Betty Friedan

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Betty Friedan, 1960

Betty Friedan (February 4, 1921 – February 4, 2006) was an American feminist, activist and writer.

1 Education and family
2 Career
3 Controversy over gay and lesbian rights
4 Temperament
5 Books
6 Quotations
7 Further reading
8 Obituaries
9 External links

[edit] Education and family

Friedan was born Bettye Naomi Goldstein on February 4, 1921 in Peoria, Illinois. Her father started as a button hawker, and later owned a jewelry shop. Her mother quit a job as a women's page editor for a newspaper when she became pregnant with Betty in order to become a housewife. Betty realized how frustrated her mother had been as a housewife when her mother took over the family shop after Betty's father fell ill. Her mother's new life outside the home seemed much more gratifying.

When Betty was young, she was active in Marxist and Jewish radical circles. She went to high school in Peoria, finishing in 1938. She attended Smith College, where she edited a campus newspaper and graduated summa cum laude in 1942. She was also active in her high school newspaper. After graduation, she spent a year at the University of California, Berkeley doing graduate work in psychology but declined a PHD fellowship for further study, leaving to work as a journalist for leftist and union publications. For some ten years, she worked for two of the most radical labor journals, the Federated Press and the United Electrical Workers' UE News.

She married Carl Friedan, a theatre-producer, in 1947 (the "e" was dropped after they were married). Betty Friedan continued to work after marriage (at a time when most women did not), first as a paid employee and after 1952, as a freelance journalist. Betty and Carl divorced in May 1969. Betty claimed in her memoir, Life So Far (2000), that Carl had beaten her during their marriage; friends such as Dolores Alexander recalled having to cover up black eyes from Carl's abuse in time for press conferences (Brownmiller 1999, p. 70). Carl Friedan denied abusing Betty in an interview with TIME magazine shortly after the book was published, describing the claim as a "complete fabrication" [1], and asserted that the bruises Betty took at his hands were from self-defense during fights^{[citation needed]}. Betty later said on Good Morning America, "I almost wish I hadn't even written about it, because it's been sensationalized out of context. My husband was no wife-beater, and I was no passive victim of a wife-beater. We fought a lot, and he was bigger than me." Carl Friedan died in December, 2005.

The Friedans had three children, Emily, Daniel, and Jonathan. One of their sons, Daniel Friedan, is a noted theoretical physicist.

Friedan died at her home in Washington, D.C. on February 4, 2006 of congestive heart failure on her 85th birthday.

[edit] Career

In 1952, Friedan was fired from the union newspaper UE News when she was pregnant with her second child.

For her 15th college reunion in 1957, Friedan conducted a survey of Smith College graduates, focusing on their education, their subsequent experiences and satisfaction with their current lives. Her article on the survey, which lamented the lost potential of her female classmates and present-day female college students, was submitted to women's magazines in 1958. It was rejected by all editors to whom it was submitted, even after Friedan rewrote portions at the request of some of the editors.

[edit] The Feminine Mystique

Friedan then decided to rework and expand the article into a book. The book was published in 1963, and was titled The Feminine Mystique. It depicted the roles of women in industrial societies, and in particular the full-time homemaker role, which Friedan saw as stifling. The book became a bestseller, which some people suggest was the impetus for the second wave of feminism, and significantly spurred the women's movement.

[edit] Other works

Friedan's other books include The Second Stage, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement, and The Fountain of Age. Her autobiography, Life so Far, was published in 2000.

[edit] NOW

Friedan co-founded the US National Organization for Women with 27 other women and men. She wrote its statement of purpose with Pauli Murray, the first African-American female Episcopal priest. Friedan was its first president, serving from 1966 to 1970. NOW statement on Friedan's death

[edit] NARAL and abortion

Friedan helped found NARAL (originally National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws) in 1969 together with Bernard Nathanson and Larry Lader. Unlike Nathanson, she always remained a staunch advocate of legal abortion.

[edit] Controversy over gay and lesbian rights

One of the most influential feminists of the late 20th century, Friedan opposed "equating feminism with lesbianism." She later acknowledged that she had been "very square" and was uncomfortable about homosexuality.[2]. She is said to have ^{[citation needed]} coined the anti-lesbian phrase "Lavender Menace" during a 1969 National Organization for Women (NOW) meeting. Lavender Menace refers to lesbians who want to equate lesbianism to feminism and was later used by gay rights activists as the original name of the pro-lesbian group "Radicalesbians".

However, Betty Friedan subsequently switched positions. At the Women's Conference held in Houston, Texas in 1977 to ratify the United Nations 'Platform for Women' she seconded the motion supporting lesbian rights. In the huge velodrome where the conference was held, the air was electric. 10,000 women debated the resolutions back and forth. Rumors of 'right wing women' having been 'bussed in' from around the country meant that there was great apprehension as to the outcome of voting. When Betty Friedan took the microphone to pledge her support for the lesbian rights motion, women cheered, some cried, and all around the venue, thousands of lavender balloons rose from the floor, drifting triumphantly towards the ceiling. Despite opposition from the right, the motion was overwhelmingly passed. This was a defining moment for the US Women's Movement, for lesbian rights, and for Betty Friedan.^[1]

[edit] Temperament

The New York Times obituary for Friedan noted that she was "famously abrasive" and that she could be "thin-skinned and imperious, subject to screaming fits of temperament." And in February 2006, shortly after Friedan's death, the controversial feminist writer Germaine Greer published an article in Guardian [3], in which she described Friedan as egotistic, personally demanding, and often selfish, focusing on repeated incidents during a tour of Iran in 1972. Greer wrote of her outbursts,

Betty Friedan "changed the course of human history almost single-handedly." Her ex-husband, Carl Friedan, believes this; Betty believed it too. This belief was the key to a good deal of Betty's behaviour; she would become breathless with outrage if she didn't get the deference she thought she deserved. Though her behaviour was often tiresome, I figured that she had a point. Women don't get the respect they deserve unless they are wielding male-shaped power; if they represent women they will be called "love" and expected to clear up after themselves. Betty wanted to change that for ever.

—Germaine Greer, "The Betty I knew," The Guardian (February 7, 2006)

Indeed, Carl has been quoted as saying "She changed the course of history almost single-handedly. It took a driven, superaggressive, egocentric, almost lunatic dynamo to rock the world the way she did. Unfortunately, she was that same person at home, where that kind of conduct doesn't work. She simply never understood this." [Ginsberg L., "Ex-hubby fires back at feminist icon Betty," New York Post, 05 July 2000]

[edit] Books

The Feminine Mystique (1963)

It Changed My Life (1976)

The Second Stage (1981) [4]

First published in 1981, The Second Stage is eerily prescient and timely, a reminder that much of what is called new thinking in feminism has been eloquently observed and argued before. Warning the women's movement against dissolving into factionalism, male-bashing, and preoccupation with sexual and identity politics rather than bottom-line political and economic inequalities, Friedan argues that once past the initial phases of describing and working against political and economic injustices, the women's movement should focus on working with men to remake private and public arrangements that work against full lives with children for women and men both. ..Called "utopian" fifteen years ago, when it seemed unbelievable that women had enough power in the workplace to make effective demands, or that men would join them, some of these visions are slowly but steadily coming to pass even now. The problem Friedan identifies is as real now as it was years ago: "how to live the equality we fought for," and continue to fight for, with "the family as new feminist frontier." She writes not only for women's liberation but for human liberation.[5]

The Fountain of Age (1993)

Life So Far (2000)

[edit] Quotations

The problem that has no name — which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities — is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.

- Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 1963. NY: Dell Publ., 1974.

The shallow unreality, immaturity, promiscuity, lack of lasting human satisfaction that characterize the homosexual's sex life usually characterize all his life and interests.

- Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 1963. NY: Dell Publ., 1974.

Men weren't really the enemy - they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.

-Betty Friedan [6]

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 housewife 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?

-Betty Friedan [7]

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. There is no other way..The only kind of work which permits an able woman to realize her abilities fully, to achieve identity in society in a life plan that can encompass marriage and motherhood, is the kind that was forbidden by the feminine mystique, the lifelong commitment to an art or science, to politics or profession.

-Betty Friedan [8]

If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based.

-Betty Friedan [9]

[edit] Further reading

Blau, Justine. Betty Friedan: Feminist (Women of Achievement), Paperback Edition, Chelsea House Publications 1990 ISBN 1-55546-653-2
Bohannon, Lisa Frederikson. Women's Work: The Story of Betty Friedan, Hardcover Edition, Morgan Reynolds Publishing 2004 ISBN 1-931798-41-9
Brownmiller, Susan. In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution The Dial Press 1999 ISBN 0-385-31486-8
Friedan, Betty. Fountain of Age, Paperback Edition, Simon and Schuster 1994 ISBN 0-671-89853-1
Friedan, Betty. It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement, Hardcover Edition, Random House Inc. 1978 ISBN 0-394-46398-6
Friedan, Betty. Life So Far, Paperback Edition, Simon and Schuster 2000 ISBN 0-684-80789-0
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique, Hardcover Edition, W.W. Norton and Company Inc. 1963 ISBN 0-393-08436-1
Friedan, Betty. The Second Stage, Paperback Edition, Abacus 1983 ASIN B000BGRCRC
Horowitz, Daniel. "Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America" American Quarterly, Volume 48, Number 1, March 1996, pp. 1-42
Horowitz, Daniel. "Betty Friedan and the Making of "The Feminine Mystique", University of Massachusetts Press, 1998, ISBN 1-55849-168-6
Hennessee, Judith. Betty Friedan: Her Life, Hardcover Edition, Random House 1999 ISBN 0-679-43203-5
Henry, Sondra. Taitz, Emily. Betty Friedan: Fighter For Women's Rights, Hardcover Edition, Enslow Publishers 1990 ISBN 0-89490-292-X
Meltzer, Milton. Betty Friedan: A Voice For Women's Rights, Hardcover Edition, Viking Press 1985 ISBN 0-670-80786-9
Sherman, Janann. Interviews With Betty Friedan, Paperback Edition, University Press of Mississippi 2002 ISBN 1-57806-480-5
Taylor-Boyd, Susan. Betty Friedan: Voice For Women's Rights, Advocate of Human Rights, Hardcover Edition, Gareth Stevens Publishing 1990 ISBN 0-8368-0104-0