Betty Friedan
From Philosopedia
Friedan, Betty Naomi (4 Feb 1921 - 4 Feb 2006)
Friedan was a feminist crusader and author whose The Feminine Mystique in 1963 ignited the postwar American myth of suburban women's domestic fulfillment.
Bettye Naomi Goldstein was born in Peoria, Illinois, the daughter of a Russian immigrant who built a small street-corner collar-button business into a prosperous downtown jewelry store. Her mother, often described as being imperious, was an editor of the women's page of the local newspaper before giving up her job to marry and have children.
At Smith College, she received her bachelor's degree in 1942, dropping the "e" in her first name and accepting a fellowship to the University of California, Berkeley, for graduate work in psychology. There, she studied with Erik Erikson, winning a second fellowship that would allow her to have earned a doctorate. But the young physicist she was dating disapproved, and she not only turned down the fellowship but also the physicist, first returning home to Peoria before moving to New York City's Greenwich Village.
In New York, she worked as an editor at The Federated Press, then in 1946 became a reporter for U.E. News, a publication for the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America. Upon becoming pregnant with her second child, she was fired by that left-leaning group.
In 1947 she married Carl Friedan, a theater director who became an advertising executive. The two divorced in 1969 after having three children: Daniel, Emily, and Jonathan. In her memoir, Life So Far (2000), she accused Friedan of being physically abusive, giving her black eyes that she hid with make-up when being interviewed publicly. He called the charges a "complete fabrication."
The Feminine Mystique (1963. 1984) attacked the popular notion that women could find fulfillment only through childbearing and housewifery. The book became a bestseller despite arriving during a newspaper printers' strike. Reviews of the book ranged "from bewildered to outraged to cautiously laudatory," wrote Margalit Fox in Friedan's New York Times front-page obituary. Its publisher, W. W. Norton & Co., sold more than three million copies by the year 2000, and the book has been translated into many languages.
With a group of colleagues in 1966, Friedan founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), remaining its president until 1970. At the group's Women's Strike for Equality in 1970, tens of thousands of women marched down Fifth Avenue, with Friedan in the lead. Before the march, she made the point of lunching at Whyte's, a downtown restaurant that formerly had been open only to men.
In 1969, she denounced lesbians as a “lavender menace,” for which comment she apologized in 1977 at their Houston conference.
The First Women's Bank and Trust Company, which she helped found in 1973, was an unsuccessful venture. Similarly, her speeches were insufficient to secure passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Some of her most vocal critics were women who disliked her abrasiveness, Fox's obituary reported, for "she could be thin-skinned and imperious, subject to screaming fits of temperament." Others criticized her for overlooking the concerns of minorities, lesbians, and the poor, calling her retrograde for insisting that women could, and should, live in collaborative partnership with men.
A biography by Judith Hennessee, Betty Friedan, Her Life (1999), suggests that Friedan’s abrasiveness has always been part of her problem. Her marriage was an unhappy one, complete with physical fights in which she was punched or pushed down. She is seen by some as the victim of sexism, anti-Semitism, and taunts about her sterotypically big nose. Others, however, have been inspired by her exhorting women to free themselves of their own crippling ideas of themselves. Judith Shulevitz, a senior editor at Slate in a review of the Hennessee work (The New York Times, 9 May 1999), mentions that today Friedan is “mostly written off as obsolete - too bourgeois for left-wing feminists, too feminists for the family-values right and too kooky for everyone else.”
Upon her death, however, many held that she had helped arrange the death of the post-war American Ideal Woman, the wife with a neat hairstyle, wearer of sheer stockings, husband-helper, and (to keep herself smiling) dutiful pill-taker.
Although often described as being Jewish, Friedan in 1975 was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. She signed Humanist Manifesto II, having been influenced by Abraham Maslow.
When nominated as one of Council for Secular Humanism’s Laureates in the International Academy of Humanism, she accepted, saying that unfortunately feminism, liberalism, emancipation, and humanism are still dirty words in many parts of the U.S. In 1988, Friedan addressed the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo. Friedan was on the editorial board of The Humanist.
At a 6 February 2006 memorial, held at the Riverside Memorial Chapel in New York City, several hundred mourners smiled as eulogizers told jokes about her while brushing aside tears. Her son, Jonathan, said that on his eighth-grade school trip to Washington, he saw his mother chained to the gates of the White House. Others described the acerbic and fiery Friedan, NOW co-founder Muriel Fox saying, "I truly believe that Betty Friedan was the most influential woman, not only of the 20th century, but of the second millennium." Raphael, 23, one of her nine grandchildren, remembered her as being "the coolest grandmother a young guy like me could ask for. Betty didn't tiptoe through life - she stomped. Wherever Betty is now, she's giving them hell." On the plain, wooden coffin arranged for by her family was a Star of David.
BOOKS BY BETTY FRIEDAN
- Friedan, Betty. Fountain of Age, Paperback Edition, Simon and Schuster 1994
- Friedan, Betty. It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement, Hardcover Edition, Random House Inc. 1978
- Friedan, Betty. Life So Far, Paperback Edition, Simon and Schuster 2000
- Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique, Hardcover Edition, W.W. Norton and Company Inc. 1963
- Friedan, Betty. The Second Stage, Paperback Edition, Abacus 1983
