Betty Friedan; Independent obituary (good)
Hyfler/Rosner
07 February 2006
Ground-breaking author of 'The Feminine Mystique' who
sparked feminism's second wave
By Corinne Sweet
Betty Friedan was the founding mother of the women's
liberation movement of the mid-20th century. She was the
original desperate housewife, frustrated by domesticity and
limited by the traditional social mores defining women's
lives, and her ground-breaking book The Feminine Mystique
(1963), an intelligent and outspoken analysis of women's
position in post-Second World War America, made her famous
and infamous in equal measure.
Her writing sparked sweeping social upheaval in the mid to
late 1960s in what became feminism's "second wave" after the
women's suffrage movement of the 19th and early 20th
centuries. In 1966 Friedan helped found the National
Organization of Women in the United States, campaigning for
womens' equality and legal independence, with Gloria
Steinem, Susan Brownmiller and others. Her passionate
feminist ideology inspired thousands of others by raising
their consciousness about women's unequal status.
I remember first reading her book and being blown away by
its freshness, passion and weight of research. Thousands of
suburban apple-pie-baking "moms" in the US were asking "Is
this it?" We soon started asking the same question in the
UK. Feminist magazines like Spare Rib were begun, and
Cosmopolitan was soon to hit UK news-stands. Kate Millett's
Sexual Politics (1970), Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch
(1970) and Sheila Rowbotham's Hidden from History (1973)
were also inspired by Friedan's outspoken spirit.
She was born Bettye Naomi Goldstein in 1921, the year after
US women won the vote, in the mid-Western city of Peoria,
Illinois. Her father, Harry Goldstein, was a Russian Jewish
émigré, who began as a street seller of collar-buttons and
rose to be a prosperous jeweller. Her mother, Miriam
Horwitz, had given up her job on a local newspaper to marry,
which became a source of her own marital bitterness.
Jewish, outspoken, not conventionally pretty, Betty
Goldstein (she dropped the "e" from her first name) was
often ostracised as a child. She suffered from asthma and
visual problems, and she felt her intelligence isolated her
from her peers. Anti-Semitism barred her father from joining
the country club and élite Peoria circles. Of her childhood,
Friedan wrote "When you're a Jewish girl who grows up on the
right side of the tracks in the Midwest, you're marginal.
You're in, but you're not, and you grow up an observer."
When Harry Goldstein's health failed, his wife took over the
management of his business, and Betty observed her mother's
health and happiness improve. It was an early glimpse of
what she would later call "the feminine mystique", whereby
bored housewives would experience "the problem that has no
name", the lack of fulfilment to be had from traditional
domestic duties.
Friedan studied Psychology at Smith College, in
Massachusetts, graduating summa cum laude in 1942. She was
awarded a prestigious science fellowship to the University
of California, Berkeley, but amazingly turned it down,
against the advice of her professors, because her physicist
boyfriend felt threatened by her success.
By 1943, she had embraced Marxism and pursued a journalistic
path, first at Federated Press in New York, secondly at UE
News, the official trade union paper of the United
Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. In 1947
she married the theatrical producer Carl Friedman (who
dropped the "m" in his surname) and in 1948, Daniel, the
first of their three children, was born. Four years later,
in what she called a "formative experience", Betty Friedan
was sacked from her union job for being pregnant with
Jonathan, her second child. A daughter, Emily, was born in
1956.
A move to Rockland County, New York, where Betty stayed at
home with her children, drove her to therapy. She started
freelance writing for women's magazines, but her work was
spiked whenever she referred to women needing careers.
In 1957, she was asked to conduct a survey of her Smith
classmates for their 15th anniversary reunion and the
startling results inspired Betty Friedan to begin research
for a book, conducting interviews with other suburban
housewives. She soon realised that the 1950s notion of a
happy housewife was little more than advertising hype and
that millions of US women were surviving on tranquillisers,
feeling anxious, empty and incomplete.
Friedan's publisher, W.W. Norton, initially printed only
3,000 copies of the book. However, The Feminine Mystique
went on to become a best-seller and by 2000 had sold more
than three million copies worldwide. At the time of its
publication, Friedan was vilified and praised in equal
measure. She was shunned by neighbours and dropped by
friends, but the book politicised millions of women. In
1963, in her defence, she told Life magazine,
Some people think I'm saying, "Women of the world unite -
you have nothing to lose but your men." It's not true. You
have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners.
In 1966, the National Organization of Women (NOW) was
founded in Friedan's apartment and its members began
campaigning for equal legal rights at work and in education,
and for the right to abortion. Today the organisation has
500,000 members across the US. In 1970, Friedan helped
organise the first national strike of women and in 1971,
with Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug among others, founded
the National Women's Political Caucus.
Meanwhile, the Friedans' marriage had begun to crumble, and
in 1969 they were divorced. Later, she said that her husband
had beaten her, a claim which Carl Friedan strongly
rejected. Betty Friedan then admitted they had exchanged
blows, commenting, "Look, I'm not a doormat. We did have our
battles."
By the 1970s, political splits had begun to appear in the US
women's movement, and Friedan was criticised by radical
lesbian feminists for being too moderate and "hopelessly
bourgeois". "I'm at odds with the radical feminists," she
said,
because I'm not anti-marriage and anti-family. I always
thought it was dangerous to go against the idea of the
family. I don't even like the phrase "women's liberation"
because that idea of being set free from everything doesn't
seem right to me. I like to think of the women's movement as
a fight for equality.
Friedan's The Second Stage (1981) aimed to set the record
straight, stating that men were not the enemy and that women
were burdened with trying to juggle motherhood with work.
Ironically, in these post-feminist times Friedan's analysis
chimes with many women who find it almost impossible to have
everything, especially all at the same time. "The equality
we fought for isn't livable, isn't workable, isn't
comfortable in the terms that structured our battle," she
said. "I believe we have to break through our own feminine
mystique." Friedan may often have been brusque, irascible,
robust, even a "bad-tempered bitch" (her own words), but she
had the guts to expose the American dream as a myth.
In 1993, her controversial book about ageism, The Fountain
of Age, called for more power for the elderly. Her own last
years were split between New York and Washington, DC,
spending time with her children and grandchildren. She died
on her 85th birthday.
Bettye Naomi Goldstein, campaigner and writer: born Peoria,
Illinois 4 February 1921; founder, National Organization for
Women 1966, president 1966-70, chair 1970-72; married 1947
Carl Friedan (died 2005; two sons, one daughter; marriage
dissolved 1969); died Washington, DC 4 February 2006.