interesting are irrelevant to the complexities of these issues.
Even abortion presented as so clear cut isn't. Arguing that it is only about a woman's body totally ignores that a feotus isn't just an object. This doesn't mean abortion should be illegal only tha the issue is a lot more complicated that feminist ideologues want to acknowledge.
Daniel A. Greenbaum
February 6, 2006 8:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
...all of my wife's friends, college educated, lawyers etc, wanted children and stopped working because they wanted to be with their chidlren. The class arguments though interesting are irrelevant to the complexities of these issues
Everyone is not a college educated lawyer, etc. Lots, if not most, women must return to work in order to feed, clothe, shelter and educate their children, even tho they want to be with their children. The class issue is only irrelevant when you're in a certain economic class.
February 6, 2006 8:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
spot on...or when one is fortunate enough to enjoy a certain sex/gender/ethnicity/social/economic class/position to which these issues do not seem to readily apply and therefore may seem not as relevent. many however can readily identify and must live within these constraints. that is why they matter. thank you for your reality-based words of good sense. it's quite evident we as a society have even farther to go than we realized. great comment.
February 6, 2006 11:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
I can't remember any feminist claiming that any of these issues were "black and white". In fact, the opposite is true. It is the feminists who point out the complexities of these issues - that women have to make choices that men don't have to make for many reasons, including biological and sociological.
As to the "class arguments", everything in society is about class and the opportunity to overcome its stratification and limitations. Class isn't just about money, it's about opportunities and their allocation. If you're denied opportunity, then by definition you're without choice. This argument against feminism misses Friedan's point - that without opportunity, there is no choice, there are only limitations.
This claim that feminists see abortion as "only about a woman's body" is false. It isn't "only about a woman's body" it's about the woman's right to control her own reproduction without coercion or fear by and of society.
It seems to me that you're reducing these issues to a single cause and then accusing feminists of ignoring complexities. I know for a fact, that they do not.
February 7, 2006 7:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
No, the class issue is irrelevant because people of either gender should be able to get any job they are able to do and be paid the same for the same work. That however is not the issue. The issue is the philosophical one of what Betty Friedan and other Feminists advocated and how it relates to the lives of real women and especially women most like the leaders themselves.
Daniel A. Greenbaum
February 7, 2006 10:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
You're wrong. Friedan's message was that not everyone in society has the opportunity to choose. Different classes have different opportunities and the higher your class, the more opportunities are made available to you. You're simply misunderstanding her argument. If because you're a woman and denied access to loans, colleges or careers, then your opportunities are limited. This criticism of her book is not only unfair, but it is based on a misreading of her argument.
People who claim that class doesn't matter in this society simply don't understand the system. Upper class people have access to power and wealth, the other classes do not. It has little to do with getting the job you're able to do and everything with getting the job you want to do. You'd think the election of Bush would tell you that. He sure as hell isn't able to do the job, but he wanted it, and because of his access to wealth and power he got it. That's why we've had so few presidents from the lower and middle classes.
February 7, 2006 11:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
Betty's book literally changed my life. And I am deeply grateful for that. I remember my mother crying when she was training yet another young man that she knew was already earning more money than she was. I suppose we can argue all day about the philosophy but the reality is I never cried because I was earning the same money.
Thank you Betty and RIP.
February 7, 2006 3:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Of course, people of either gender should be able to get any job they are able to do and be paid the same for the same work.
People of any race, religion, national origin or sexual orientation should have the same right, also. That doesn’t make the class issue irrelevant. In fact it brings the class issue to the forefront. Cuz if you’re in the wrong race, religion, national origin or sexual orientation group, you’re in the econimic minority. (ie. the relatively powerless, and poorer than lots of others)
The issue is the philosophical one of what Betty Friedan and other Feminists advocated and how it relates to the lives of real women and especially women most like the leaders themselves.
What is a real woman, and, who are the the women most like the (Feminist) leaders themselves? Philosophically speaking, was Ms. Friedan’s intention only to touch, change, question, improve the lives of the women who were like her -- i.e. college educated, middle to upper class, (most) married to college educated, middle to upper class men -- only the women she knew and associated with? If so, she could have skipped writing the books and the activism and just talked to her friends at tea time.
I’m 54, so it’s a long time since I read The Feminine Mystique back in college in the 70’s. Coming from the relatively “upper” range of a lower working class family, I don’t recall when I read the book feeling that “my” class of women was left out of her critique of the problems/attitudes facing women.
To borrow a phrase: It seems to me that you're reducing these issues to a single cause and then accusing feminists of ignoring complexities.
But what is your single cause?
Class is one of the many complexities that women must face. Perhaps not your wife, mother or daughter. But lots of other women. I’m the mother of a son, the grandmother of a beautiful (of course! lol!) baby boy. And our combined families are doing our best and damnedest to make sure that the mother of the baby boy has as many choices as she wants or needs (as you want for yours), so that she too, can be home with her baby, when she is most needed, just like your wife. But it’s a group effort here, without any law degrees, but including one union worker.
People close to me at work -- (professional, but not lawyers) single mothers of school age children -- have non stop problems with child care. Philosophically speaking, I think Ms. Friedan would have been very sympathetic to them, but I don’t recall if she every addressed that issue. Perhaps that’s one of the issues left to the next, new generation of feminists.
And thanks to the TPM “powers that be” for keeping this on the front page so far.
February 7, 2006 8:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
We all, I think, have dealt with our mother's tears, over lots of injustices that they had to endure. I'm glad that you were earning the same money. I hope that continues, and continues to your children and my grandchildren.
February 7, 2006 8:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Cindy Sheehan, Cindy Sheehan, and Cindy Sheehan.
Tom
February 8, 2006 10:44 PM | Reply | Permalink