Betty Friedan

From New World Encyclopedia

Betty Friedan, 1960

Betty Friedan (February 4, 1921 – February 4, 2006) was an American feminist, activist and writer. Her book, The Feminine Mystique written in 1963, is considered by many to have given important impetus to the women's rights movement. It was a bestseller in 1964, the year of the passage of the Civil Rights Act and sold over three million copies its first year. Her book, geared to the suburban housewife of post-World War II America, and based on a survey she took of her Smith colleauges, told of women's disaffection with societal roles prescribed for them. In an era when a woman could choose to stay at home or have a career - two paths that were normally deemed mutually exclusive - Friedan's book opened the way for women to re-think their places in their family, community, and the world-at large.

Early life and Education

Friedan was born Bettye Naomi Goldstein on February 4, 1921 in Peoria, Illinois. Her father, Harry Goldstein, owned a jewelry shop and her mother, Miriam Horowitz Goldstein, quit her job as a women's page editor for a newspaper when she became pregnant with Betty in order to become a housewife. When Betty's mother took over running the shop, after her husband fell ill, Betty noted that she seemed happier and more gratified then when she was an at-home mother. Although the family was well-off, her mother's frustration and unhappiness at being at home, coupled with the fact that the family was Jewish, and did not fit into the cultural mileu of Peoria, led to Betty's feelings of isolation and anger as a teenager.

Betty channeled her anger into seeking social change. She became active in Marxist and Jewish radical circles. Eventually, she became disillusioned with ideologies,like communism that did not fit with her experience. She said in her biography, "But in the America where I lived, abstractions of that world revolution of the masses didn't seem all that real, didn't really work, didn't actually change real life. But later this struggle to make sense of it all made me wary of any tinge of authoritarianism in the women's movement and the danger of perversion of feminism by its own extremists."

After high school, she left Peoria and attended Smith College, where she edited a campus newspaper and graduated summa cum laude in 1942. After graduation, she spent a year at the University of California, Berkeley doing graduate work in psychology but declined a PHD fellowship for further study, leaving to work as a journalist for leftist and union publications. Turning down the fellowship, partly due to lack of confidence about her own path in life as a woman, was a decision that she came to regret. However, later when Friedan was doing research for her groundbreaking book, The Feminine Mystique she utilized her background in psychology, along with her knowledge of statisitcs and surveys, to bring a keen power of observation to her writing.

Career

In 1952, Friedan was fired from the union newspaper UE News when she was pregnant with her second child. This experience helped to shape her views about the importance of securing rights for women in terms of employment opportunities.

For her 15th college reunion in 1957, Friedan conducted a survey of Smith College graduates, focusing on their education, their subsequent experiences and satisfaction with their current lives. Her article on the survey, which lamented the lost potential of her female classmates and present-day female college students, was submitted to women's magazines in 1958. It was rejected by all editors to whom it was submitted, even after Friedan rewrote portions at the request of some of the editors.

The Feminine Mystique

Friedan then decided to rework and expand the article into a book. The book was published in 1963, and was titled The Feminine Mystique. The book depicts the roles of women in industrial societies, and in particular the full-time homemaker role, which Friedan saw as unfulfilling for some women. The book became an overnight bestseller, and was said to have significantly spurred the second wave of feminism and the women's movement. In 1964 it was number one on the non-fiction bestseller list and sold over three million copies.

The book instigated reaction throughout the country from both men and women. Although controversial, many women wrote to Ms. Friedan suggesting that her book helped them to make positive choices in their lives which had, heretofore, been experiencing stagnation. As to her rationale for writing it, the book's preface reads:

"...my answers may disturb the experts and women alike for they imply social change. But there would be no sense in my writing this book at all if I did not believe that women can affect society as well as be affected by it; that, in the end, a woman, as a man, has the power to choose, and to make her own heaven or hell."

NOW and the Women's Movement

Friedan co-founded the US National Organization for Women with 27 other women and men. She wrote its statement of purpose with Pauli Murray, the first African-American female Episcopal priest. Friedan was its first president, serving from 1966 to 1970. NOW statement on Friedan's death

Controversy over gay and lesbian rights

One of the most influential feminists of the late 20th century, Friedan opposed "equating feminism with lesbianism." She later acknowledged that she had been "very square" and was uncomfortable about homosexuality

NARAL and abortion

Friedan helped found NARAL (originally National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws) in 1969 together with Bernard Nathanson and Larry Lader. Unlike Nathanson, she always remained a staunch advocate of legal abortion.

World travels, world figures

Indirha Gandhi, the Pope, Simone B.

Marriage and divorce

She married Carl Friedan, a theatre-producer, in 1947 (the "e" was dropped after they were married). Betty Friedan continued to work after marriage (at a time when most women did not), first as a paid employee and after 1952, as a freelance journalist. The Friedans had three children, Emily, Daniel, and Jonathan. One of their sons, Daniel Friedan, is a noted theoretical physicist. Betty and Carl divorced in May 1969. Betty claimed in her memoir, Life So Far (2000), that Carl had beaten her during their marriage; friends such as Dolores Alexander recalled having to cover up black eyes from Carl's abuse in time for press conferences (Brownmiller 1999, p. 70). Carl Friedan denied abusing Betty in an interview with TIME magazine shortly after the book was published, describing the claim as a "complete fabrication" [1], and asserted that the bruises Betty took at his hands were from self-defense during fights[citation needed]. Betty later said on Good Morning America, "I almost wish I hadn't even written about it, because it's been sensationalized out of context. My husband was no wife-beater, and I was no passive victim of a wife-beater. We fought a lot, and he was bigger than me." Carl Friedan died in December, 2005.

quotation|{{Betty Friedan "changed the course of human history almost single-handedly." Her ex-husband, Carl Friedan, believes this; Betty believed it too. This belief was the key to a good deal of Betty's behaviour; she would become breathless with outrage if she didn't get the deference she thought she deserved. Though her behaviour was often tiresome, I figured that she had a point. Women don't get the respect they deserve unless they are wielding male-shaped power; if they represent women they will be called "love" and expected to clear up after themselves. Betty wanted to change that for ever.|Germaine Greer|"The Betty I knew," The Guardian (February 7, 2006)}}

Indeed, Carl has been quoted as saying "She changed the course of history almost single-handedly. It took a driven, superaggressive, egocentric, almost lunatic dynamo to rock the world the way she did. Unfortunately, she was that same person at home, where that kind of conduct doesn't work. She simply never understood this." [Ginsberg L., "Ex-hubby fires back at feminist icon Betty," New York Post, 05 July 2000]

Friedan died at her home in Washington, D.C. on February 4, 2006 of congestive heart failure on her 85th birthday.


Quotations

The problem that has no name — which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities — is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.
- Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 1963. NY: Dell Publ., 1974.
Men weren't really the enemy - they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.
-Betty Friedan [2]
The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban housewife 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 ask even of herself the silent question: Is this all?
-Betty Friedan [3]
If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based.
-Betty Friedan [4]

Further reading

  • Blau, Justine. Betty Friedan: Feminist (Women of Achievement), Paperback Edition, Chelsea House Publications 1990 ISBN 1-55546-653-2
  • Bohannon, Lisa Frederikson. Women's Work: The Story of Betty Friedan, Hardcover Edition, Morgan Reynolds Publishing 2004 ISBN 1-931798-41-9
  • Brownmiller, Susan. In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution The Dial Press 1999 ISBN 0-385-31486-8
  • Friedan, Betty. Fountain of Age, Paperback Edition, Simon and Schuster 1994 ISBN 0-671-898531
  • Friedan, Betty. It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement, Hardcover Edition, Random House Inc. 1978 ISBN 0-394-46398-6
  • Friedan, Betty. Life So Far, Paperback Edition, Simon and Schuster 2000 ISBN 0-684-80789-0
  • Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique, Hardcover Edition, W.W. Norton and Company Inc. 1963 ISBN 0393084361
  • Friedan, Betty. The Second Stage, Paperback Edition, Abacus 1983 ASIN B000BGRCRC
  • Horowitz, Daniel. "Betty Friedan and the Making of "The Feminine Mystique", University of Massachusetts Press, 1998, ISBN 1-55849-168-6
  • Hennessee, Judith. Betty Friedan: Her Life, Hardcover Edition, Random House 1999 ISBN 0-679-43203-5
  • Henry, Sondra. Taitz, Emily. Betty Friedan: Fighter For Women's Rights, Hardcover Edition, Enslow Publishers 1990 ISBN 0-89490-292-X
  • Meltzer, Milton. Betty Friedan: A Voice For Women's Rights, Hardcover Edition, Viking Press 1985 ISBN 0-670-80786-9
  • Sherman, Janann. Interviews With Betty Friedan, Paperback Edition, University Press of Mississippi 2002 ISBN 1-57806-480-5
  • Taylor-Boyd, Susan. Betty Friedan: Voice For Women's Rights, Advocate of Human Rights, Hardcover Edition, Gareth Stevens Publishing 1990 ISBN 0-8368-0104-0

Obituaries

External links

Credits

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