Feminist Author Betty Friedan Dies at 85

Betty Friedan, whose manifesto "The Feminine Mystique" became a best seller in the 1960s and laid the groundwork for the modern feminist movement, died Saturday, her birthday. She was 85.

Friedan died at her home of congestive heart failure, according to a cousin, Emily Bazelon.

Friedan's assertion in her 1963 best seller that having a husband and babies was not everything and that women should aspire to separate identities as individuals, was highly unusual, if not revolutionary, just after the baby and suburban booms of the Eisenhower era.

The feminine mystique, she said, was a phony bill of goods society sold to women that left them unfulfilled, suffering from "the problem that has no name" and seeking a solution in tranquilizers and psychoanalysis.

"A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, `Who am I, and what do I want out of life?' She mustn't feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children," Friedan said.

In the racial, political and sexual conflicts of the 1960s and '70s, Friedan's was one of the most commanding voices and recognizable presences in the women's movement.

As a founder and first president of the National Organization for Women in 1966, she staked out positions that seemed extreme at the time on such issues as abortion, sex-neutral help-wanted ads, equal pay, promotion opportunities and maternity leave.

But at the same time, Friedan insisted that the women's movement had to remain in the American mainstream, that men had to be accepted as allies and that the family should not be rejected.

"Don't get into the bra-burning, anti-man, politics-of-orgasm school," Friedan told a college audience in 1970.

To more radical and lesbian feminists, Friedan was "hopelessly bourgeois," Susan Brownmiller wrote at the time.

Friedan, deeply opposed to "equating feminism with lesbianism," conceded later that she had been "very square" and uncomfortable about homosexuality.

"I wrote a whole book objecting to the definition of women only in sexual relation to men. I would not exchange that for a definition of women only in sexual relation to women," she said.

Nonetheless she was a seconder for a resolution on protecting lesbian rights at the National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977.

"For a great many women, choosing motherhood makes motherhood itself a liberating choice," she told an interviewer two decades later. But she added that this should not be a reason for conflict with "other feminists who are maybe more austere, or choose to seek their partners among other women."

By then in her 70s, Friedan had moved on to the issue of how society views and treats its elderly.

She said that while researching her last book, "The Fountain of Age," published in 1993, she found those who dealt with old people "talk about the aged with the same patronizing, `compassionate' denial of their personhood that was heard when the experts talked about women 20 years ago."

She had not stopped being a feminist, she said, "but women as a special separate interest group are not my concern any more."

Friedan, born Feb. 4, 1921, in Peoria, Ill., was a high achieving Jewish outsider growing up in middle America. Her father, Harry Goldstein, owned a jewelry store; her mother, Miriam, quit a job as a newspaper women's page editor to become a housewife.

As a girl, Friedan watched her mother "cut down my father because she had no place to channel her terrific energies, a typical female disorder that I call impotent rage," she said.

From high school valedictorian in 1938 to summa cum laude graduate of Smith College in 1942, "I was that girl with all A's and I wanted boys worse than anything," she said.

She won a fellowship in psychology to the University of California, Berkeley, but turned down a bigger fellowship there so as not to outdo a boyfriend.

The romance broke up anyway and Friedan moved to Greenwich Village in New York and became a labor reporter.

She lost one job to a returning World War II veteran but found another before marrying Carl Friedan, a summer-stock producer and later an advertising executive, in 1947. The marriage, which produced three children, ended in divorce 22 years later.

Friedan got a maternity leave to have her first child in 1949, but was fired and replaced by a man when she asked for another leave to have the second child five years later.

The family had moved to a big Victorian house in the suburban Rockland County village of Grandview-on-the-Hudson, N.Y., where Friedan cranked out freelance magazine articles while bringing up her brood.

Hoping to get a magazine piece out of a Smith College 15-year reunion, Friedan prepared an in-depth survey of her classmates.

What she found was that these well-educated women of the class of 1942, now largely suburban housewives, were asking, in effect, "Is this all?"

Friedan couldn't get the article published in a magazine, but five years of more research and writing turned it into "The Feminine Mystique."

If some women read it as a call to arms, others were outraged, Friedan recalled. Dinner invitations stopped; she was out of the school car pool.

But the first printing of 3,000 eventually grew to 600,000 copies hardcover and more than 2 million in paperback. The book was listed at No. 37 on a 1999 New York University survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the century.

In 1964, the family moved back to Manhattan in 1964 and Friedan began working to have the federal government enforce the Civil Rights Act as it applied to sex and not only to race, religion and national origin.

Founding NOW was a response to federal inaction. The finale of Friedan's presidency was the national women's strike of August 1970, which brought women out across the country on the 50th anniversary of women's suffrage.

She also was a founder in 1968 of the National Conference for Repeal of Abortion Laws, which became the National Abortion Rights Action League, and of the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971.

During the following decade she taught and lectured, and her 1981 book, "The Second Stage," was seen by many as a public break with the feminist leadership that had succeeded her. She said they had pursued "sexual politics that distorted the sense of priorities of the women's movement during the 1970s," and had opened the way for conservatives and reactionaries to occupy the center on family issues.

Friedan taught on both coasts, at New York University and the University of Southern California, lecturing widely and traveling to women's conferences around the globe.

She helped persuade the Democratic Party to give women half the delegate strength at its nominating convention and was herself a delegate when Geraldine Ferraro was nominated for vice president in 1984.

She lived in New York City and Washington, D.C., and had a summer house in Sag Harbor, N.Y.

Survivors include her sons, Daniel Friedan of Princeton, N.J., and Jonathan Friedan of Philadelphia, and daughter Emily Friedan of Buffalo, N.Y.; nine grandchildren; a sister, Amy Adams of New York; and a brother, Harry Goldstein of Palm Springs, Calif.

The funeral will be Monday or Tuesday in New York, according to Bazelon.


news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060204/ap_on_re_us/obit_friedan

Adios, ya old huzzy!!

Yesterday I saw a guy wearing a shirt that said, "This is what a feminist looks like."

From the NRA-ILA web site:

Feminist icon Betty Friedan denounces "the trend of women buying guns" as "a horrifying, obscene perversion of feminism." Friedan believes "that lethal violence even in self-defense only engenders more lethal violence, and that gun control should override any personal need for safety."


"Are You Safer With a Gun?"
by Ann Japenga, Health,
March/April 1994

www.nraila.org/Issues/Articles/Read.aspx?ID=59

First time I've heard of her, after she died, guess I was lucky!

Quoted: Yesterday I saw a guy wearing a shirt that said, "This is what a feminist looks like."

She looked like Helen Thomas's sister, a farking horseface.

Today's her birthday.

Happy Birthday, Betty!

R.I.P. (Rot In Pieces)

Using the name Betty Friedan and feminine in the same sentence is an oxymoron......

What a bitch!  The only good thing that came out of that "movement" was when they were burning their bras.

Quoted: From the NRA-ILA web site: Feminist icon Betty Friedan denounces "the trend of women buying guns" as "a horrifying, obscene perversion of feminism." Friedan believes "that lethal violence even in self-defense only engenders more lethal violence, and that gun control should override any personal need for safety." "Are You Safer With a Gun?" by Ann Japenga, Health, March/April 1994 www.nraila.org/Issues/Articles/Read.aspx?ID=59

I disliked her immensly BEFORE, now I just hate her. Good bye biatch

Didn't they burn women on stakes for looking like her?

Nothing to see here.  We can all move on now.

She's dead.

What a buch of <religion> asses.

Sounds like she probably lead a lonely life cause no man would want her.

Was this the same mindless bitch who claimed that all sex, even within marriage, was rape?

No, IIRC that was Andrea Dworkin.

The guys on this thread are kinda scary.

Let's see how great you or your significant other look when you are old and whithered.  (Assuming you HAVE sig others.... given your comments, that is a BIG assumption).

Yeah, she was afraid of guns, so what, people didn't listen to her for her views on guns. And she was attacking her own feminist hoard with that one.

Have you READ The Feminine Mystique.  It was written a long time ago and while it was groudbreaking then, it has the strange feminist notions of equal pay for equal work among others...  

Seems like that must be a radically threatening idea for some on this thread.

Quoted: Was this the same mindless bitch who claimed that all sex, even within marriage, was rape?

No, and if you actually read the obit in the original post, you'll learn that she was directly opposed to the man-hating lesbian feminists of the 1960s.

Quoted: Quoted: The guys on this thread are kinda scary. Let's see how great you or your significant other look when you are old and whithered.  (Assuming you HAVE sig others.... given your comments, that is a BIG assumption). Yeah, she was afraid of guns, so what, people didn't listen to her for her views on guns. And she was attacking her own feminist hoard with that one. Have you READ The Feminine Mystique.  It was written a long time ago and while it was groudbreaking then, it has the strange feminist notions of equal pay for different work in the same company that is a lot easier but more women do it among others...   Seems like that must be a radically threatening idea for some on this thread. Fixed it for you.

Oh really?  Where does it say that in her book?

Since you are argueing that point, I am assuming that you read it.  After all, you wouldn't just make a comment like that having no knowledge of what you are talking about, right?  

That would be moronic.

Quoted: The guys on this thread are kinda scary. Let's see how great you or your significant other look when you are old and whithered.  (Assuming you HAVE sig others.... given your comments, that is a BIG assumption). Yeah, she was afraid of guns, so what, people didn't listen to her for her views on guns. And she was attacking her own feminist hoard with that one. Have you READ The Feminine Mystique.  It was written a long time ago and while it was groudbreaking then, it has the strange feminist notions of equal pay for equal work among others...   Seems like that must be a radically threatening idea for some on this thread.

People have very short historical memories.

Many wish we could go back to the 50's of "Happy Days."  A 50s that never existed.

I have fond memories of youth too.  But, things change, and for women, I think things have, in most respects, changed for the better.  

Pay no attention to the woman haters and neo-con taliban that would have you out of the workforce and "make'n sammiches."  

Quoted: Quoted: The guys on this thread are kinda scary. Let's see how great you or your significant other look when you are old and whithered.  (Assuming you HAVE sig others.... given your comments, that is a BIG assumption). Yeah, she was afraid of guns, so what, people didn't listen to her for her views on guns. And she was attacking her own feminist hoard with that one. Have you READ The Feminine Mystique.  It was written a long time ago and while it was groudbreaking then, it has the strange feminist notions of equal pay for equal work among others...   Seems like that must be a radically threatening idea for some on this thread. People have very short historical memories. Many wish we could go back to the 50's of "Happy Days."  A 50s that never existed. I have fond memories of youth too.  But, things change, and for women, I think things have, in most respects, changed for the better.   Pay no attention to the woman haters and neo-con taliban that would have you out of the workforce and "make'n sammiches."

Blasphemy, Turn in your man card

Quoted: Quoted: From the NRA-ILA web site: Feminist icon Betty Friedan denounces "the trend of women buying guns" as "a horrifying, obscene perversion of feminism." Friedan believes "that lethal violence even in self-defense only engenders more lethal violence, and that gun control should override any personal need for safety." "Are You Safer With a Gun?" by Ann Japenga, Health, March/April 1994 www.nraila.org/Issues/Articles/Read.aspx?ID=59 I disliked her immensly BEFORE, now I just hate her. Good bye biatch

+1

Good riddance.  Hell is waiting.

Here's a fairly good interview of her from later in her life, so at least you get her own words to assess.  Helped found NOW and NARAL but says that there were currents in those organizations that she didn't agree with.

www.pbs.org/fmc/interviews/friedan.htm  The First Measured Century was a very good book that showed that actual statistics contradict a lot of claims about progress in our country, claims in both directions.

We'd be lucky if she had some counterparts in the Islamic world.

Quoted: Quoted: The guys on this thread are kinda scary. Let's see how great you or your significant other look when you are old and whithered.  (Assuming you HAVE sig others.... given your comments, that is a BIG assumption). Yeah, she was afraid of guns, so what, people didn't listen to her for her views on guns. And she was attacking her own feminist hoard with that one. Have you READ The Feminine Mystique.  It was written a long time ago and while it was groudbreaking then, it has the strange feminist notions of equal pay for equal work among others...   Seems like that must be a radically threatening idea for some on this thread. People have very short historical memories. Many wish we could go back to the 50's of "Happy Days."  A 50s that never existed. I have fond memories of youth too.  But, things change, and for women, I think things have, in most respects, changed for the better.   Pay no attention to the woman haters and neo-con taliban that would have you out of the workforce and "make'n sammiches."

the opposite of feminism isn't mistreating women

the opposite of feminism is fair play and clear rational thought

a feminist is just a kind of a klansman, only instead of hating blacks, they hate men

my whole i life have been getting bitterly criticized for being a white Christian heterosexual male.  i'm sick of it.  i say fuck them and fuck all the liberal-wannabees who go along with it

basically feminism is a bunch of nasty lesbian cunts saying that men suck

you guys can keep licking the boot thats kicking you but I say

FUCK IT

go kick your son's ass if he tries to play cowboys and indians.  that kind of "aggressive behavior" should not be encouraged.  (also it is not sensitive towards the feelings of "native americans")

go watch sex in the city.  


“Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America’s Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley’s radiation lab with J. Robert Oppenheimer.”


what a hero.  our fucking society makes me sick

Quoted: Adios, ya old huzzy!!

Only woman who ever made Helen Thomas look decent.  

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/friedan-per-horowitz.html


Betty Friedan's secret Communist past


Salon
January 18, 1999
by David Horowitz


Why has this feminist icon continued to cover up her years as a party activist? What is it with progressives? Why do they feel the need to lie so relentlessly about who they are? Recently Rigoberta Mench 's autobiography was exposed as a complete hoax. Now it's Betty Friedan's turn to be revealed as a feminist fibber.

In a new book, "Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique", Smith College professor Daniel Horowitz (no relation) establishes beyond doubt that the woman who has always presented herself as a typical suburban housewife until she began work on her groundbreaking book was in fact nothing of the kind. In fact, under her maiden name, Betty Goldstein, she was a political activist and professional propagandist for the Communist left for a quarter of a century before the publication of "The Feminist Mystique" launched the modern women's movement.

Professor Horowitz documents that Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America's Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley's radiation lab with J. Robert Oppenheimer. Her famous description of America's suburban family household as "a comfortable concentration camp" in "The Feminine Mystique" therefore had more to do with her Marxist hatred for America than with any of her actual experience as a housewife or mother. (Her husband, Carl, also a leftist, once complained that his wife "was in the world during the whole marriage," had a full-time maid and "seldom was a wife and a mother").

It is fascinating that Friedan not only felt the need to lie about her real views and life experience then, but still feels the need to lie about them now.

Although Horowitz, the author of the new biography, is a sympathetic leftist, Friedan refused to cooperate with him once she realized he was going to tell the truth about her life as Betty Goldstein. After he published an initial article about Friedan's youthful work as a "labor journalist," Friedan maligned him, saying to an American University audience, "Some historian recently wrote some attack on me in which he claimed that I was only pretending to be a suburban housewife, that I was supposed to be an agent."

This was particularly unkind because Friedan's professor-biographer is such a fellow-traveler himself that he bends over backwards throughout the book to sanitize the true dimensions of Friedan's past. Thus he describes one character in the book, Steve Nelson, as "the legendary radical, veteran of the Spanish Civil War and Bay Area party official." In fact, Nelson was an obscure radical but an important apparatchik (later notorious for his espionage activities in the Berkeley Radiation Lab) who was in Spain as a Party commissar to enforce the Stalinist line.

Professor Horowitz also bends over backwards, and at length, to defend Friedan's lying as a response to "McCarthyism." When she makes the ridiculous accusation that he is going to use "innuendoes" to describe her past as a justification for refusing to grant him permission to quote from her unpublished papers, he is all-too understanding. The word "innuendoes," he explains, was often used by people "scarred by McCarthyism."

Reading this reminded me of a C-Span "BookNotes" program on which Brian Lamb asked the president of the American Historical Association, Eric Foner, about his father, Jack. Foner claimed that Jack Foner was a man "with a social conscience" who made his living through public lectures and who, along with his brothers Phil and Moe, was persecuted during the McCarthy era. When Lamb asked Foner why they were persecuted, Foner responded that his father had supported the loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. But no one was actually persecuted for siding with the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War. The Foner brothers, on the other hand, were fairly famous Communists, one a Communist Party labor historian and another a Communist Party union organizer and leader. It is a fact that, on orders from Moscow, Communist-controlled unions in the CIO opposed the Marshall Plan's effort to rebuild Western Europe. The Marshall Plan, it should be recalled, was in part designed to prevent Stalin's empire from absorbing Western Europe as it had its satellites in the east. That's why socialists like Walter Reuther purged the reds from the CIO and also why Communists like Foner's uncle came under FBI scrutiny -- i.e., why they were "persecuted" in the McCarthy era. That Communists, like the Foners, lied at the time was understandable. They had something to hide. But why are their children lying to this day? And why are people like Friedan lying long after they have anything to fear from McCarthy committees and the like?

Surely no one seriously believes that people who reveal their Communist pasts these days have anything to fear from the American government. Angela Davis, for example, was once the Communist Party's candidate for vice president and served the Soviet empire until its very last gasp. Her punishment for this is to have been appointed one of only seven "President's Professors" at the state-run University of California, and to be officially invited at exorbitant fees by college administrations all across the country to give ceremonial speeches on public occasions.

Folk singer Pete Seeger, who has been a party puppet his entire life, is a celebrated entertainer and was honored recently at the Kennedy Center with a Freedom Medal by the president himself. In the midst of the Vietnam War, Jane Fonda incited American troops to defect in a broadcast she made from the enemy's capital over Radio Hanoi. She then returned to the United States to win an Academy Award and eventually become the wife of one of America's most powerful media moguls, where she oversaw a 24-episode CNN special purporting to be a history of the Cold War. Bernadine Dohrn, leader of America's first political terrorist cult, who once officially declared war on "Amerika," and who has never conceded even minimal regret for her crimes nor hinted at the slightest revision of her views, has just been appointed to a Justice Department commission on children. The idea that America punishes those who betray her is laughable, as is the idea that leftists have anything to fear from their government if they tell the truth. So why the continuing lies? The reason is this: The truth is too embarrassing. Imagine what it would be like for Betty Friedan (the name actually is Friedman) to admit that as a Jew she opposed America's entry into the war against Hitler because Stalin told her that it was just an inter-imperialist fracas? Imagine what it would be like for America's premier feminist to acknowledge that well into her 30s she thought Stalin was the Father of the Peoples, and that the United States was an evil empire, and that her interest in women's liberation was just a subtext of her real desire to create a Soviet America. No, those kinds of revelations don't help a person who is concerned about her public image.

Which is why it probably has seemed better just to lie about this all these years. The problem, however, is that lying can't be contained. It begets other lies, and eventually becomes a whole way of life, as President Clinton could tell you. One of the lies that the denial of one's Communist past begets is an exaggerated view of McCarthyism. Fear of McCarthyism becomes an excuse that explains everything. That McCarthyism was some gigantic "reign of terror" (to use Carl Bernstein's sappy analogy), as though thousands lost their freedom and hundreds their lives while the country itself remained paralyzed with fear for a decade is simply not true. McCarthy's personal reign lasted but a year a half, until Democrats took control of his committee. Being an accused Communist on an American college campus in the '50s, moreover, was only marginally more damaging to one's career opportunities than the accusation of being a member of the Christian Right would be on today's politically correct campus, dominated as it now is by the tenured left. Bad enough, but reign of terror, no.

The example of Betty Friedan should be a wake-up call to the rest of us to insist that people be candid about their politics and about calling things by their right names. Otherwise, we are going to continue being inundated with books from the academy with ludicrous claims like this: "In response to McCarthyism and to the impact of mass media, suburbs, and prosperity, a wave of conformity swept across much of the nation. Containment referred not only to American policy toward the U.S.S.R. but also to what happened to aspirations at home. The results for women were especially unfortunate. Even though increasing numbers of them entered the work force, the Cold War linked anti-communism and the dampening of women's ambitions." If you believe that, there is a bridge I have to sell you. On the other hand, at least according to Friedan's biographer, that's exactly what Friedan has sold American feminists: "With 'The Feminine Mystique,' Friedan began a long tradition among American feminists of seeing compulsory domesticity as the main consequence of 1950s McCarthyism." Well, perhaps it's not American feminists Friedan has sold this bizarre version of reality to, so much as American Communists posing as feminists and unsuspecting young women whose only understanding of this past will come from their tenured leftist professors.


*********


I'll bet that no large media outlet in America uses the word Communist in any story about Friedan between now and the funeral.


Steve

Quoted: Quoted: The guys on this thread are kinda scary. Let's see how great you or your significant other look when you are old and whithered.  (Assuming you HAVE sig others.... given your comments, that is a BIG assumption). Yeah, she was afraid of guns, so what, people didn't listen to her for her views on guns. And she was attacking her own feminist hoard with that one. Have you READ The Feminine Mystique.  It was written a long time ago and while it was groudbreaking then, it has the strange feminist notions of equal pay for equal work among others...   Seems like that must be a radically threatening idea for some on this thread. People have very short historical memories. Many wish we could go back to the 50's of "Happy Days."  A 50s that never existed. I have fond memories of youth too.  But, things change, and for women, I think things have, in most respects, changed for the better.   Pay no attention to the woman haters and neo-con taliban that would have you out of the workforce and "make'n sammiches."

Translation........I'm typing this as my wife is watching.

Quoted: Translation........I'm typing this as my wife is watching.

Ahhh, I thought I heard a whip sound in his house.

Quoted: Quoted: Translation........I'm typing this as my wife is watching. Ahhh, I thought I heard a whip sound in his house.

Odd that someone's manhood is attacked whenever he, even in a fairly roundabout way, says something nice about women's rights.

But, I was blessed with full sized male genitalia and my wife can stay home and raise our son because I was blessed with the ability to earn a respectable living even if I have to compete with women.  

She has a degree and is quite employable, its just not our best option right now.  Ms. Friedan, and others helped make that a choice, as opposed to a necessity.

As and asside, Ms. Friedan was obviosly an idiot for her Marxiism and anti gun agenda.  But, its a fallacy to then say that ALL of her views were bonkers.

Quoted: Quoted: Was this the same mindless bitch who claimed that all sex, even within marriage, was rape? No, and if you actually read the obit in the original post, you'll learn that she was directly opposed to the man-hating lesbian feminists of the 1960s.

Good for her.

No, I didn't read the obit. It was a simple question.

Quoted: Surely no one seriously believes that people who reveal their Communist pasts these days have anything to fear from the American government. Angela Davis, for example, was once the Communist Party's candidate for vice president and served the Soviet empire until its very last gasp. Her punishment for this is to have been appointed one of only seven "President's Professors" at the state-run University of California, and to be officially invited at exorbitant fees by college administrations all across the country to give ceremonial speeches on public occasions. Folk singer Pete Seeger, who has been a party puppet his entire life, is a celebrated entertainer and was honored recently at the Kennedy Center with a Freedom Medal by the president himself. In the midst of the Vietnam War, Jane Fonda incited American troops to defect in a broadcast she made from the enemy's capital over Radio Hanoi. She then returned to the United States to win an Academy Award and eventually become the wife of one of America's most powerful media moguls, where she oversaw a 24-episode CNN special purporting to be a history of the Cold War. Bernadine Dohrn, leader of America's first political terrorist cult, who once officially declared war on "Amerika," and who has never conceded even minimal regret for her crimes nor hinted at the slightest revision of her views, has just been appointed to a Justice Department commission on children. The idea that America punishes those who betray her is laughable, as is the idea that leftists have anything to fear from their government if they tell the truth.

Notice how these commies are "celebrated" not by mainstream America but the usual liberal refuge: academia, Hollywood, media, low level government posts, etc.  I don't know which president "honored" Peter Seeger, but most likely Clinton.  In more radical times, Jane Fonda would have been thought to have whored herself to the highest bidder.  But damn it, even communist like luxury housing and limo rides.