Betty Friedan,
Philosopher of Feminism,
Dies at 85
By MARGALIT FOX,
NYTimes on the Web, February 4, 2006
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Susana Raab for The New York Times
As a
founder and first president of the National Organization for Women
in 1966, Ms. Friedan staked out positions that seemed extreme at the
time. |
Betty Friedan, the feminist crusader
and author whose searing first book, "The Feminine Mystique," ignited the
contemporary women's movement in 1963 and in so doing permanently transformed
the social fabric of the United States and countries around the world, died
yesterday, her 85th birthday, at her home in Washington.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said Emily Bazelon, a family
spokeswoman.
With its impassioned yet clear-eyed analysis of the issues that affected women's
lives in the decades after World War II -- including enforced domesticity,
limited career prospects and, as chronicled in later editions, the campaign for
legalized abortion -- "The Feminine Mystique" is widely regarded as one of the
most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century. Published by W.W.
Norton & Company, the book had sold more than three million copies by the year
2000 and has been translated into many foreign languages.
For decades a familiar presence on television and the lecture circuit, Ms.
Friedan, with her short stature, round figure, protuberant nose and deeply
hooded eyes, looked for much of her adult life like a "combination of Hermione
Gingold and Bette Davis," as Judy Klemesrud wrote in The New York Times Magazine
in 1970.
"The Feminine Mystique" made Ms. Friedan world famous. It also made her
one of the chief architects of the women's liberation movement of the late
1960's and afterward, a sweeping social upheaval that harked back to the
suffrage campaigns of the turn of the century and would be called the feminism's
second wave.
In 1966, Ms. Friedan helped found the National Organization for Women, serving
as its first president. In 1969, she was a founder the National
Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, now known as Naral Pro-Choice
America. With Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug, she founded the Women's
Political Caucus in 1971.
Though in later years, some feminists dismissed Ms. Friedan's work as outmoded,
a great many aspects of modern life that seem routine today -- from unisex Help
Wanted ads to women in politics, medicine, the clergy and the military -- are
the direct result of the hard-won advances she helped women attain.
A brilliant student who had graduated summa cum laude from Smith College in
1942, Ms. Friedan had trained as a psychologist but had never pursued a career
in the field. When she wrote "The Feminine Mystique," she was a suburban
housewife and mother who supplemented her husband's income by writing freelance
articles for women's magazines.
Though Ms. Friedan was not generally considered a lyrical stylist, "The Feminine
Mystique," read today, is as mesmerizing as it was more than four decades ago:
"Gradually, without seeing it clearly for quite a while, I came to realize that
something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to lives their
lives today," Ms. Friedan wrote in the opening line of the preface. "I
sensed it first as a question mark in my own life, as a wife and mother of three
small children, half-guiltily, and therefore half-heartedly, almost in spite of
myself, using my abilities and education in work that took me away from home."
The words have the hypnotic pull of a fairy tale, and for the next 400 pages,
Ms. Friedan identifies, dissects and damningly indicts one of the most pervasive
folk beliefs of postwar American life: the myth of suburban women's domestic
fulfillment she came to call the feminine mystique.
Drawing on history, psychology, sociology and economics, as well as on
interviews she conducted with women across the country, Ms. Friedan charted the
gradual metamorphosis of the American woman from the independent, career-minded
New Woman of the 1920's and 30's into the vacant, aproned housewife of the
postwar years.
The portrait she painted was chilling. For a typical woman of the 1950's,
even a college-educated one, life centered almost exclusively on chores and
children. She cooked and baked and bandaged and chauffeured and laundered
and sewed. She did the mopping and the marketing and took her husband's
gray flannel suit to the cleaners. She was happy to keep his dinner warm
till he came wearily home from downtown.
The life she led, if educators, psychologists and the media were to be believed,
was the fulfillment of every women's most ardent dream. Yet she was
unaccountably tired, impatient with the children, craving something that neither
martial sex nor extramarital affairs could satisfy. Her thoughts sometimes
turned to suicide. She consulted a spate doctors and psychiatrists, who
prescribed charity work, bowling and bridge. If those failed, there were
always tranquilizers to get her through her day. A Nebraska housewife with
a Ph.D. in anthropology whom Ms. Friedan interviewed told her:
"A film made of any typical morning in my house would look like an old Marx
Brothers comedy. I wash the dishes, rush the older children off to school,
dash out in the yard to cultivate the chrysanthemums, run back in to make a
phone call about a committee meeting, help the youngest child build a
blockhouse, spend fifteen minutes skimming the newspapers so I can be
well-informed, then scamper down to the washing machines where my thrice-weekly
laundry includes enough clothes to keep a primitive village going for an entire
year. By noon I'm ready for a padded cell. Very little of what I've
done has been really necessary or important. Outside pressures lash me
though the day. Yet I look upon myself as one of the more relaxed
housewives in the neighborhood."
"The Feminine Mystique" began as a survey Ms. Friedan conducted in 1957 for the
15th reunion of her graduating class at Smith. It was intended to refute a
prevailing postwar myth: that higher education kept women from adapting to
their roles as wives and mothers. Judging from her own capable life, Ms.
Friedan expected her classmates to describe theirs as similarly well adjusted.
But what she discovered in the women's responses was something far more complex,
and more troubling -- a "nameless, aching dissatisfaction" that she would
famously call "the problem that has no name."
When Ms. Friedan sent the same questionnaire to graduates of Radcliff and other
colleges, and later interviewed scores of women personally, the results were the
same. The women's answers gave her the seeds of her book. They also
forced her to confront the painful limitations of her own suburban idyll.
Bettye Naomi Goldstein was born on Feb. 4, 1921, in Peoria, Ill. Her
father, Harry, was an immigrant from Russia who parlayed a street-corner
collar-button business into a prosperous downtown jewelry store. Her
gifted, imperious mother, Miriam, had been the editor of the women's page of the
local newspaper before giving up her job for marriage and children. Only
years later, when she was writing "The Feminine Mystique," did Ms. Friedan come
to see her mother's cold, critical demeanor as masking a deep bitterness at
giving up the work she loved.
Growing up brainy, Jewish, outspoken and, by the standards of the time,
unlovely, Bettye was ostracized. She was barred from the fashionable sororities
at her Peoria high school and rarely asked on dates. It was an experience,
she would later say, that made her identify with people on the margins of
society.
At Smith, she blossomed. For the first time, she could be as smart as she
wanted, as impassioned as she wanted and as loud as she wanted, and for four
happy years she was all those things. Betty received her bachelor's degree
in 1942 -- by that time she had dropped the final "e," which she considered an
affectation of her mother's -- and accepted a fellowship to the University of
California, Berkeley, for graduate work in psychology.
At Berkeley, she studied with the renowned psychologist Erik Erikson, among
others. She won a second fellowship, even more prestigious than the first,
that would allow her to continue for doctorate. But she was dating a young
physicist who felt threatened by her success. He pressured her to turn
down the fellowship, and she did, an experience she would later recount
frequently in interviews. She also turned down the physicist, returning
home to Peoria before moving to Greenwich Village in New York.
There, Ms. Friedan worked as an editor at The Federated Press, a small news
service that provided stories to labor newspapers nationwide. In 1946, she
took a job as a reporter with U.E. News, the weekly publication of the United
Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. In 1947, she married
Carl Friedan, a theater director who later became an advertising executive.
They started a family and moved to a rambling Victorian house in suburban
Rockland County, N.Y.
Ms. Friedan, whose marriage would end in divorce in 1969, is survived by their
three children, Daniel Friedan of Princeton, N.J.; Emily Friedan of Buffalo,
N.Y.; and Jonathan Friedan of Philadelphia; a brother, Harry Goldstein, of Palm
Springs, Calif., and Purchase, N.Y.; a sister, Amy Adams, of New York City; and
nine grandchildren.
"The Feminine Mystique" had the misfortune to appear during a newspaper
printers' strike. The reviews that appeared afterward ran the gamut from
bewildered to outraged to cautiously laudatory. Some critics also felt
that Ms. Friedan had insufficiently acknowledged her debt to Simone de Beauvoir,
whose 1949 book, "The Second Sex," dealt with many of the same issues.
Writing in The New York Times Book Review in April 1963, Lucy Freeman called
"The Feminine Mystique" a "highly readable, provocative book," but went on to
question its basic premise, writing, of Ms. Friedan:
"Sweeping generalities, in which this book necessarily abounds, may hold a
certain amount of truth but often obscure the deeper issues. It is
superficial to blame the 'culture' and its handmaidens, the women's magazines,
as she does. What is to stop a woman who is interested in national and
international affairs from reading magazines that deal with those subjects?
To paraphrase a famous line, 'The fault, dear Mrs. Friedan, is not in our
culture, but in ourselves.'"
Among readers, however, the response to the book was so overwhelming that Ms.
Friedan realized she needed more than words to address the condition of women's
lives. After moving back to Manhattan with her family, determined to start
a progressive organization that would be the equivalent, as she often said, of
an N.A.A.C.P. for women.
In 1966, Ms. Friedan and a group of colleagues founded the National Organization
for Women. She was its president until 1970. One of NOW's most
visible public actions was the Women's Strike For Equality, held on Aug. 26,
1970, in New York and in cities around the country. In New York, tens of
thousands of woman marched down Fifth Avenue, with Ms. Friedan in the lead.
(Before the march, she made a point of lunching at Whyte's a downtown restaurant
formerly open to men only.)
Carrying signs and banners ("Don't Cook Dinner -- Starve a Rat Tonight!"
"Don't Iron while the Strike Is Hot"), women of all ages, along with a number of
sympathetic men, marched joyfully down the street to cheering crowds. The
march ended with a rally in Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library,
with passionate speeches by Ms. Friedan, Ms. Steinem, Ms. Abzug and Kate
Millett. Not all of Ms. Friedan's ventures were as successful. The
First Women's Bank and Trust Company, which she helped found in 1973, is no
longer in business. Nor were even her indomitable presence and relentless
energy enough to secure passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Though widely respected as a modern-day heroine, Ms. Friedan was by no means
universally beloved, even -- or perhaps especially -- by members of the women's
movement. She was famously abrasive. She could be thin-skinned and
imperious, subject to screaming fits of temperament.
In the 1970's and afterward, some feminists criticized Ms. Friedan for focusing
almost exclusively on the concerns of middle-class married white women and
ignoring those of women of color, lesbians and the poor. Some called her
retrograde for insisting that women could, and should, live in collaborative
partnership with men.
Ms. Friedan's private life was also famously stormy. In her recent memoir,
"Life So Far" (Simon & Schuster, 2000), she accused her husband of being
physically abusive during their marriage, writing that he sometimes gave her
black eyes, which she concealed with make-up at public events and on television.
Mr. Friedan has repeatedly denied the accusations. In an interview with
Time magazine in 2000, shortly after the memoir's publication, he called Ms.
Friedan's account a "complete fabrication." He added: "I am the
innocent victim of a drive-by shooting by a reckless driver savagely aiming at
the whole male gender."
Ms. Friedan's other books include "It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's
Movement" (Random House, 1976); "The Second Stage" (Summit, 1981); and "The
Fountain of Age" (Simon & Schuster, 1993).
The recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, she was a visiting professor
at universities around the country, among them Columbia, Temple and the
University of Southern California. In recent years, Ms. Friedan was
associated with the Institute for Women and Work at Cornell University.
Despite all of her later achievements, Ms. Friedan would be forever known as the
suburban housewife who started a revolution with "The Feminine Mystique."
Rarely has a single book been responsible for such sweeping, tumultuous and
continuing social transformation.
The new society Ms. Friedan proposed, founded on the notion that men and women
were created equal, represented such a drastic upending of the prevailing social
norms that over the years to come, she would be forced to explain her position
again and again.
"Some people think I'm saying, 'Women of the world unite -- you have nothing to
lose but your men,'" she told Life magazine in 1963. "It's not true.
You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners."
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