Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan
Friedan in 1960.
Born	Bettye Naomi Goldstein February 4, 1921 Peoria, Illinois, United States
Died	February 4, 2006(2006-02-04) (aged 85) Washington, D.C., United States
Cause of death	Congestive heart failure
Nationality	United States of America
Known for	Reshaping the attitudes of Americans toward the lives and rights of women.
Spouse	Carl Friedan (1947-1969; divorced)

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

A leading figure in the Women's Movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the "second wave" of American feminism in the 20th century. In 1966, Friedan founded and was elected the first president of the National Organization for Women, which aimed to bring women "into the mainstream of American society now [in] fully equal partnership with men".

In 1970, after stepping down as NOW's first president, Friedan organized the nation-wide Women's Strike for Equality on August 26, the 50th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granting women the right to vote. The national strike was successful beyond expectations in broadening the feminist movement; the march led by Friedan in New York City alone attracted over 50,000 women and men. In 1971, Friedan joined other leading feminists to establish the National Women's Political Caucus. Friedan was also a strong supporter of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution that passed the United States House of Representatives (by a vote of 354-24) and Senate (84-8) following intense pressure by women's groups led by NOW in the early 1970s. Following Congressional passage of the amendment Friedan advocated for ratification of the amendment in the states and supported other women's rights reforms. Friedan founded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws but was later critical of the abortion-centered, politicized tactics of many liberal and radical feminists.

Regarded as an influential author and intellectual in the United States, Friedan remained active in politics and advocacy for the rest of her life, authoring six books. As early as the 1960s Friedan was critical of polarized and extreme factions of feminism that attacked groups such as men and homemakers. One of her later books, The Second Stage (1981), critiqued what Friedan saw as the extremist excesses of some feminists who could be broadly classified as gender feminists.

Early life

Friedan was born Bettye Naomi Goldstein on February 4, 1921 in Peoria, Illinois, to Harry and Miriam (Horwitz) Goldstein, whose Jewish families were from Russia and Hungary. Harry owned a jewelry store in Peoria, and Miriam wrote for the society page of a newspaper when Friedan's father fell ill. Her mother's new life outside the home seemed much more gratifying.

As a young girl, Friedan was active in Marxist and Jewish circles; she later wrote how she felt isolated from the community at times, and felt her "passion against injustice...originated from my feelings of the injustice of anti-Semitism". She attended Peoria High School where she became involved in the school newspaper. When she was turned down for a column, she and six other friends launched a literary magazine called Tide. In this magazine, Friedan and her friends talked about home life as opposed to school life.

She attended the all-female Smith College in 1938. She won a scholarship prize in her first year for outstanding academic performance. In her second year, she became interested in poetry, and had many poems published in campus publications. In 1941, she became editor-in-chief of the college newspaper. The editorials became more political under her leadership, taking a strong anti-war stance and occasionally causing controversy. She graduated summa cum laude in 1942, majoring in psychology.

In 1943, she spent a year at the University of California, Berkeley having won a fellowship to undertake graduate work in psychology with Erik Erikson. She became more politically active, continuing to mix with Marxists (many of her friends were investigated by the FBI). Friedan claims in her memoirs that her boyfriend at the time pressured her into turning down a Ph.D fellowship for further study and abandoning her academic career.

Writing career

Before 1963

After leaving Berkeley, Friedan became a journalist for leftist and union publications. Between 1943-46 she wrote for The Federated Press and between 1946-52 she worked for the United Electrical Workers' UE News. One of her assignments was to report on the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Friedan was dismissed from the union newspaper UE News in 1952, because she was pregnant with her second child. After leaving UE News, she became a freelance writer, and wrote for various magazines, including Cosmopolitan.

According to Daniel Horowitz, Friedan's time as a labor journalist was when she first became aware of women's oppression and exclusion, although Friedan herself disputed this interpretation of her work.

The Feminine Mystique

Main article: The Feminine Mystique

For her 15th college reunion in 1957, Friedan conducted a survey of college graduates, focusing on their education, their subsequent experiences and satisfaction with their current lives. She started publishing articles about what she called "the problem that has no name," and got passionate responses from many housewives grateful that they were not alone in experiencing this problem.

"The shores are strewn with the casualties of the feminine mystique. They did give up their own education to put their husbands through college, and then, maybe against their own wishes, ten or fifteen years later, they were left in the lurch by divorce. The strongest were able to cope more or less well, but it wasn’t that easy for a woman of forty-five or fifty to move ahead in a profession and make a new life for herself and her children or herself alone."

Friedan then decided to rework and expand this topic into a book, The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963, it depicted the roles of women in industrial societies, especially the full-time homemaker role, which Friedan deemed stifling. Friedan speaks of her own 'terror' at being alone, and observes in her life never once seeing a positive female role-model who worked and also kept a family. She provides numerous accounts of housewives who feel similarly trapped. With her psychology background, Friedan offers a critique of Freud's penis envy theory, noting a lot of paradoxes in his work. And she attempts to offer some answers to women who wish to pursue an education.

The "Problem That Has No Name" was described by Friedan in the beginning of the book:

"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 is, a longing] that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries … she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — 'Is this all?"

Friedan noted that women are as capable as men to do any type of work or follow any career path, and the mass media, educators, and psychologists argued to the contrary. The restrictions of the 1950s, and the trapped, imprisoned, feeling of many women forced into these roles, spoke to American women who soon began attending consciousness-raising sessions and lobbying for the reform of oppressive laws and social views that restricted women.

The book became a bestseller, which many historians believe was the impetus for the "second wave" of the Women's Movement, and significantly shaped national and world events.

Other works

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

She also wrote for magazines and a newspaper:

• Columns in McCall's magazine, 1971–1974
• Writings for The New York Times Magazine, Newsday, Harper's, Saturday Review, Mademoiselle, Ladies' Home Journal, Family Circle, TV Guide, and True Magazine

Activism in the women's movement

National Organization for Women

National Organization for Women (NOW) founder and president Betty Naomi Goldstein Friedan (1921-2006); NOW co-chair and Washington, D.C., lobbyist Barbara Ireton (1932-1998); and feminist attorney Marguerite Rawalt (1895-1989). Rawalt was an attorney with the Internal Revenue Service, a former president of the Federal Bar Association, and a tireless advocate for women's rights

In 1966 Friedan founded, and became the first president of, the National Organization for Women. She, with Pauli Murray, the first black female Episcopal priest, wrote its mission statement. Friedan stepped down as president in 1969.

Under Friedan, NOW advocated fiercely for the legal equality of women and men. They lobbied for enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the first two major legislative victories of the movement, and forced the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to stop ignoring, and start treating with dignity and urgency, claims filed involving sex discrimination. They successfully campaigned for a 1967 Executive Order extending the same Affirmative Action granted to blacks to women and a 1968 EEOC decision ruling illegal sex-segregated help want ads, later upheld by the Supreme Court. NOW was vocal in support of the legalization of abortion, something that divided some feminists. Also divisive in the 1960s among women was the Equal Rights Amendment, which NOW fully endorsed; by the 1970s the women and labor unions opposed to ERA warmed up to it and began to fully support it. NOW also lobbied for national day-care.

In 1973, Friedan founded the First Women's Bank and Trust Company.

Women's Strike for Equality

In 1970, NOW, with Friedan leading the cause, was instrumental in bringing down the nomination of G. Harrold Carswell, who had opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act which granted women and men workplace equality, to the Supreme Court. On August 26, 1970, the 50th anniversary of the Women's Suffrage Amendment to the Constitution, Friedan organized the national Women's Strike for Equality, and led a march of 50,000 women in New York City.

Friedan spoke about the Strike for Equality: no incorrect likeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

"All kinds of women's groups all over the country will be using this week on August 26 particularly, to point out those areas in women's life which are still not addressed. For example, a question of equality before the law; we are interested in the equal rights amendment. The question of child care centers which are totally inadequate in the society, and which women require, if they are going to assume their rightful position in terms of helping in decisions of the society. The question of a women's right to control her own reproductive processes, that is, laws prohibiting abortion in the state or putting them into criminal statutes; I think that would be a statute that we would addressing ourselves to.

"So I think individual women will react differently; some will not cook that day, some will engage in dialog with their husband, some will be out at the rallies and demonstrations that will be taking place all over the country. Others will be writing things that will help them to define where they want to go. Some will be pressuring their Senators and their Congressmen to pass legislations that affect women. I don't think you can come up with any one point, women will be doing their own thing in their own way."

National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws

Friedan founded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, renamed National Abortion Rights Action League after the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973.

Politics

In 1970 Friedan led other feminists in derailing the nomination of Supreme Court nominee G. Harold Carswell whose record of racial discrimination and antifeminism made him unacceptable and unfit to sit on the highest court in the land to many in the civil rights and feminist movements. Friedan's impassioned testimony before the Senate helped sink Carswell's nomination.

In 1971 Friedan, along with many other leading women's movement leaders, including Gloria Steinem (with whom she had a legendary rivalry) founded the National Women's Political Caucus.

In 1972, Friedan unsuccessfully ran as a delegate to the 1972 Democratic National Convention in support of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. That year at the DNC Friedan played a very prominent role and addressed the convention, though she clashed with other women, notably Steinem, on what should be done there, and how.

Movement image and unity

One of the most influential feminists of 20th century, Friedan opposed equating feminism with lesbianism. As early as 1964, very early in the movement, and only a year after the publication of The Feminine Mystique, Friedan appeared on television to address the fact the media was, at that point, trying to dismiss the movement as a joke and centering argument and debate around whether or not to wear bras and other issues considered ridiculous. In 1982, during the second wave, she wrote a book for the post-feminist 1980s called The Second Stage, about family life, premised on women having conquered social and legal obstacles.

She pushed the feminist movement to focus on economic issues, especially equality in employment and business and provision for child care and other means by which women and men could balance family and work. She tried to lessen the focus on abortion, as an issue already won, and rape and pornography, which she believed most women did not consider to be high priorities.

Related issues

Lesbian politics

When she grew up in Peoria, Ill., she knew one gay man. She said, "the whole idea of homosexuality made me profoundly uneasy." She later acknowledged that she had been very square and was uncomfortable about homosexuality. "The women's movement was not about sex, but about equal opportunity in jobs and all the rest of it. Yes, I suppose you have to say that freedom of sexual choice is part of that, but it shouldn't be the main issue ...." She ignored lesbians in the National Organization for Women (NOW) initially but objected to what she saw as demands for equal time. "'Homosexuality ... is not, in my opinion, what the women's movement is all about.'" While opposing all repression, she wrote, she refused to wear a purple armband or self-identify as a lesbian (although heterosexual) as an act of political solidarity, considering it not part of the mainstream issues of abortion and child care. In 1977, at the National Women's Conference, she seconded a lesbian rights resolution "which everyone thought I would oppose" in order to "preempt any debate" and move on to other issues she believed were more important and less divisive in the effort to add the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution. She accepted lesbian sexuality ("'Enjoy!'"), albeit not its politicization. In 1995, at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing, China, she found Chinese advice to taxi drivers that naked lesbians would be "cavorting" in their cars and so drivers should hang sheets and that lesbians would have AIDS and so drivers should have disinfectants to be "ridiculous", "incredibly stupid", and "insulting". In 1997, she wrote that "children ... will ideally come from mother and father." She wrote in 2000, "I'm more relaxed about the whole issue now[.]"

Abortion choice

She supported the concept that abortion is a woman's choice, that it shouldn't be a crime or exclusively a doctor's choice, and helped form NARAL (now NARAL Pro-Choice America) at a time when Planned Parenthood wasn't yet supportive. Death threats against her speaking on abortion led to two events being canceled, although subsequently one of the host institutions, Loyola College, invited her back to speak on abortion and other issues and she spoke then. Her draft of NOW's first statement of purpose included an abortion plank but NOW didn't include it until the next year. In 1980, she believed abortion should be in the context of "'the choice to have children'", a formulation supported by the Roman Catholic priest organizing Catholic participation in the White House Conference on Families of that year, although perhaps not by the bishops above him. A resolution embodying the formulation passed at the conference by 460 to 114, whereas a resolution addressing abortion, ERA, and "'sexual preference'" passed by only 292–291 and that only after 50 anti-abortion advocates had walked out and so hadn't voted on it. She disagreed with a resolution that framed abortion in more feminist terms that was introduced in the Minneapolis regional conference of the same White House Conference on Families, believing it to be more polarizing, while the drafters apparently thought Friedan's formulation too conservative. As of 2000, she wrote, referring to "NOW and the other women's organizations" as seeming to be in a "time warp", "To my mind, there is far too much focus on abortion.... [I]n recent years I've gotten a little uneasy about the movement's narrow focus on abortion as if it were the single, all-important issue for women when it's not" She asked, "Why don't we join forces with all who have true reverence for life, including Catholics who oppose abortion, and fight for the choice to have children?"

Pornography

She joined nearly 200 others in Feminists for Free Expression in opposing the Pornography Victims' Compensation Act. "'[T]o suppress free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong,' says Friedan. 'Even some blue-jean ads are insulting and denigrating. I'm not adverse [sic] to a boycott but I don't think they should be suppressed.'"

War

In 1968, Friedan signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

Influence

Friedan is credited for starting the contemporary feminist movement and writing a book that is one of the cornerstones of American feminism. Her activist work and her book The Feminine Mystique have been a critical influence to authors, educators, writers, anthropologists, journalists, activists, organizations, unions, and everyday women taking part in the feminist movement. Allan Wolf, in The Mystique of Betty Friedan writes: “She helped to change not only the thinking but the lives of many American women, but recent books throw into question the intellectual and personal sources of her work.” Although there have been some debates on Friedan’s work in The Feminine Mystique since its publication, there is no doubt that her work for equality for women was sincere and committed.

Judith Hennessee (Betty Friedan: Her Life) and Daniel Horowitz, a professor of American Studies at Smith College, have also written about Friedan. Horowitz explored Friedan’s engagement with the women's movement before she began to work on her book, The Feminine Mystique and argues that Friedan’s feminism did not start in the 1950s but rather before that in the 1940s. Focusing his study on Friedan’s ideas in feminism rather than on her personal life Horowitz’s book connects Friedan to the history of American feminism.

Justine Blau was also greatly influenced by Friedan. In Betty Friedan: Feminist Blau writes about the personal and professional life of Friedan through the feminist movement. Lisa Fredenksen Bohannon in Woman’s work: The story of Betty Friedan goes deep into Friedan’s personal life and writes about her relationship with her mother. Sandra Henry and Emily Taitz (Betty Friedan, Fighter for Woman’s Rights) and Susan Taylor Boyd (Betty Friedan: Voice of Woman’s Right, Advocates of Human Rights), wrote biographies on Friedan’s life and works. Journalist Janann Sheman wrote a book called Interviews with Betty Friedan containing interviews with Friedan for the New York Times, Working Women, and Playboy, among others. Focusing on interviews that relate to Friedan's views on men, women and the American Family Sheman traces Friedan's life and explores The Feminine Mystique. Betty Friedan has influenced many individuals into writing about her and topics about women's rights and equality.

Personality

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 feminist writer Germaine Greer published an article in The Guardian, in which she described Friedan as pompous and egotistic, somewhat demanding, and sometimes selfish, as evidenced by repeated incidents during a tour of Iran in 1972.

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 forever.

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

Indeed, Carl Friedan had been quoted as saying "She changed the course of history almost singlehandedly. It took a driven, super aggressive, 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."

Writer Camille Paglia, who had been denounced by Friedan in a Playboy interview, wrote a brief obituary for her in Entertainment Weekly:

Betty Friedan wasn't afraid to be called abrasive. She pursued her feminist principles with a flamboyant pugnacity that has become all too rare in these yuppified times. She hated girliness and bourgeois decorum and never lost her earthly ethnicity.

— Camille Paglia, December 29, 2006/January 5, 2007 double End of the Year issue, section Farewell, pg. 94

The truth is that I've always been a bad-tempered bitch. Some people say that I have mellowed some. I don't know....

— Betty Friedan, Life So Far

Personal life

She married Carl Friedan, a theatre producer, in 1947 while working at UE News. Betty Friedan continued to work after marriage, first as a paid employee and, after 1952, as a freelance journalist. The couple divorced in May 1969. Carl Friedan died in December 2005.

Friedan stated 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 her in an interview with Time magazine shortly after the book was published, describing the claim as a "complete fabrication". She 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 not a wife-beater, and I was no passive victim of a wife-beater. We fought a lot, and he was bigger than me."

Carl and Betty Friedan had three children: Emily, Jonathan, and Daniel. In 1973 Friedan was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II.

Death

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

Bibliography

• The Feminine Mystique (1963)
• It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement (1976)
• The Second Stage (1981)
• The Fountain of Age (1993)
• Beyond Gender (1997)
• Life So Far (2000)

See also

• Elizabeth Hawes
• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

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. "Breaking Through the Age Mystique." 1991, Proceedings from the Kirkpatrick Memorial Conference. Muncie, IN.
• 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
• Siegel, Deborah, Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild (N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 (ISBN 978-1-4039-8204-9)), chap. 3 (author Ph.D. & fellow, Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership).
• 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

Obituaries

• Betty Friedan, philosopher of modern-day feminism, dies - CNN, February 4, 2006.
• Betty Friedan, Who Ignited Cause in 'Feminine Mystique,' Dies at 85 - The New York Times, February 5, 2006.
• Sullivan, Patricia (February 5, 2006). "Voice of Feminism's 'Second Wave'". The Washington Post. Retrieved March 31, 2010.
• Woo, Elaine (February 4, 2006). "Betty Friedan, Philosopher Of Modern-day Feminism, Dies". Los Angeles Times.
• Woo, Elaine (February 5, 2006). "Catalyst of Feminist Revolution". Los Angeles Times.
• Feeney, Mark (February 5, 2006). "Betty Friedan, feminist visionary, dies at 85". The Boston Globe.
• "Betty Friedan, 1921–2006". The Nation. February 9, 2006.

External links

• National Women's Hall of Fame: Betty Friedan
• Betty Friedan at C-SPAN's American Writers: A Journey Through History
• Betty Friedan's Biography from The Encyclopaedia Judaica
• The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud (chapter 5 of The Feminine Mystique)
• Booknotes interview with Friedan on Fountain of Age, November 28, 1993.
• First Measured Century: Interview: Betty Friedan
• Betty Friedan: Late Bloomer.
• Cheerless Fantasies, A Corrective Catalogue of Errors in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique
• Anything you can do, Icon do better — Germaine Greer remembers Betty Friedan
• After a Life of Telling It Like It Is: Betty Friedan Dies at Age 85, Lys Anzia, Moondance magazine Spring 2006
• Papers of Betty Friedan, 1933-1985: A Finding Aid.Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
• Video collection of Betty Friedan, ca.1970-2006: A Finding Aid.Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
• Audio collection of Betty Friedan, 1963-2007: A Finding Aid.Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.