Profile of a Feminist
This issue of Samyukta gives a profile of Betty Friedan in its regular series on major feminists.
FEMINIST MATRIARCH: BETTY
FRIEDAN - A PROFILE
ESTHER JAYANTHI RAJ
ABSTRACT---At eighty today, Betty Friedan is the grand old lady of the feminist movement.Born in Peoria, she was educated at Smith'scollege, where she developed herinterest in political activism. She worked as a labour journalist and participatedin radical movements in her youth. Her books awakened women to new possibilities of individual self fulfilment. An indomitable personality, Friedan is often credited with launching the second phase of the women's liberation movement with her much acclaimed book, The Feminine Mystique.
“I was certainly not a feminist then - none of us, were a bit interested in women’s rights.”
( Friedan, quoted in Horowitz 6 )
The year was 1949. Pregnant with her second child, a woman labor journalist working at UE was told that her pregnancy was her fault and that the Newspaper Guild for which she was working was unwilling to honor its commitment to grant pregnancy leave. The UE was the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America, the most radical union in post war America, which Ronald Schatz, the historian has described as the largest communist led institution of any kind in the U.S. It had a strong ideological commitment to gender equality. The woman journalist, with over a decade’s experience in protest
movements called an urgent meeting. No one raised their hands in support. The women were silent and embarrassed: the men unco-operative and uncomprehending. “ It was my own fault, getting pregnant again, a personal matter, not something you should take to the union. There was no word in 1949 for ‘sex discrimination’ “ ( It Changed My Life 6, 8 - 9). The realization dawned that Leftist organizations and unions were also riddled with male supremacist prejudice and discrimination. It was the first personal stirring of her own feminism. The woman lost her job. A man took her place. Betty Friedan, the feminist was
born.
The freedom to choose one’s own destiny has been the theme of women’s struggle for liberation both during the first wave and second wave phases of the feminist movement. In the 18 th century, female thinkers notably Mary Wollstonecraft had shaped the women’s movement and put forward ‘feminist’ views on women’s social and political status. This first wave signalled the beginnings of a mass movement. Their goal of formal equality between the two sexes, was probably achieved through the process of enfranchisement. But formal equality without the means to implement the decisions about one’s own life, remains an illusion as Friedan painfully discovered. Political and civic structures had an inbuilt propensity for institutionalizing gender inequality. The second wave feminists realized that women had to reconceive the potential for women’s liberation outside the parameters of a political discourse and that nothing short of a social revolution could solve women’s continued oppression. Thus the pioneers of the second wave feminist activities like Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer challenged the dominant ideological representations of femininity, which ensured female subordination and made it endemic in all social relations.
Betty Friedan became a celebrity in the 1960’s with the publication of her book, The Feminine Mystique, a powerful, passionate analysis of the position of white middle class women in western society. The book, now regarded as the catalytic work of the women’s movement heralded a new dynamism of feminist thought. The scope of her analysis of the problem that had no name, endeared her to thousands of educated housewives, who had felt dehumanized by the drudgery of domestic labor. She had voiced their unarticulated alienation. She had realized that there was “a strong discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform” (The Feminine Mystique 9). As Eva Figes, the British feminist who concurred with Friedan argued “women, presented with an image in a mirror, has danced to that image in a
hypnotic trance” (Qtd in Whelehan 36). The problem that had no name was a sense of incompleteness that all women felt. It was caused by a society that did not permit women to gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities
as human beings. Reading responses of college classmates to a questionnaire, in anticipation of their fifteenth reunion in 1957, Friedan understood that this dissatisfaction was shared by her suburban peers. Friedan decided to voice her problem when her articles to magazines were rejected. She claimed that she had been so trapped by the feminine mystique that she had worried over neglecting her children. Despite being a free lance writer she had written ‘ housewife ‘ in the census form asking for her occupation, as she felt guilty about her work. She had also identified a pivotal moment in her life when she had turned away from a promising career in psychology as she felt she would end up as an old maid. What her book did not reveal was the fact that she had reinvented herself in her book for some reason. She had distanced herself from her radical views and had portrayed herself as a victim of the feminine mystique. However, the past had a different story to tell.
Betty Naomi Goldstein was born of Jewish parents in class divided Peoria on Feb. 4, 1921. Her father, Harry Goldstein was a rich merchant who owned a jewellery store. The mother Miriam had voluntarily given up her job as an editor of the local paper to raise a family. Betty grew up as a bright, self - confident young girl with dreams of going to college and having a family. Encouraged by her mother to enter the journalism profession Betty began writing for her school newspaper. She entered Smith College at Massachusetts in 1938. She studied Gestalt psychology and Kurt Koffka. She took courses from James Gibson, an advocate of trade unions, and Dorothy W. Douglas who was well known for her radical views. Slowly she developed sympathy for Marxist ideas. In 1941 she participated in a writer’s workshop at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a school well known for its Communist leanings. She served as editor in chief of the campus newspaper and published critiques on restrictions on student life, criticised teaching of professors, challenged curbs on publishing articles, opposed fascism and commented on related topics. She helped to organize workers into a union. When she left Smith in 1942 with a degree in psychology, she had developed her radical consciousness and established herself as a protest writer, linking journalism to political activities. She had become a determined advocate of trade unions, a defender of free speech, an opponent of fascism, a sceptic of all authority a questioner of social privilege and a herald of progressive social change. She also dropped the ‘e’ from her first name “perhaps a symbolic statement that she was no longer a girl form Peoria” (Horowitz 11).
Betty joined graduate school at Berkeley, University of California and just when it looked as if she was going to have a bright career in psychology she left. Her reasons for leaving are not clear. In 1963 she wrote that the feminine mystique had claimed one of its first victims as she declined the fellowship due to her boy friend’s insistence. A 1943 article in the Peoria paper reported that “she decided she wanted to work in the labor movement - on the labor press” (Qtd in Horowitz 11).
Betty Goldstein worked as a labor journalist for nine years from 1943, first as staff writer for Federated Press and later for UE News, both left wing news services. These years provided a seed bed for her later feminism. She wrote articles that supported dreams of African Americans, that criticized discrimination of women and large capitalist business houses. She wrote the pamphlet “ UE fights for Women Workers “ where she maintained that fighting exploitation of women was man’s business too. She also highlighted the even more shocking situation of African American Women and set forth a program - a prescription for a gender blind workplace. At this time of her life the fight for justice for women was inseparable from the more general struggle to secure rights for African Americans and workers.
Until 1952 Betty had published all her articles and pamphlets under the name Betty Goldstein though she had married Carl Friedan in 1947 (Carl Friedan was a returning vet who switched careers from theatre to advertising and later public relations). But in 1955 she emerged as Betty Friedan, a writer for women’s magazines. From an employee of a union, writing radical political articles she had suddenly shifted to a free lance writer for mass circulation women’s magazines. But her keen interest in the working class and in union activity was not forgotten. Living in a cosmopolitan neighborhood at Parkway village in Queens she edited The Parkway Villager, which articulated a progressive position on a wide range of issues. Her articles invariably encouraged individual striving, non conformism and women’s political activism. In 1952 she led an extended protest and rent strike. In 1953 she read Simon de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and stated that from it she learned “my own existentialism” (The Feminine Mystique 10). Meanwhile she had also become a mother. Between 1948 and 1956 she had three children. In 1956 the family moved to the suburbs where Friedan fought against terrible odds
to combine motherhood and career in a tension filled marriage marked by financial difficulties and even violence.
All this Friedan chose to keep secret in 1963. Instead she maintained that she had eagerly read fashion magazines, spent money on clothes and had lost all interest in political activity. She gave the impression that she had lived in the bliss of domesticity and had generally succumbed to the feminine mystique, albeit reluctantly. Her critics too ignored her past. Donald Meyer, the historian of feminism skipped over Friedan’s years as a radical labor journalist and harped on how Friedan was “the exemplary victim of the feminine mystique” (Qtd in Horowitz 8). David Halberstan in 1993 covered the nine years of Freidan’s career with a casual statement that Betty Goldstein had worked as a reporter for a left wing paper.
The book however raised several issues. The malaise of educated white affluent housewives who had neither career nor political ambition was different from the raw suffering of African American woman who worked under inhuman conditions both at home and in the workplace. Gerda Lerner, one of the leading historians of women, though excited about the book, wrote to Friedan in 1963:
I have one reservation .. you address yourself solely to the problemof middle class college educated women. This approach was one
of the shortcomings of the suffrage movement for many years and
has, I believe, retarded the general advance of women. Working
women, especially Negro women, labor not only under the
disadvantages imposed by the feminine mystique, but under the
more pressing disadvantages of economic discrimination. To leave
them out of consideration of the problem or to ignore the
contributions they can make toward its solution, is something we
simply cannot afford to do (Qtd in Horowitz 22).
Repeated attacks on her lack of interest in the working class forced Friedan herself to rewrite her history and reveal the radical past that shaped her 1963 feminism. In an autobiographical article in the 1976 publication, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement Friedan revealed how she had worked in the vanguard of the working revolution and how she had protested against “the grubby economic underside of American reality.” However the dynamics of her shifts in commitment from the working class to the affluent middle class is still not clear. Why was her past kept a secret? Was it a part of her rhetorical strategy? Was it for complete identification with her subject? Was it because the revelation of her pro - communist stance would undercut the book’s impact ? Was it a part of a long term deradicalization ? Or was it unintentional? Perhaps Friedan herself was not so sure. “In a certain sense it was almost accidentalcoincidental that I wrote The Feminine Mystique and in another sense my whole life had prepared me to write that book: all the pieces of my own life came together for the first time in the writing of it” (Qtd in Horowitz 1).
The focus on women, especially the more affluent middle class, which replaced Friedan’s focus on unions is in line with the legacy of such liberal thinkers as Mary Wollstonecraft, and John Stuart Mill. Liberal feminists speak the language of liberty, rights and legal equality and they claim that rationality is potentially genderless. They agree that woman too possess the innate capacity for rational thought and action but nurture makes all the difference. The institutional and ideological means of oppression over the centuries have been the same. Friedan’s portrait of the bored educated housewife echoes Wollstonecraft’s domestic angel who is not given the opportunity to realize her full potential; Friedan also characterizes the effect of nurture rather than nature upon women as sex role conditioning. The Feminine Mystique is thus a part of the consciousness raising tradition related to efforts of women to reconstitute their identities. The subtext to Friedan’s epoch-making book is that ultimately the burden for progress lies with the actions of individual women. She assumes that women should continue their domestic responsibilities even as they try to find creative work outside their homes. Rosemary Tong critiques Friedan’s argument and observes:
The Feminine Mystique failed to consider just how difficult it wouldbe for even privileged women to combine marriage and motherhood
with a career unless major structural changes were made within,
as well as outside the family. Like Wollstonecraft, [Harriet] Taylor
and [John Stuart] Mill before her, Friedan sent women out into the
public realm without summoning men into the private domain (Qtd
in Whelehan 37).
The impetus and inspiration derived from liberal feminist writings is also evident in the statement of aims of the National Organization for Women (NOW), a civil rights group which Friedan helped to found in 1966. It states that “NOW is dedicated to the proposition that women first and foremost are human beings.” It is the age old liberal plea for entry into humanity. The Organization, with Friedan as its first president tried to unify the loosely structured women’s movement. Campaigns were held to end sex discrimination, to establish childcare centers, to encourage representation of women in government, to legalizeabortion and several other reforms. Though Friedan stepped down from presidentship in 1970, she continued to be the foremost spokesperson for women’s rights in the seventies. On the 50 th anniversary of women’s suffrage she organized a women’s strike for equality. She led campaigns for ratification of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. constitution. In 1971 she founded the National Women’s Political Caucus (N.W.P.C) “to make policy not coffee”. In 1973 she became director of First Women’s Bank and Trust Company. In the same year she declared that full equality for women would restructure all our institutions. The Humanist Award for the year 1975 was conferred on her. Her liberal leanings were markedly apparent when she attacked the disrupters of the women’s movement who advocated lesbianism and hatred of men. At the First World Conference on Women in Mexico in 1975, where most of the official delegates were men, she organized a march for women’s rights and a global network of women was born.
In 1981 Friedan ushered in a second stage to the feminist movement. In her book The Second Stage which speaks of new challenges, she identified a feminist mystique “, the result of a reactive stance taken by women. The cost of feminist reaction against gender discrimination was the compulsion that many women felt to abandon their human needs for hearth and home. This intensified the backlash against the women’s movement. Opponents of feminism effectively used defense of traditional family values as a platform to attack the Equal Rights Amendment. Moreover, an unarticulated malaise also existed among women who combined marriage, children and career. There seemed to be only dead ends for them. Her own marriage had broken up in 1967 largely due to maladjustment. Feminist ideology too had taken a decisive gynocentric turn and the emphasis was on women as a political class whose interests were at odds with interests of men. Friedan called for a joint effort by men and women to redefine their strategies. Men could aid the emancipation of women and there should be greater flexibility and adaptability. In a NOW convocation on “New Leadership” (April 1981) Friedan called for “a coalition of interests of not women alone and certainly not women against men”, to work for the larger interests of the country.