A brief reflection on Betty Friedan

As everyone has been saying, the icons of another era are fast leaving us.  The latest, of course, is Betty Friedan, who died Saturday at 85.  Almost everyone in the feminist blogosphere has written about her passing, and there is much that is good and interesting to read.

I wrote yesterday that I had mixed feelings about Friedan's legacy.  On the one hand, there is no question that she deserves tremendous credit for helping launch the revival of the feminist movement in the 1960s, first with the extraordinary Feminine Mystique of 1963 and then with her pivotal role in founding the National Organization for Women three years later.  It's impossible to imagine the modern feminist movement without her.  As so many others have said, Friedan gave voice to an entire generation of women who had been told the greatest of lies, the lie that says that happiness is ultimately only found in a life lived for husbands and children.  She exposed that lie beautifully, and helped millions of American women realize "Wait, I'm not the only one who feels this way."  Plenty of women of my mother's generation still remember how amazed they were when they first read the Feminine Mystique, and realized that what they had thought of as their own personal dissatisfaction was, in fact, damn near universal.

But even in a time of tributes and accolades, we can't forget the "lavender menace", a term that Friedan infamously coined in 1969.   Friedan, like a number of conservative feminists, saw her movement as calling for a reconfiguring of heterosexual relationships along more egalitarian lines.  But throughout her life, she seemed bewildered by those women who shared her political commitments but did not share her romantic and sexual interest in men.  Rather than build feminist solidarity between lesbians and straight women, Friedan sought to purge NOW of lesbians.  She feared for the future of the movement, but she also -- according to those who knew her -- seemed genuinely and persistently unnerved by queer folks.

Friedan also quarreled with most of the later leaders of the feminist movement, like Gloria Steinem and Patricia Ireland.   Her 1981 manifesto, The Second Stage, was a startling statement of essentialism (the notion that women are, biologically speaking, more inclined to be nurturing and relational than men).  A long excerpt from that book is here.    She wanted the movement to de-emphasize sexual issues, for fear that they were inflaming the right. She wrote: ...the sexual politics that dis-torted the sense of priorities of the women's movement during the 1970's made it easy for the so-called Moral Majority to lump E.R.A. with homosexual rights and abortion into one explosive package of licentious, family-threatening sex.

To be fair, it was written right after the election of Ronald Reagan, and Friedan was trying to reconfigure her movement to be successful in a more conservative era.   From a political standpoint, she made some wise suggestions, but she also managed to alienate an exceptional number of young feminists, particularly those who did not share her color, her affluence, and her sexual identity.

In the end, I can't help but think about the death just ten months ago of Andrea Dworkin, another -- very different -- icon of the feminist movement.  Dworkin, like Friedan, quarreled with and horrified a number of erstwhile allies.  Indeed, Andrea was almost a mirror image of Betty Friedan: almost everything Friedan embraced, Andrea rejected.  Dworkin was so eager to include the marginalized and the wounded that she frightened folks with her powerful rhetoric; Friedan was so eager not to frighten middle America that she tried, time and again, to purge the feminist movement of its more radical voices.  In different but oddly similar ways, both women ended up on the outs with most of the contemporary leadership of the women's movement.  And yet the feminist movement was better for their work, their writing, and, perhaps, even their passionate, devoted and often curmudgeonly criticism from the sidelines. 

Comments

[Catty]

I think it's important when discussing people to place appropriate context. I think Friedan was a radical woman of her times, but people (including all of us) are still a product of their/our times. She was 85 years old, meaning she was born in the 1920's. I'm not surprised that she wasn't comfortable with homosexuality. I don't know of many straight people from that era that was comfortable with homosexuality. none of us are perfect. I absolutely disagree with Betty in terms of gay rights, but I can also see that she was a rdical woman of her times and appreciate that.

I worked for a Saudi Arabian man once- and he's considered a radical feminist by many in his community. He insisted that his daughters attend college and he's very proud of them having careers. His wife also has a full-time career and works outside of the home- without a headscarf. He abhors violence againt women. However, from a Western viewpoint, I'm sure many feminists would have an issue with some of his beliefs (for example, he feels men and women should get married and have families, for example. In his household, women also eat separately from the men. He thinks men should avoid women during menstruation, etc) However, considering that he comes from a very conservative muslim household and community, he's come a long ways.

[Hugo]

I hear you, Catty -- but it would be false to say that all of the heterosexual feminists of her generation were anti-lesbian; many of the early NOW leaders did quarrel with Friedan over this issue. Some of them were "straight" women far more sympathetic to lesbian issues (and radical feminism in general) than Friedan.

[Wonderperson]

I am getting the sense that Friedan deserves a silver or bronze medal, but not the gold medal in feminist movement.

[Catty]

I agree with you, Hugo. I'm only saying that she was a groundbreaker and a radical for her times in many respect, while she fell short in other respects. She was human.

I'm not saying that all heterosexual feminists from her era was anti-lesbian. Not at all. I also understand that many people consider her stance againt homosexuality to be a net negative, and I also agree with them. I'm just saying I do respect her as one of the groundbreakers, and I do think she was a radical woman of her times. I mean, Mahatma Gahndi was pretty anti-sex. He believed that sex was for procreation only- yet he also had some very feminist beliefs. His anti-sex stance, especially considering his cultural and social context- doesn't disqualify him in my eyes as a radical groundbreaker and a feminist for his times.

[Catty]

It's just that it's unfortunate when people bring up faults in a activist for not being perfect. People bring up MLK's womanizing as an attempt to discredit him as a Civil Rights Activist, for example. I believe Betty to be a radical woman that had a large, important influence on feminism, albeit an imperfect leader. Activism is a process and often, it's done in small steps. She was a major groundbreaker in one of the steps, but not so in others.

[Hugo]

Agreed, and my tribute to her was simply a reflection -- as a professor who teaches women's history -- on her influence and her complex legacy.

[Catty]

Hugo, I think your post is great. My comment was meant to be a simple comment and not a disagreement with you.

[Jill]

I was so sad to hear of Betty Friedan's passing. It was even harder to take because the young woman newsreader on MSNBC mispronounced Friedan's name - badly. It was clear she had never heard the name Betty Friedan in her life. She probably thinks women have always been news anchors. How sad that she did not recognize the name of the woman who was so instrumental in so many of things our young newsreader takes for granted..

[Hugo]

Catty, I absolutely understand, and did not take what you wrote as a criticism at all!

Jill, indeed! The hardest thing is convincing young women that the rights they take for granted were won for them by their foremothers who sweated and bled for them.

[Past tense]

I must admit I hadn't heard of Friedan until she died. Why aren't these things taught in schools?

[Amanda Marcotte]

Interesting observation on Friedan and Dworkin. The sad thing is that the anti-feminists are already descending and trying to claim that Friedan was too radical.

[Mickle]

past tense - was that meant to be rhetorical? ;)

And Hugo, thanks for a great post. I think it's important to understand people's faults as well as their virtues, the problem is, as Catty and Amanda point out, it's hard to be honest about women like Friedan without unintentionally supporting anti-feminist rhetoric.

I think you did a great job of being honest while avoiding that pitfall.

[SBW]

This is the first that I heard of her death. I remember my first introduction to feminism was when I saw The Feminine Mystique on the shelf of my history professor in high school. He let me borrow the book and from that point on I was a feminist.

[Lynn Gazis-Sax]

I must admit I hadn't heard of Friedan until she died.

Now I feel really old. Everyone had heard of Friedan when I was a child, even without hearing about her in school.

[evil_fizz]

True story: Last Halloween, I dressed up as the Feminine Mystique. (I had a Donna Reed dress, seamed stockings, pearls, and apron, a martini glass, and a bottle of pills.) It was a little abstract, but I thought it was funny. My roommate at the time was a Ph.D student in a humanities program with a strong focus on sociology. When she asked about my costume, I just said I was the Feminine Mystique. She looked puzzled and said "That's a cool name. Where did you come up with it? Is it from a book or something?"

I felt like I needed the martini and pills then.

[David Thompson]

Now I feel really old. Everyone had heard of Friedan when I was a child, even without hearing about her in school.

That's not surprising. There is only slightly less time between the publication of The Feminine Mystique and today, than between the Treaty of Versailles and the publication of The Feminine Mystique.

[mythago]

It's just that it's unfortunate when people bring up faults in a activist for not being perfect.

There's a difference between faults that are orthogonal to the activism and faults that weaken that person's activism. "Betty Friedan smoked" would be orthogonal; Betty Friedan ranting about the Lavender Menace is not, because that went directly to her feminism and advocacy for women.

That doesn't mean her advocacy was worthless, of course, or that The Feminine Mystique was worthless. But we do her no service by swallowing her ideas uncritically, as if they were fixed in time and perfect, without noting her homophobia and classism.

[catty]

Andy,

I think you should consider not inflicting yourself on women and never have kids.

[labyrus]

I went back in time here because I saw this on the "recent comments" bar and it turned out someone was just spamming it. But I noticed Catty said " People bring up MLK's womanizing as an attempt to discredit him as a Civil Rights Activist, for example." and I can't resist pointing out that such rumours were in fact manufactured by the FBI and untrue.

[unknown]

if you will remember in texas 1977 to ratify the UNs platform for women
betty seconded the motion supporting lesbian rights