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Who Was Betty Friedan?

by Christopher Chantrill
February 05, 2006 at 8:46 pm

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THE 1963 BESTSELLER The Feminine Mystique is credited with starting the Second Wave of feminism that transformed the relations between men and women in the second half of the twentieth century. On Saturday February 4, her 85th birthday, its author Betty Friedan died of congestive heart failure. Writes Margalit Fox in The New York Times about the 1963 plea of this educated suburban housewife from Rockland County, NY:

With its impassioned 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... Ms. Friedan charted the gradual metamorphosis of the American woman from the independent, career-minded New Woman of the 1920s and ’30s into the vacant, aproned housewife of the postwar years.

By 1966 Betty Friedan had founded the National Organization for Women, and the postwar feminist movement was running at full flood.

Friedan’s idea for the book came from a survey she conducted at the 15th reunion of her class at Smith College. She found among her educated women classmates a “nameless, aching dissatisfaction,” a discovery that “forced her to confront the painful limitations of her own suburban idyll.” But in The Second Stage published in 1981 Friedan seemed to retreat from her Mystique argument, writing that “The equality we fought for isn’t livable, isn’t workable, isn’t comfortable in the terms that structured our battle.”

So who was Betty Friedan? The suburban housewife, the feminist activist, or the revisionist? In Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique academic Daniel Horowitz revealed that Friedan was not indeed the simple suburban housewife she had advertised herself to be. In his review of Horowitz’s book conservative activist David Horowitz (no relation) wrote that as

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... 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.”

The (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-2026461,00.htm) London Times agrees. “For 20 years before her book appeared, she had worked as a journalist for union and left-wing newspapers and magazines and campaigned for a number of radical causes.”

Understandably, Smith graduate Friedan wanted to appeal to her readers as everywoman. But was she right about life in suburbia? What do real suburban women think about living in suburbia?

In Men and Marriage published in 1986 George Gilder reported that sociologists find that women “deeply enjoy suburban living.” Researching the lives of suburban Chicagoans, sociologist Herbert J. Gans found that “only 10 percent of suburban women reported frequent loneliness or boredom.” Helen Znaniecki Lopata found that

suburban housewives, by a significant margin, were more likely than working women to be using their education in their lives, to be reading widely and curiously, to be maintaining close and varied friendships, and to be involved in community affairs.

But throughout the last generation public policy in the western world has assumed that women are imprisoned in cages out in the suburbs aching to be freed into the satisfactions of paid employment and a career. Yet even feminist Maureen Dowd in Are Men Necessary? has admitted that high-status educated women, the women whose marriages are advertised in The New York Times Sunday Style section, are turning overwhelmingly away from careers and towards full-time motherhood.

Betty Friedan is survived by three children and nine grandchildren. She wrote “The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own. There is no other way.”

But many of the women inspired by her book and the movement she helped to create have found themselves childless on the wrong side of fifty and discovered that they really wanted children after all. Which is more important for a woman: to create children or find herself by creative work of her own?

Would it make a difference to a woman if she knew that Friedan was not an ordinary suburban housewife after all? Or would she have come to think, following researcher Lopata, that “the role of a housewife provides her a base for a multi-faceted life, an opportunity few other vocational roles allow, because they are tied down to single organizational structures and goals?” Would she decide to live a life, like Friedan, in which creative work could wait until after she had started a family?

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate. 
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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