When I met Betty Friedan, we discussed marriage, divorce, and child rearing, although I had planned to discuss her book The Feminine Mystique. We had some similar experiences as I, too, had been married for 20 years and was separated from my husband. Whereas she had three children, I had only one daughter, and she said to me, "don't say 'only' one--you have one wonderful daughter." I felt encouraged, and, paraphrasing Wordsworth, in a feminine mode, I said, "the child is Mother of the woman, and I shall wish my days to be bound each to each in natural piety." She closed her eyes for a moment, as if she were savoring that thought, and then she said, "that's right," and nodded. Some people then came to talk to her, and she continued smiling. During the rest of the reception, we often caught each other's glances, and whenever our eyes met, she had a glimmer in it, which was so warm and it was like she was saying "yes, yes" and following my train of thought. She had a smile of understanding. I felt very close to her after this meeting.
Best regards,
Jenny Batlay, PhD
________________________________________________________
I met Betty Friedan in 1970 the night before the March for Women's Equality down 5th Avenue. Since that day our paths crossed many times. I found her to be a brave woman who had a sense that her book "The Feminine Mystique" was having a profound world-wide impact on the lives of women. At that time we did not know the extent of her input but knew something was happening and that women were going forward, not to return to the way it was.
Betty was constantly under attack, both from the right and the, left and from governments nationally or internationally. She was one of the few women who fundamentally changed women's lives in modern times. I remember the time in Mexico City when I attended the International Women's Year Conference along with Betty and Jacqui Ceballos. The environment was very unfriendly to feminists especially, American feminists. Betty was threatened by various government and political groups to the point that she was warned that her life was in danger by both the Mexican and American government representatives. We set up a separate speak-out called "East meets West" after one the daily conferences to show that American feminists were for women and not controlled by the government. It was attended by women from different parts of the world. At the end women started sharing their concerns and hardships a nd not the dogma given to them by their governments. Later we heard that it was written about in various countries, even in China. Betty's book "It Changed my Life' gives the details in her chapter "Scary doings in Mexico City" of the unbelievable events that took place.
Another moment of her life when she had to keep up the fight was when she ran for a delegate slot to the Democratic Convention in New York in 1974. I was her campaign manager and booked speaking engagements with senior citizen centers and various non-political places on the West Side of Manhattan, since we didn't have the political power to be invited to speak at the usual places. She placed second, over elected political officials. The Board of Elections said she didn't win. In the end we were proven right and off to the convention she went.
I supported Betty when I was a board member on the NOW National Board. There was a split in the movement on the direction it should take and Betty was again fighting for what she believed was the right way the movement should go. It hurt her deeply when certain people disagreed with her.
My last memory of Betty was in Washington, DC for the "March for Women's Lives". Betty was eighty-three years old: it was two years before her death and she was not feeling well. She sat quietly at the bus window looking out. People lining the streets saw it was her and called out her name and cheered. The bus stopped along the way so Betty could speak to the people and wave. It brought a sparkle to her eyes and she became the Betty we knew from the past. When we arrived at the mall I rode in a cart crossing crossing the Washington Mall, with Betty up front and myself and Sandy Zwerling in the back. Women filled the mall. As they separated to allow the cart to pass they started yelling "that's Betty Friedan, that's Betty Friedan". Cheers filled the air. Betty sat up smiling and waved.
She was our leader.
Carole De Saram, VFA Board Member, President NY NOW 1974, Board Member National Board NOW 1974.
_____________________________________________________
I met Betty just after she published "Feminine Mystique," when she was about to write a piece about working mothers (still a new idea) for the then NY Herald Tribune. I had three kids under five years old, and also a job as Special Features editor for Harper's Bazaar--for which I also wrote a monthly column about social issues, called Needles and Pins. She then lived at the Dakota on the Upper West Side and I lived nearby at the Century. A mutual friend introduced us, and Betty invited me to come by for an interview about the joys and travails of working-motherhood.
We had an immediate meeting of minds and recognized each other as kindred spirits. Her hearty, raucous laugh enchanted me. Later, after we both divorced, we moved into the same building. At One Lincoln Plaza, off Central Park, we were closer neighbors than ever. Betty was more of a gadabout than I, but she always checked in when she came home at night. We shared many a midnight supper together, and gossiped like kids over cold chicken and glasses of wine about everything and everyone.
Betty signed the books she wrote: "Evolve! Enjoy!" To the end of her legendary life, she took her own advice. She evolved. She enjoyed.
I loved her. I still do.
Natalie Gittelson Lachman
_____________________________________________________
Mary Eastwood, Esq. remembers:
I first met Betty Friedan in the late fall of 1965. Pauli Murray had given a speech to a national women's organization in New York (National Council of Women?) in which she stated "I hope that women do not have to march on Washington like the 1963 march for jobs and freedom in order to get title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 enforced." or words to that effect. She was quoted in the New York Times which Betty read.
At the time Betty was planning to write another book basically on what the Lyndon Johnson Administration was doing on women. Pres. Johnson had previously announced he would appoint 50 women to high federal positions. Betty called Pauli and asked who she could talk to in Washington, DC and Pauli told her Catherine East and me. Pauli knew us from working with the President's Commission on the Status of Women in 1962 and 63, and Pauli and I had just finished writing a law review article (Jane Crow and the Law) awaiting publication in the George Washington Law Review.
Betty first met Catherine and me separately, then together every couple of weeks after that. It was at these dinner meetings we encouraged Betty to initiate an organization outside the government to pressure the government to enforce the nondiscrimination in employment law for women. At first Betty resisted saying she was not an organization type person.
It was the next summer (1966) at the meeting of the State Commissions on the Status of Women, that NOW was started. Catherine provided most of the names of women to be invited to Betty's hotel room
_____________________________________________________
The only personal contact I had with Betty was in 1999 when she was honored by the VFA -- I had a photo taken of the two of us, which I proudly display with other feminist icons. At that event, I asked her if I could get her something from the bar -- She said - "Yes, get me a Scotch" -- and as I turned to do so -- she said "...and make it a double!"
GRACE WELCH, VFA board member and President Emerita, National Organization for Women - Mid-Suffolk chapter, Yoga Teacher
______________________________________________
I wrote a paper about The Feminine Mystique
when I was in my first year of college. I still have it
somewhere
Linda Joplin
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Looking Back at a Domestic Cri de Coeur
By JANET MASLIN Published: February 18, 2013
On my first day of work at The New York Times, a young reporter spied me in the newsroom and rushed up to say hello. “Hey!” she said. “It’s another one of us!” We were both in our 20s at a time when young women at The Times were a novelty, and that big smile from Anna Quindlen was an amazingly generous icebreaker. That was that: friends for life.
Three and a half decades later I was embarrassed to tell Anna that I had never read “The Feminine Mystique,” which was published 50 years ago this Tuesday. It has now been reissued, with an introduction by the Times Op-Ed columnist Gail Collins and an afterword by Anna. Anna and I talk about books all the time; how had this one never come up in conversation?
She wasn’t surprised. She hears “The Feminine Mystique” name-dropped by people who, she can tell, haven’t read it at all.
“It is a cliché of our own time,” Betty Friedan wrote in her 1963 manifesto — which, yes, I have just finished reading — “that women spent half a century fighting for ‘rights,’ and the next half wondering whether they wanted them at all. ‘Rights’ have a dull sound to people who have grown up after they have been won.”
Among the many truisms in the book, that one leaps out at me most. Unlike friends who went to women’s colleges, I went to a coed campus and studied math; “The Feminine Mystique” was not required reading. By the time I became a journalist, Friedan’s sleepwalking housewives were so long gone that I could enter the professional world with a short memory and an undisguised advantage. The top editor who hired me in 1977 told me, perfectly nicely, that I was “the right age and the right sex.” He told Anna that if she hadn’t been female, she never would have gotten in the door.
Friedan wrote about the period between World War II and 1960, when women married young, abandoned their ambitions, had large families that fueled the baby boom, moved to the suburbs and valued femininity above all else. This was the era during which Adlai Stevenson, soon to make his second bid for president, told Smith College’s Class of 1955: “I think there is much you can do about our crisis in the humble role of housewife. I could wish you no better vocation than that.”
Read today, “The Feminine Mystique” is a fascinating mixture of antiquated attitudes (like that one) and others that have remained unchanged. Foisting sexual precocity on the very young goes way back, we find out; JonBenet Ramsey’s parents didn’t invent it. Remember that YouTube video of 7-year-old girls mimicking Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” dance moves? In Friedan’s day a newspaper ad for a child’s dress featured the tag line “She Too Can Join the Man-Trap Set.”
This gasp factor keeps “The Feminine Mystique” evergreen. Friedan, a suburban housewife herself (though with a more complicated history than she let on), played reporter to collect evidence of how and why young married women felt so stifled. She claimed to be writing about “the problem that has no name,” but she executed a brilliant marketing coup in naming it. She was writing about depression, frustration, emptiness, guilt and dishonesty; she was analyzing the way psychiatrists, women’s magazines, marketers, educators and social scientists routinely lied to women about their need for feminine glamour. But mystique itself is a glamorous word, and it put a seductive spin on a set of dismal problems.
Her chapter on advertising, “The Sexual Sell,” is the most obvious stunner. Thanks to “Mad Men,” we have some inkling of what marketers thought of women, but Friedan brought her own anger to describing it. After writing about how they tried to make housework sound important, scientific and even therapeutic — instant cake mix was pitched as an outlet for creativity, not as a way of being lazy — she sat down with a motivational-research expert (male), who explained that ads had to be careful not to scare women with the prospect of making them so efficient that they would have free time.
What would be so bad about that? she asked. “Why doesn’t the pie-mix ad tell the woman she could use the time saved to be an astronomer?” Even an algebraic topologist who also shuffled computer punch cards — hey, I tried — would find that a silly question. The expert then tossed off a few suggestions, like “the astronomer gets her man.”
Parts of the book now seem repetitive and obvious, but perhaps because these ideas were so new they warranted repetition. Though her topics include Freud (shredded here), Margaret Mead (ditto) and the arrested development of young wives, Friedan repeatedly returns to women as lost souls. Equating the helpless housewife and the concentration camp inmate is as shrill now as it must have been in 1963.
One big gap in “The Feminine Mystique” concerns popular culture. Aside from looking closely at women’s magazines (what easy targets), Friedan ignores the messages sent by television, books, movies and celebrities, though lonely housewives must have been well aware of these influences. Did she not wonder why shows like “Leave It to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” presented housework as something to be done in full makeup and party clothes? Why did she overlook the new world of rebellious teenagers? Why mention the novel “Peyton Place” without parsing its values? I suppose it’s safe to say that Friedan had quite a lot else on her mind.
In 1963 she prophetically suggested that the era of “The Feminine Mystique” might be a larval stage, after which women would break out of their cocoons and get moving again. As time passed and she added retrospective material — an epilogue in 1973, a new introduction in 1997 — she gave the book much-needed context and described its consequences. Yet she made enemies along the way, and not just the suburbanites who ran her out of Rockland County. She had her differences with later waves of feminists too.
I have a photograph of myself with Betty Friedan. We were together on a radio show. I was there because I was a critic for The Times and I arrived at The Times because of opportunities her book created. I wish I had known how much I owed her.
She wasn’t surprised. She hears “The Feminine Mystique” name-dropped by people who, she can tell, haven’t read it at all.
“It is a cliché of our own time,” Betty Friedan wrote in her 1963 manifesto — which, yes, I have just finished reading — “that women spent half a century fighting for ‘rights,’ and the next half wondering whether they wanted them at all. ‘Rights’ have a dull sound to people who have grown up after they have been won.”
Among the many truisms in the book, that one leaps out at me most. Unlike friends who went to women’s colleges, I went to a coed campus and studied math; “The Feminine Mystique” was not required reading. By the time I became a journalist, Friedan’s sleepwalking housewives were so long gone that I could enter the professional world with a short memory and an undisguised advantage. The top editor who hired me in 1977 told me, perfectly nicely, that I was “the right age and the right sex.” He told Anna that if she hadn’t been female, she never would have gotten in the door.
Friedan wrote about the period between World War II and 1960, when women married young, abandoned their ambitions, had large families that fueled the baby boom, moved to the suburbs and valued femininity above all else. This was the era during which Adlai Stevenson, soon to make his second bid for president, told Smith College’s Class of 1955: “I think there is much you can do about our crisis in the humble role of housewife. I could wish you no better vocation than that.”
Read today, “The Feminine Mystique” is a fascinating mixture of antiquated attitudes (like that one) and others that have remained unchanged. Foisting sexual precocity on the very young goes way back, we find out; JonBenet Ramsey’s parents didn’t invent it. Remember that YouTube video of 7-year-old girls mimicking Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” dance moves? In Friedan’s day a newspaper ad for a child’s dress featured the tag line “She Too Can Join the Man-Trap Set.”
This gasp factor keeps “The Feminine Mystique” evergreen. Friedan, a suburban housewife herself (though with a more complicated history than she let on), played reporter to collect evidence of how and why young married women felt so stifled. She claimed to be writing about “the problem that has no name,” but she executed a brilliant marketing coup in naming it. She was writing about depression, frustration, emptiness, guilt and dishonesty; she was analyzing the way psychiatrists, women’s magazines, marketers, educators and social scientists routinely lied to women about their need for feminine glamour. But mystique itself is a glamorous word, and it put a seductive spin on a set of dismal problems.
Her chapter on advertising, “The Sexual Sell,” is the most obvious stunner. Thanks to “Mad Men,” we have some inkling of what marketers thought of women, but Friedan brought her own anger to describing it. After writing about how they tried to make housework sound important, scientific and even therapeutic — instant cake mix was pitched as an outlet for creativity, not as a way of being lazy — she sat down with a motivational-research expert (male), who explained that ads had to be careful not to scare women with the prospect of making them so efficient that they would have free time.
What would be so bad about that? she asked. “Why doesn’t the pie-mix ad tell the woman she could use the time saved to be an astronomer?” Even an algebraic topologist who also shuffled computer punch cards — hey, I tried — would find that a silly question. The expert then tossed off a few suggestions, like “the astronomer gets her man.”
Parts of the book now seem repetitive and obvious, but perhaps because these ideas were so new they warranted repetition. Though her topics include Freud (shredded here), Margaret Mead (ditto) and the arrested development of young wives, Friedan repeatedly returns to women as lost souls. Equating the helpless housewife and the concentration camp inmate is as shrill now as it must have been in 1963.
One big gap in “The Feminine Mystique” concerns popular culture. Aside from looking closely at women’s magazines (what easy targets), Friedan ignores the messages sent by television, books, movies and celebrities, though lonely housewives must have been well aware of these influences. Did she not wonder why shows like “Leave It to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” presented housework as something to be done in full makeup and party clothes? Why did she overlook the new world of rebellious teenagers? Why mention the novel “Peyton Place” without parsing its values? I suppose it’s safe to say that Friedan had quite a lot else on her mind.
In 1963 she prophetically suggested that the era of “The Feminine Mystique” might be a larval stage, after which women would break out of their cocoons and get moving again. As time passed and she added retrospective material — an epilogue in 1973, a new introduction in 1997 — she gave the book much-needed context and described its consequences. Yet she made enemies along the way, and not just the suburbanites who ran her out of Rockland County. She had her differences with later waves of feminists too.
I have a photograph of myself with Betty Friedan. We were together on a radio show. I was there because I was a critic for The Times and I arrived at The Times because of opportunities her book created. I wish I had known how much I owed her.
‘The Feminine Mystique’ at 50, Part 2: Three Feminists on What It Means Today
Letty Cottin Pogrebin is a founding editor of the feminist Ms. Magazine; Alisa Solomon is a drama critic and a journalism professor at Columbia University; Jessica Bennett is the executive editor of Tumblr and a former Newsweek senior writer. In part two of the conversation, they examine how the feminist movement has changed in five decades.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a founding editor of Ms. magazine, is the author of many books, including Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America and the upcoming How to Be a Friend to a Friend Who's Sick. She is a past president of Americans for Peace Now, co-founder of the (now-defunct) International Center for Peace in the Middle East, and co-founder of several Palestinian/Jewish dialogue groups, one of which has been ongoing for three years. She is also a former president of The Authors Guild.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a founding editor of Ms. magazine, is the author of many books, including Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America and the upcoming How to Be a Friend to a Friend Who's Sick. She is a past president of Americans for Peace Now, co-founder of the (now-defunct) International Center for Peace in the Middle East, and co-founder of several Palestinian/Jewish dialogue groups, one of which has been ongoing for three years. She is also a former president of The Authors Guild.
Feb 12, 2013 4:45 AM EST
Three feminists from different generations revisit Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking book on its 50th anniversary. How have things changed for women in 50 years? Plus, part one of the conversation. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published 50 years ago this month, all but bringing the nascent second-wave feminist movement to the national spotlight. We asked three feminists, each representing a different generation, to discuss the intellectual legacy of the book.
Betty Friedan, co-founder of National Organization for Women (NOW), speaks during the Women's Strike for Equality event in New York's Central Park on August 26, 1970, the 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage. (AP (file))
Alisa: Today, the feminist discourse seems to me to have narrowed. All those magazine pieces that still come out bemoaning how women can’t have it all seem to leave out the structural impediments to equality. Has 21st-century feminism so totally bought into the larger cultural insistence on individualism that we make no demands on the workplace or the state? Friedan helped teach us that the personal is political. Has the political now become completely personal?
Jess: I wonder how much of this has to do with the fact that feminism as a "movement" has waned. There are certainly young women who care about women's issues today, there are bloggers and writers and organizers. But there is no Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan. There's no marching in the streets (at least not without our tops off). Is it harder to make demands on an institutional level if it doesn't feel like there's a movement behind us?
Today, the message is that you can be anything. Supreme Court justice. Secretary of State. Astronaut. President. And yet I've often wondered if that message is almost too rosy. Young women today are excelling in every way imaginable: better grades, better graduation rates, and so on. But does that only set them up for a shock? Gail Collins said in an interview with The Atlantic this week that young women who face discrimination today often “don't know what to do.” The discrimination itself is subtle, and so when it does come up it's almost hard to recognize it. By the time I was in my 20s and starting my career, it was as if the idea of gender as an inhibitor was so passé that I'd never even considered it.
Alisa: There’s no Big Sexist Jerk guarding the gates, thus, enormous challenges for any kind of movement building. Friedan encouraged women toward self-actualization—not abandonment of their families by any stretch, but widening of their worlds and aspirations. That ground shifted—and maybe resettled without the more difficult, sociopolitical reconfiguring that real equality would require. If it’s no longer a “feminine mystique” that must be bared and examined, is it the old mystique of power, operating in ways that have come to appear anonymous and natural, that poses the problem? And how in heaven’s name do you organize to change that?
Jess: Rather than fighting the system, or making demands on it, we're trying to work within it, individually, to get ahead. I'm reading Sheryl Sandberg's new book right now, Lean In, which argues (among other things) that women must learn to work within the system in their efforts to rise to power, even if they want to fight on a structural level—simply because it's what we can more easily control. I tend to agree, but this also strikes me as a particularly third-wave phenomenon, of fighting within the system, for ourselves, rather than banding together to fight the system as a whole. Whether it's effective or not, it's a very "me, then us" tactic. It actually pits women against each other.
Letty: The trouble is once they get power, they seem to change things for themselves—the female elites—but they don't change policies for everyone and make sure systemic change holds for the future. Furthermore, change doesn't trickle down because they don't make common cause with women who are the company's receptionists, file clerks, and office cleaners.
Alisa: That’s the same lack of common cause among women that Friedan herself was criticized for: she pretty much ignored class and race. Working-class women have always had jobs outside the home, of course, and a second shift in the home. Gender discrimination and prevailing assumptions about women’s domestic responsibilities certainly impinged those lives, but Friedan didn’t seem interested in—or know how to discuss—ways the “mystique” worked on them. I wonder, too, whether The Feminine Mystique played into the emerging vilification of poor African-American women at the time. I’m thinking of the notorious Moynihan Report that came out just a year or so after Friedan’s book and basically blamed black people for the consequences of poverty. The argument went that single-mother households—“matriarchies” as Moynihan termed them—emasculated men in the community, led to children’s poor academic achievement, and even to high crime rates. To this day, the conservative answer to poverty has nothing to do with economics or jobs or housing or education. It’s marriage!
Letty: Today's average young woman seems capable of reacting with appropriate outrage to injustices committed against her. What's missing is the macro-analysis, the impulse toward solidarity, the gut-level identification with one's "sisters"—including women of color, and poor and working-class women—and the willingness to organize or act collectively even if resistance makes you appear a tad unfeminine.
But generally speaking, unless their personal ox is being gored, few young women seem willing to make waves. (Block that mixed metaphor!) Maybe they don't want to be marked as troublemakers, or maybe they're afraid of reprisals, or maybe what we're seeing is the return of the "good girl," to borrow a phrase from Lynn Povich's book title, which brings us back to Jess’s Newsweek story a couple years ago assessing the gender discrimination case from 1970 and its legacy.
Jess: I think to myself, couldn't this so easily be solved just by teaching women's history in schools?! I pretty much gave myself an education in our own history once I realized how little I knew—but it was only through discovering the story of the Newsweek women, and everything that was happening around them at the time, that even convinced me that I needed to know it. The problem wasn't just that I didn't learn things that I wish I'd known, it was that I genuinely didn't think I needed to know them.
Letty: Such an important point! What troubles me about the fact that The Feminine Mystique is not read in colleges anymore is that this is part of a clear social pattern (I almost said conspiracy) to alienate one generation from the other so that each generation is condemned to rediscover the same patriarchal injustices in new forms and fight the revolution all over again. I didn't know anything about what the suffragists did 40 years before I was born until I encountered a few paragraphs about them in my sixth-grade history textbook. The accompanying photos made them look like crazy ladies and discontented old maids. (Plus ça change!) The language of the text suggested that "women were given the vote" rather than that women won the vote after a bravely sustained 60-year struggle— by chaining themselves to the White House gates, moldering in prison, maintaining hunger strikes (and being painfully force fed), and otherwise putting their lives and bodies on the line.
The women of each subsequent generation are encouraged/pressured to dissociate themselves from the radical heroism of the prior generation. Rather than today's young women feeling like the heirs to a glorious legacy, they disavow those who came before. Who wants to be one of "Them" when you can be new, cool, critical, and ironic?
Jess: Great organizing can certainly happen in the messy, DIY-Occupy style, without the hierarchy of campaigns. And great organizing and protest can happen online, via massive petitions, via blogging, via Twitter campaigns and hashtags, and so forth. I'm thinking, say, of the campaign by three New Jersey young women to have a female moderator of the presidential debates, which earned 170,000 signatures on Change.org.
The problem, it seems, is that these examples are few and far between. Most of these campaigns deal in the specific over the institutional—i.e., a female moderator, which is fantastic but doesn't address the larger institutional problems of why there was no female moderator in the first place, or why there are so few women at the heads of news organizations, or businesses, and so on. It's certainly easier (and perhaps more effective) to focus on specific, targeted causes. But what about the larger problems? What about the problems that would really require a massive sense of anger, among women all across the country, to change?
Alisa: Lest I leave off on a pessimistic note, I hasten to add: There is so much great local organizing being done in communities, workplaces, schools, religious institutions ... Maybe it’s just a different model of movement making than we saw, and needed, 50 years ago, and one just has to plug in where she feels drawn and do the work.
Jessica Bennett, formerly of Newsweek, is executive editor of Tumblr. Find her online.
Alisa Solomon is a professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, where she directs the Arts and Culture concentration in the M.A. program. She is the author of Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender and, with Tony Kushner, co-editor of Wrestling With Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
Friday, February 15, 2013
Abortion: A Woman's Civil Right
Keynote speech, First National Conference for Repeal of Abortion Laws, Chicago, Ill., Feb 14, 1969
There is no freedom, no equality, no fullhuman dignity and personhood possible for
women until we assert and demand control
over our own bodies, over our own reproduc-
tive process.
Then and only then will women move out
of their enforced passivity, their enforced
denigration, their definition as sex objects,
as things, to human personhood, to self-
determination, to human dignity.
The use of sex to sell everything from
cars to detergents to mouthwash, even the
glorification of breasts and behinds is finally
being understood by women for what it is:
This ultimately denigrating enshrinement of
women as sex objects and even the hypo-
critical tributes to motherhood.
Don't talk to me about abortion reform.
Reform is something dreamed up by men.
Maybe good-hearted men, but they can only
think from their point of view as men. Women
are the passive objects that must somehow
be regulated; let them have abortions for
thalidomide, rape, incest. What right have
they to say ? This is a woman's right and
not a technical question needing the sanc-
tion of the state, or to be debated in terms
of technicalities -- they are irrelevant.
I remember how they laughed when NOW
decided that there had been enough talk
about women, we wanted action; we decided
to define a new Bill of Rights for women, and
one of the rights had to be the right of
women to control their own reproductive
process.
Then, lo and behold, I began to hear
ministers and ADA and ACLU and others
begin to voice the same position, in terms
of the woman's basic right. The essence of
the denigration of women somehow, in this
country, in the world, is the treatment of
women as a passive sex object.
Women, almost to the degree that they're
almost too visible as sex objects in this
country today, are invisible people. As the
Negro was the invisible man, so women are
the invisible people in America today. Women
as people, women to be taken seriously as
people, women to have a share in the decis-
ions of the mainstream of government, of
politics, of the church -- not just to cook the
church supper, but to preach the sermon; not
just to look up the zip codes and address the
envelopes, but to make political decisions; not
just to do the housework of industry, but to
make some of the executive decisions. Women,
above all, to say what their own lives are going
to be, what their own personalities are going to
be, and no longer listen to or even permit male
experts to define what "feminine" is or isn't
or should be.
Am I saying that therefore women must be
liberated from sex? No. I am saying that sex
will only be liberated to be a human dialogue;
sex will only cease to be dirty, if you will; sex
will only cease to be a sniggering dirty joke
and an obsession in this society, when women
are liberated to be active self-determining
people, liberated to a creativity beyond
motherhood, to a full human creativity.
Am I saying that women must be liberated
from motherhood ? No, I am not. I am saying
that motherhood will only be liberated to be
a joyous and responsible human act, where
women are free to make, with full conscious
choice and full human responsibility, the
decisions to be mothers. Then and only then,
will they be able to embrace motherhood
without conflict. When they are able to de-
fine themselves as people, not just as
somebody's mother, not just as servants of
children, not just breeding receptacles, but
as people for whom motherhood is a freely
chosen part of life, freely celebrated while
it lasts, but for whom creativity has many
more dimensions, as it has for men.
The hostility between the sexes has never
been worse. The image of woman in avant
garde plays, novels, in the movies and in the
mass image that you can detect behind the
family situation comedies on television is
that mothers are man-devouring cannibal-
istic monsters, or else Lolitas, thing-like
sex objects. Objects not even of hetero-
sexual impulse, objects of a sadistic sado-
masochistic impulse. That impulse is much
more a factor in the abortion question than
anybody ever admits: the punishment of
women.
Men will only be truly liberated, to love
women and be fully themselves, when women
are liberated to be full people. To have a full
say in the decisions of their life and their
society and a full part in that society.
Until that happens, men are going to bear
the burden and the guilt of the destiny they
have forced upon women, the suppressed
resentment of that passive stage -- the
sterility of love, when love is not between
two fully active, fully participant, fully joy-
ous people, but has in it the element of ex-
ploitation. And men will also not be fully
free to be all they can be as long as they
must live up to an image of masculinity that
denies all the tenderness, the sensitivity, in
a man that might be considered feminine.
All the burdens and responsibilities that men
are supposed to shoulder alone makes them
resent women's pedestal, much as that
pedestal -- that enforced passivity -- may be
a burden for women.
Men are not allowed to admit that they
sometimes are afraid. They are not allowed
to express their own sensitivities, their own
needs, sometimes, to be passive and not
always active. Their own ability to cry. So,
they are only half-human, as women are
only half-human until we can go this next
step forward, of which this right of woman
to control her reproductive process, the
right of woman to have a say in the decisions
of her own life, is a part.
The real sexual revolution is the emer-
gence of women from passivity, from thing-
ness, from the point of view where they can
be the easiest victim and the channel, if you
will, for all the seductions.
It cannot happen without radical changes
in the family as we know it today; in our con-
cepts of marriage, in our very concepts of
love, in our architecture, our plans of cities,
in our theology, in our politics, in our art. Not
that women are special. Not that women are
superior. But, it's bound to be a different
politics, when women's voices are equally
heard.
If we are allowed finally to become full
people, not only will children be born and
brought up with more love and responsibil-
ity than today, but we will break out of the
confines of that sterile little suburban
family to relate to each other in terms of
all of the possible dimensions of our per-
sonalities -- male and female, as comrades,
as colleagues, as friends, as lovers, in a
life span that is now 75 years and is going
to be 100 years. And without hate and
without so much jealousy and buried resent-
ment and hypocrisies, there will be a whole
new sense of what love is that will make
Valentine's Day look very pallid.
human dignity and personhood possible for
women until we assert and demand control
over our own bodies, over our own reproduc-
tive process.
Then and only then will women move out
of their enforced passivity, their enforced
denigration, their definition as sex objects,
as things, to human personhood, to self-
determination, to human dignity.
The use of sex to sell everything from
cars to detergents to mouthwash, even the
glorification of breasts and behinds is finally
being understood by women for what it is:
This ultimately denigrating enshrinement of
women as sex objects and even the hypo-
critical tributes to motherhood.
Don't talk to me about abortion reform.
Reform is something dreamed up by men.
Maybe good-hearted men, but they can only
think from their point of view as men. Women
are the passive objects that must somehow
be regulated; let them have abortions for
thalidomide, rape, incest. What right have
they to say ? This is a woman's right and
not a technical question needing the sanc-
tion of the state, or to be debated in terms
of technicalities -- they are irrelevant.
I remember how they laughed when NOW
decided that there had been enough talk
about women, we wanted action; we decided
to define a new Bill of Rights for women, and
one of the rights had to be the right of
women to control their own reproductive
process.
Then, lo and behold, I began to hear
ministers and ADA and ACLU and others
begin to voice the same position, in terms
of the woman's basic right. The essence of
the denigration of women somehow, in this
country, in the world, is the treatment of
women as a passive sex object.
Women, almost to the degree that they're
almost too visible as sex objects in this
country today, are invisible people. As the
Negro was the invisible man, so women are
the invisible people in America today. Women
as people, women to be taken seriously as
people, women to have a share in the decis-
ions of the mainstream of government, of
politics, of the church -- not just to cook the
church supper, but to preach the sermon; not
just to look up the zip codes and address the
envelopes, but to make political decisions; not
just to do the housework of industry, but to
make some of the executive decisions. Women,
above all, to say what their own lives are going
to be, what their own personalities are going to
be, and no longer listen to or even permit male
experts to define what "feminine" is or isn't
or should be.
Am I saying that therefore women must be
liberated from sex? No. I am saying that sex
will only be liberated to be a human dialogue;
sex will only cease to be dirty, if you will; sex
will only cease to be a sniggering dirty joke
and an obsession in this society, when women
are liberated to be active self-determining
people, liberated to a creativity beyond
motherhood, to a full human creativity.
Am I saying that women must be liberated
from motherhood ? No, I am not. I am saying
that motherhood will only be liberated to be
a joyous and responsible human act, where
women are free to make, with full conscious
choice and full human responsibility, the
decisions to be mothers. Then and only then,
will they be able to embrace motherhood
without conflict. When they are able to de-
fine themselves as people, not just as
somebody's mother, not just as servants of
children, not just breeding receptacles, but
as people for whom motherhood is a freely
chosen part of life, freely celebrated while
it lasts, but for whom creativity has many
more dimensions, as it has for men.
The hostility between the sexes has never
been worse. The image of woman in avant
garde plays, novels, in the movies and in the
mass image that you can detect behind the
family situation comedies on television is
that mothers are man-devouring cannibal-
istic monsters, or else Lolitas, thing-like
sex objects. Objects not even of hetero-
sexual impulse, objects of a sadistic sado-
masochistic impulse. That impulse is much
more a factor in the abortion question than
anybody ever admits: the punishment of
women.
Men will only be truly liberated, to love
women and be fully themselves, when women
are liberated to be full people. To have a full
say in the decisions of their life and their
society and a full part in that society.
Until that happens, men are going to bear
the burden and the guilt of the destiny they
have forced upon women, the suppressed
resentment of that passive stage -- the
sterility of love, when love is not between
two fully active, fully participant, fully joy-
ous people, but has in it the element of ex-
ploitation. And men will also not be fully
free to be all they can be as long as they
must live up to an image of masculinity that
denies all the tenderness, the sensitivity, in
a man that might be considered feminine.
All the burdens and responsibilities that men
are supposed to shoulder alone makes them
resent women's pedestal, much as that
pedestal -- that enforced passivity -- may be
a burden for women.
Men are not allowed to admit that they
sometimes are afraid. They are not allowed
to express their own sensitivities, their own
needs, sometimes, to be passive and not
always active. Their own ability to cry. So,
they are only half-human, as women are
only half-human until we can go this next
step forward, of which this right of woman
to control her reproductive process, the
right of woman to have a say in the decisions
of her own life, is a part.
The real sexual revolution is the emer-
gence of women from passivity, from thing-
ness, from the point of view where they can
be the easiest victim and the channel, if you
will, for all the seductions.
It cannot happen without radical changes
in the family as we know it today; in our con-
cepts of marriage, in our very concepts of
love, in our architecture, our plans of cities,
in our theology, in our politics, in our art. Not
that women are special. Not that women are
superior. But, it's bound to be a different
politics, when women's voices are equally
heard.
If we are allowed finally to become full
people, not only will children be born and
brought up with more love and responsibil-
ity than today, but we will break out of the
confines of that sterile little suburban
family to relate to each other in terms of
all of the possible dimensions of our per-
sonalities -- male and female, as comrades,
as colleagues, as friends, as lovers, in a
life span that is now 75 years and is going
to be 100 years. And without hate and
without so much jealousy and buried resent-
ment and hypocrisies, there will be a whole
new sense of what love is that will make
Valentine's Day look very pallid.
There is no freedom, no equality, no fullhuman dignity and personhood possible for
women until we assert and demand control
over our own bodies, over our own reproduc-
tive process.
Then and only then will women move out
of their enforced passivity, their enforced
denigration, their definition as sex objects,
as things, to human personhood, to self-
determination, to human dignity.
The use of sex to sell everything from
cars to detergents to mouthwash, even the
glorification of breasts and behinds is finally
being understood by women for what it is:
This ultimately denigrating enshrinement of
women as sex objects and even the hypo-
critical tributes to motherhood.
Don't talk to me about abortion reform.
Reform is something dreamed up by men.
Maybe good-hearted men, but they can only
think from their point of view as men. Women
are the passive objects that must somehow
be regulated; let them have abortions for
thalidomide, rape, incest. What right have
they to say ? This is a woman's right and
not a technical question needing the sanc-
tion of the state, or to be debated in terms
of technicalities -- they are irrelevant.
I remember how they laughed when NOW
decided that there had been enough talk
about women, we wanted action; we decided
to define a new Bill of Rights for women, and
one of the rights had to be the right of
women to control their own reproductive
process.
Then, lo and behold, I began to hear
ministers and ADA and ACLU and others
begin to voice the same position, in terms
of the woman's basic right. The essence of
the denigration of women somehow, in this
country, in the world, is the treatment of
women as a passive sex object.
Women, almost to the degree that they're
almost too visible as sex objects in this
country today, are invisible people. As the
Negro was the invisible man, so women are
the invisible people in America today. Women
as people, women to be taken seriously as
people, women to have a share in the decis-
ions of the mainstream of government, of
politics, of the church -- not just to cook the
church supper, but to preach the sermon; not
just to look up the zip codes and address the
envelopes, but to make political decisions; not
just to do the housework of industry, but to
make some of the executive decisions. Women,
above all, to say what their own lives are going
to be, what their own personalities are going to
be, and no longer listen to or even permit male
experts to define what "feminine" is or isn't
or should be.
Am I saying that therefore women must be
liberated from sex? No. I am saying that sex
will only be liberated to be a human dialogue;
sex will only cease to be dirty, if you will; sex
will only cease to be a sniggering dirty joke
and an obsession in this society, when women
are liberated to be active self-determining
people, liberated to a creativity beyond
motherhood, to a full human creativity.
Am I saying that women must be liberated
from motherhood ? No, I am not. I am saying
that motherhood will only be liberated to be
a joyous and responsible human act, where
women are free to make, with full conscious
choice and full human responsibility, the
decisions to be mothers. Then and only then,
will they be able to embrace motherhood
without conflict. When they are able to de-
fine themselves as people, not just as
somebody's mother, not just as servants of
children, not just breeding receptacles, but
as people for whom motherhood is a freely
chosen part of life, freely celebrated while
it lasts, but for whom creativity has many
more dimensions, as it has for men.
The hostility between the sexes has never
been worse. The image of woman in avant
garde plays, novels, in the movies and in the
mass image that you can detect behind the
family situation comedies on television is
that mothers are man-devouring cannibal-
istic monsters, or else Lolitas, thing-like
sex objects. Objects not even of hetero-
sexual impulse, objects of a sadistic sado-
masochistic impulse. That impulse is much
more a factor in the abortion question than
anybody ever admits: the punishment of
women.
Men will only be truly liberated, to love
women and be fully themselves, when women
are liberated to be full people. To have a full
say in the decisions of their life and their
society and a full part in that society.
Until that happens, men are going to bear
the burden and the guilt of the destiny they
have forced upon women, the suppressed
resentment of that passive stage -- the
sterility of love, when love is not between
two fully active, fully participant, fully joy-
ous people, but has in it the element of ex-
ploitation. And men will also not be fully
free to be all they can be as long as they
must live up to an image of masculinity that
denies all the tenderness, the sensitivity, in
a man that might be considered feminine.
All the burdens and responsibilities that men
are supposed to shoulder alone makes them
resent women's pedestal, much as that
pedestal -- that enforced passivity -- may be
a burden for women.
Men are not allowed to admit that they
sometimes are afraid. They are not allowed
to express their own sensitivities, their own
needs, sometimes, to be passive and not
always active. Their own ability to cry. So,
they are only half-human, as women are
only half-human until we can go this next
step forward, of which this right of woman
to control her reproductive process, the
right of woman to have a say in the decisions
of her own life, is a part.
The real sexual revolution is the emer-
gence of women from passivity, from thing-
ness, from the point of view where they can
be the easiest victim and the channel, if you
will, for all the seductions.
It cannot happen without radical changes
in the family as we know it today; in our con-
cepts of marriage, in our very concepts of
love, in our architecture, our plans of cities,
in our theology, in our politics, in our art. Not
that women are special. Not that women are
superior. But, it's bound to be a different
politics, when women's voices are equally
heard.
If we are allowed finally to become full
people, not only will children be born and
brought up with more love and responsibil-
ity than today, but we will break out of the
confines of that sterile little suburban
family to relate to each other in terms of
all of the possible dimensions of our per-
sonalities -- male and female, as comrades,
as colleagues, as friends, as lovers, in a
life span that is now 75 years and is going
to be 100 years. And without hate and
without so much jealousy and buried resent-
ment and hypocrisies, there will be a whole
new sense of what love is that will make
Valentine's Day look very pallid.
human dignity and personhood possible for
women until we assert and demand control
over our own bodies, over our own reproduc-
tive process.
Then and only then will women move out
of their enforced passivity, their enforced
denigration, their definition as sex objects,
as things, to human personhood, to self-
determination, to human dignity.
The use of sex to sell everything from
cars to detergents to mouthwash, even the
glorification of breasts and behinds is finally
being understood by women for what it is:
This ultimately denigrating enshrinement of
women as sex objects and even the hypo-
critical tributes to motherhood.
Don't talk to me about abortion reform.
Reform is something dreamed up by men.
Maybe good-hearted men, but they can only
think from their point of view as men. Women
are the passive objects that must somehow
be regulated; let them have abortions for
thalidomide, rape, incest. What right have
they to say ? This is a woman's right and
not a technical question needing the sanc-
tion of the state, or to be debated in terms
of technicalities -- they are irrelevant.
I remember how they laughed when NOW
decided that there had been enough talk
about women, we wanted action; we decided
to define a new Bill of Rights for women, and
one of the rights had to be the right of
women to control their own reproductive
process.
Then, lo and behold, I began to hear
ministers and ADA and ACLU and others
begin to voice the same position, in terms
of the woman's basic right. The essence of
the denigration of women somehow, in this
country, in the world, is the treatment of
women as a passive sex object.
Women, almost to the degree that they're
almost too visible as sex objects in this
country today, are invisible people. As the
Negro was the invisible man, so women are
the invisible people in America today. Women
as people, women to be taken seriously as
people, women to have a share in the decis-
ions of the mainstream of government, of
politics, of the church -- not just to cook the
church supper, but to preach the sermon; not
just to look up the zip codes and address the
envelopes, but to make political decisions; not
just to do the housework of industry, but to
make some of the executive decisions. Women,
above all, to say what their own lives are going
to be, what their own personalities are going to
be, and no longer listen to or even permit male
experts to define what "feminine" is or isn't
or should be.
Am I saying that therefore women must be
liberated from sex? No. I am saying that sex
will only be liberated to be a human dialogue;
sex will only cease to be dirty, if you will; sex
will only cease to be a sniggering dirty joke
and an obsession in this society, when women
are liberated to be active self-determining
people, liberated to a creativity beyond
motherhood, to a full human creativity.
Am I saying that women must be liberated
from motherhood ? No, I am not. I am saying
that motherhood will only be liberated to be
a joyous and responsible human act, where
women are free to make, with full conscious
choice and full human responsibility, the
decisions to be mothers. Then and only then,
will they be able to embrace motherhood
without conflict. When they are able to de-
fine themselves as people, not just as
somebody's mother, not just as servants of
children, not just breeding receptacles, but
as people for whom motherhood is a freely
chosen part of life, freely celebrated while
it lasts, but for whom creativity has many
more dimensions, as it has for men.
The hostility between the sexes has never
been worse. The image of woman in avant
garde plays, novels, in the movies and in the
mass image that you can detect behind the
family situation comedies on television is
that mothers are man-devouring cannibal-
istic monsters, or else Lolitas, thing-like
sex objects. Objects not even of hetero-
sexual impulse, objects of a sadistic sado-
masochistic impulse. That impulse is much
more a factor in the abortion question than
anybody ever admits: the punishment of
women.
Men will only be truly liberated, to love
women and be fully themselves, when women
are liberated to be full people. To have a full
say in the decisions of their life and their
society and a full part in that society.
Until that happens, men are going to bear
the burden and the guilt of the destiny they
have forced upon women, the suppressed
resentment of that passive stage -- the
sterility of love, when love is not between
two fully active, fully participant, fully joy-
ous people, but has in it the element of ex-
ploitation. And men will also not be fully
free to be all they can be as long as they
must live up to an image of masculinity that
denies all the tenderness, the sensitivity, in
a man that might be considered feminine.
All the burdens and responsibilities that men
are supposed to shoulder alone makes them
resent women's pedestal, much as that
pedestal -- that enforced passivity -- may be
a burden for women.
Men are not allowed to admit that they
sometimes are afraid. They are not allowed
to express their own sensitivities, their own
needs, sometimes, to be passive and not
always active. Their own ability to cry. So,
they are only half-human, as women are
only half-human until we can go this next
step forward, of which this right of woman
to control her reproductive process, the
right of woman to have a say in the decisions
of her own life, is a part.
The real sexual revolution is the emer-
gence of women from passivity, from thing-
ness, from the point of view where they can
be the easiest victim and the channel, if you
will, for all the seductions.
It cannot happen without radical changes
in the family as we know it today; in our con-
cepts of marriage, in our very concepts of
love, in our architecture, our plans of cities,
in our theology, in our politics, in our art. Not
that women are special. Not that women are
superior. But, it's bound to be a different
politics, when women's voices are equally
heard.
If we are allowed finally to become full
people, not only will children be born and
brought up with more love and responsibil-
ity than today, but we will break out of the
confines of that sterile little suburban
family to relate to each other in terms of
all of the possible dimensions of our per-
sonalities -- male and female, as comrades,
as colleagues, as friends, as lovers, in a
life span that is now 75 years and is going
to be 100 years. And without hate and
without so much jealousy and buried resent-
ment and hypocrisies, there will be a whole
new sense of what love is that will make
Valentine's Day look very pallid.
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Betty Friedan's Sun/Moon Combination...Sun in Aquarius, Moon in Capricorn
The fact of outstanding interest about this combination is that it has produced more eminent Americans than any other solar-lunar combinations. It has an affinity with the horoscope of the United States and carries these people very far in public life – in politics preferably, but in any activity that deals with the general American public. They are automatically able to catch the imagination of those around them for they combine a warm humanism and logical adherence to the facts – a combination peculiarly calculated to win the support from people. Thus, whether president - LINCOLN; inventor – EDISON; actor-JOHN BARRYMORE and Katherine Cornell; critic – George Nathan; poet – William Ellery Leonard and William Rose Benet; or novelist – Dorothy Canfield Fisher -- in one way or another their work bears the mark of distinction and their achievements carries home to the public.
This person is a one hundred percent American, a supporter of the status quo, an upholder of law and order, a rugged individualist. ( MY COMMENT -- those of us who knew Betty Friedan well, knew that she was never a revolutionary ,no matter if she did dip into radical politics at one brief time ( because of a boyfriend?). So those stories about her leftist past don’t hold water. She was briefly involved, but she left it for good!)
The qualities that marked her for success are imagination, foresight, fearlessness, self-confidence and fundamental honesty of purpose, which she never lost sight of. Her ambition was important to her, but her honor, more so, and if she had to sacrifice one or the other, it would have been ambition. It was this very integrity that endeared her to those around her so that while warmer hearted more expressive people are well enough , she , with her austerity and her pride , her strict sense of right and wrong, nonetheless could win their affection and love. No one begrudges her success, as it is felt to be deserved because she created it for herself and did not compromise with truth or her convictions in any way.
She can succeed in public life . There is nothing radical about her…She was a humanitarian –though she didn’t believe in people , even though she loved them…… But in any world she was an admirable, admired and respected person, capable of assuming authority and wearing it well, of envisoning and putting through large enterprises . and remaining untouched and unspoiled even at the heighth of success and acclaim. Grant Lewi
GRANT LEWI – Called the father of modern Astrology, Grant Lewi was born June 8, 1902 in Albany, New York. He was educated at Hamilton College and Columbia University. After graduating from Columbia, he taught English at Dartmouth, at the University of North Dakota, and at the University of Delaware. He was married to Carolyn Wallace, daughter of astrologer Athene Gayle Wallace, in 1926. He began to study astrology with his mother-in-law
MY COMMENTS.. Of course one has to take the entire chart into consideration… but the general gist of this describes Betty Friedan. She was born with a great sun/moon combination as she was supposed to do what she did, and she had the talents with which to do it. Jacqui Ceballos
This person is a one hundred percent American, a supporter of the status quo, an upholder of law and order, a rugged individualist. ( MY COMMENT -- those of us who knew Betty Friedan well, knew that she was never a revolutionary ,no matter if she did dip into radical politics at one brief time ( because of a boyfriend?). So those stories about her leftist past don’t hold water. She was briefly involved, but she left it for good!)
The qualities that marked her for success are imagination, foresight, fearlessness, self-confidence and fundamental honesty of purpose, which she never lost sight of. Her ambition was important to her, but her honor, more so, and if she had to sacrifice one or the other, it would have been ambition. It was this very integrity that endeared her to those around her so that while warmer hearted more expressive people are well enough , she , with her austerity and her pride , her strict sense of right and wrong, nonetheless could win their affection and love. No one begrudges her success, as it is felt to be deserved because she created it for herself and did not compromise with truth or her convictions in any way.
She can succeed in public life . There is nothing radical about her…She was a humanitarian –though she didn’t believe in people , even though she loved them…… But in any world she was an admirable, admired and respected person, capable of assuming authority and wearing it well, of envisoning and putting through large enterprises . and remaining untouched and unspoiled even at the heighth of success and acclaim. Grant Lewi
GRANT LEWI – Called the father of modern Astrology, Grant Lewi was born June 8, 1902 in Albany, New York. He was educated at Hamilton College and Columbia University. After graduating from Columbia, he taught English at Dartmouth, at the University of North Dakota, and at the University of Delaware. He was married to Carolyn Wallace, daughter of astrologer Athene Gayle Wallace, in 1926. He began to study astrology with his mother-in-law
MY COMMENTS.. Of course one has to take the entire chart into consideration… but the general gist of this describes Betty Friedan. She was born with a great sun/moon combination as she was supposed to do what she did, and she had the talents with which to do it. Jacqui Ceballos
Betty Friedan Died
Poem by Marjorie DeFazio, on Betty's death in 2006. Marjorie was on the August 26, 1970 NYStrike Committee with Betty
Betty Friedan Died
She's gone
She could walk down an aisle
In the middle of a meeting
All heads turned
She would talk and gesture
Make some of us mad
Catch our heartsInflame our minds
When she finished
We all followed her
To the next door
We would batter
To the next barrier we would break
Betty Friedan Died
She's not gone
By Marjorie DeFazio February 7, 2006
Betty Friedan Died
She's gone
She could walk down an aisle
In the middle of a meeting
All heads turned
She would talk and gesture
Make some of us mad
Catch our heartsInflame our minds
When she finished
We all followed her
To the next door
We would batter
To the next barrier we would break
Betty Friedan Died
She's not gone
By Marjorie DeFazio February 7, 2006
Betty Friedan Started A Revolution — And We’re Still Not There Yet
WEDNESDAY, FEB 13, 2013 02:15 PM
It's been 50 years since "The Feminine Mystique" came out, and we are still feeling the pressure to "have it all"
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
(Credit: AP/Steven Senne/Salon)
Middle age is not generous to females. A man in his sixth decade can, like Alec Baldwin just this week did, proudly announce imminent parenthood with one’s yoga instructor spouse. He can be a George Clooney, appearing on magazine covers looking like the guy every guy wants to be. But for women, it’s different. As Tina Fey once said, “The definition of ‘crazy’ … is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.” And that would generally be sometime soon after 30. But Betty Freidan’s groundbreaking “Feminine Mystique,” which turns 50 this week, is celebrating its milestone by getting a fresh shower of attention — showing both just how remarkably it’s aged and how stunningly topical it still is.
Friedan’s book was a wallop of a tome, a peek behind the placid façade of the happy homemaker and into the dark heart of a seemingly enviable segment of American womanhood. Educated women, with their nice families and pretty homes, Friedan revealed, weren’t fulfilled by staying at home and waxing their floors. They needed more. And by starting the conversation about that need, by making it OK for women to want something else, Friedan helped start a revolution.
It has been a long time since I first read “The Feminine Mystique” as a bright-eyed young “feminazi,” checking off her required list of important authors: Susan Brownmiller, Kate Millet, Adrienne Rich, Barbara Ehrenreich. Then, Friedan’s searing look at the previously unexpressed pain of American women seemed like a relic of another era. I, after all, had grown up in a world of Gloria Steinem and Mary Richards. In my lifetime, women had gained the legal right to abortion and to go to West Point. I came of age as Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf were reinventing the concept of feminism, yet again, for Generation X. I had opportunities – educationally, vocationally, sexually — that my grandmother’s generation never dreamed possible. And yet today, years later, I come back to Friedan’s book as a working mother. I understand in a very different way the howl of frustration that she articulated so poignantly. And I think, Holy crap, this is our lives right now — and then some.
Friedan wrote the book because “no magazine would publish” it as an article. Just last week, after inviting feminist writer Kristine Holmgren to blog for them, Beliefnet told her they were“concerned about the negative connotation that our readers may associate with the word ‘feminism’” — and asked her not to use it.
Friedan famously identified “the problem that has no name” — the unhappiness and lack of fulfillment that came from the relentless pressure on women to conform to a narrow and limiting feminine ideal. Then, it was about being a traditional housewife. Now, the challenge we face is that we’re expected to somehow “have it all,” an insidious and unwinnable concept – while simultaneously being undermined on every single front.
Today, many of us have enviable careers – a fact we apologetically explain by quantifying our professional successes and making sure we repeat, over and over, that our first, best and most important job is as a mother. We wage “mommy wars” that pit stay-at-home mothers against working ones. We second-guess women for wanting to return to work after having kids but we’re disdainful of those who stay home too long. We fetishize Martha Stewart–level domestic perfection, pinning our cake-decorating inspirations on Pinterest – while simultaneously aspiring to attain the now all but required bikini-hot, post-baby MILF status. And hoo boy do wedenigrate women who opt out of motherhood entirely. I don’t know about you, but there are days when I think that if all I had to do to be considered doing right by my sex was put on a crinoline, vacuum the rug and make somebody a martini, I would have it easy.
Feminism opened a million new doors, but our cultural anxiety about and animosity toward women swept right in to create new wormholes of dread just beyond them. We have gained so much, and yet we struggle mightily with all the guilt and pressure that have come with every one of those victories. Five full decades after Friedan sent out the rallying cry for us to be seen as more than just wives and mothers, our president refers to “our wives, mothers and daughters” when addressing the nation as if, when he speaks to the American people, he’s not speaking to wives, mothers and daughters. It’s been 50 years of hard-won battles and gains for women, 50 years of fighting to write for ourselves our place in American culture. So how much has changed since Friedan sent out a flare called “The Feminine Mystique”? Everything. And nothing. And our definition of what it means to be a woman didn’t get easier — it just got impossibly broader.
Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub.
It's been 50 years since "The Feminine Mystique" came out, and we are still feeling the pressure to "have it all"
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
(Credit: AP/Steven Senne/Salon)
Middle age is not generous to females. A man in his sixth decade can, like Alec Baldwin just this week did, proudly announce imminent parenthood with one’s yoga instructor spouse. He can be a George Clooney, appearing on magazine covers looking like the guy every guy wants to be. But for women, it’s different. As Tina Fey once said, “The definition of ‘crazy’ … is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.” And that would generally be sometime soon after 30. But Betty Freidan’s groundbreaking “Feminine Mystique,” which turns 50 this week, is celebrating its milestone by getting a fresh shower of attention — showing both just how remarkably it’s aged and how stunningly topical it still is.
Friedan’s book was a wallop of a tome, a peek behind the placid façade of the happy homemaker and into the dark heart of a seemingly enviable segment of American womanhood. Educated women, with their nice families and pretty homes, Friedan revealed, weren’t fulfilled by staying at home and waxing their floors. They needed more. And by starting the conversation about that need, by making it OK for women to want something else, Friedan helped start a revolution.
It has been a long time since I first read “The Feminine Mystique” as a bright-eyed young “feminazi,” checking off her required list of important authors: Susan Brownmiller, Kate Millet, Adrienne Rich, Barbara Ehrenreich. Then, Friedan’s searing look at the previously unexpressed pain of American women seemed like a relic of another era. I, after all, had grown up in a world of Gloria Steinem and Mary Richards. In my lifetime, women had gained the legal right to abortion and to go to West Point. I came of age as Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf were reinventing the concept of feminism, yet again, for Generation X. I had opportunities – educationally, vocationally, sexually — that my grandmother’s generation never dreamed possible. And yet today, years later, I come back to Friedan’s book as a working mother. I understand in a very different way the howl of frustration that she articulated so poignantly. And I think, Holy crap, this is our lives right now — and then some.
Friedan wrote the book because “no magazine would publish” it as an article. Just last week, after inviting feminist writer Kristine Holmgren to blog for them, Beliefnet told her they were“concerned about the negative connotation that our readers may associate with the word ‘feminism’” — and asked her not to use it.
Friedan famously identified “the problem that has no name” — the unhappiness and lack of fulfillment that came from the relentless pressure on women to conform to a narrow and limiting feminine ideal. Then, it was about being a traditional housewife. Now, the challenge we face is that we’re expected to somehow “have it all,” an insidious and unwinnable concept – while simultaneously being undermined on every single front.
Today, many of us have enviable careers – a fact we apologetically explain by quantifying our professional successes and making sure we repeat, over and over, that our first, best and most important job is as a mother. We wage “mommy wars” that pit stay-at-home mothers against working ones. We second-guess women for wanting to return to work after having kids but we’re disdainful of those who stay home too long. We fetishize Martha Stewart–level domestic perfection, pinning our cake-decorating inspirations on Pinterest – while simultaneously aspiring to attain the now all but required bikini-hot, post-baby MILF status. And hoo boy do wedenigrate women who opt out of motherhood entirely. I don’t know about you, but there are days when I think that if all I had to do to be considered doing right by my sex was put on a crinoline, vacuum the rug and make somebody a martini, I would have it easy.
Feminism opened a million new doors, but our cultural anxiety about and animosity toward women swept right in to create new wormholes of dread just beyond them. We have gained so much, and yet we struggle mightily with all the guilt and pressure that have come with every one of those victories. Five full decades after Friedan sent out the rallying cry for us to be seen as more than just wives and mothers, our president refers to “our wives, mothers and daughters” when addressing the nation as if, when he speaks to the American people, he’s not speaking to wives, mothers and daughters. It’s been 50 years of hard-won battles and gains for women, 50 years of fighting to write for ourselves our place in American culture. So how much has changed since Friedan sent out a flare called “The Feminine Mystique”? Everything. And nothing. And our definition of what it means to be a woman didn’t get easier — it just got impossibly broader.
Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub.
Peoria Honors Favorite Daughter Betty Friedan
Betty Friedan, founder of N.O.W. and author of the Feminine Mystique, responds to questions about the energy crisis and it's effect on women. (photo by Howard D. Simmons 2/16/74) office at 37 s. Wabash
Betty Friedan was a product of Peoria, where a program honoring her life will be held at the Peoria Riverfront Museum on Feb. 19. Called “It Changed My Life,” after one of Friedan’s lesser-known books, six or seven local women will speak on how “The Feminine Mystique” and the women’s movement changed their lives.
Barbara Mantz Drake, 67, former editorial page editor for the Peoria Journal Star and a member of the Betty Friedan Hometown Tribute group, interviewed Friedan in 1999. She thinks Friedan’s legacy is largely unknown to young women today, including those living in Peoria. In the 1990s, she went to speak to a class at Peoria High School about its alumnus Friedan, who died in 2006.
“I was stunned to learn only two of them knew who she was, and none of them knew that she had gone to high school there,” Drake said. “That began a crusade at the newspaper to get her better known and to establish a museum that would recognize the contributions of Peorians like her.”Drake said she is “constantly stunned by the number of young women I’ve met who don’t know who Betty Friedan is.”“I think that young women don’t know enough about how it used to be,” she said. “When I tell a couple of stories about how it was when I was young, you can see people’s mouths drop open. They find it hard to believe.”Still, she said she had a hard time believing Friedan’s book when she read it as a college freshman.“I remember thinking this can’t be true, all these opportunities that were closed to women,” she said. “I just refused to believe it.”
February 7, 2013 4:50PM By Kara Spak
Mary Ann Lupa and Kathy Rand, VFA board members, interviewed about Betty Friedan by Chicago Sun Times
'The Feminine Mystique’ turns 50
By Kara Spak Staff Reporter kspak@suntimes.com February 7, 2013 4:54PM
Before women were allowed on the front lines or in the boardroom, before the words feminist and feminazi, before the idea of equal pay for equal work or work-life balance, there was “The Feminine Mystique.”
The book by Peoria-raised Betty Friedan turns 50 years old this month, a landmark anniversary for the premise that housewives might just be unhappy because they weren’t allowed access to intellectually fulfilling jobs.
Friedan famously called it the “problem that had no name,” writing “Each suburban wife 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 even ask of herself the silent question: Is this all?”
Both credited and blamed with kicking off the women’s movement, Friedan’s book wasn’t specifically a call to arms. Though the author would go on to found the National Organization for Women, “The Feminine Mystique” was directed at a generation of women who married upwardly mobile World War II veterans, a legion of “Mad Men’s” Betty Drapers.
If these women complained of discontent, it wasn’t uncommon for a doctor to diagnose them with “housewives’ syndrome,” a malaise where shopping was considered a legitimate cure.
The book’s most consistent criticism hasn’t changed in five decades — that Friedan ignored the issues of working-class and minority women. Still, despite what some believe is too narrow a focus, one look at the gender makeup in virtually any American office is a testament to the book’s lasting impact.
“It really did change everything,” said Kathy Rand, a Lake Forest resident who is a member of the Veteran Feminists of America, a group dedicated to preserving the history of second-wave feminism, the women’s movement that started in the 1960s. “I don’t think you can estimate the impact that it had.”
Rand, now 67, was a single working gal active in the women’s movement when she read “The Feminine Mystique.”
“I couldn’t relate to not being able to have a job,” she said. Still, Friedan’s message of equality rang true, and on Aug. 26, 1970, Rand joined thousands of women in Daley Plaza for a “Strike for Equality” commemorating the 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage.
Throughout the United States, housewives were asked to head downtown instead of into the laundry room. Working women skipped their lunch break to rally around the theme “Don’t Iron While the Strike Is Hot.”
“I was overwhelmed by this whole thing,” Rand said. “That day changed my life.”
Mary-Ann Lupa, a 70-year-old Portage Park resident, was one of the organizers of the Chicago strike, which Friedan had called for at a NOW conference in Chicago in March 1970.
“I wasn’t sure anybody was going to show up,” Lupa said. “[Friedan] was a great visionary. Besides her having the high intellect that allowed her to write the book, she had a tremendous vision of what women could be. It was in her heart, both intellectual and emotional.”
Before women were allowed on the front lines or in the boardroom, before the words feminist and feminazi, before the idea of equal pay for equal work or work-life balance, there was “The Feminine Mystique.” The book by Betty Friedan turns 50 this month, a landmark anniversary for the premise that housewives might just be unhappy because they weren’t allowed access to intellectually fulfilling jobs.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)