Farewell to Two Feminists
Even as Atlanta buries Coretta Scott King, however, New York and Washington will honor the life of Betty Friedan. Her book, The Feminine Mystique, is often said to have launched"second wave feminism." It's still in print. Friedan's claim was that
The feminine mystique was a phony deal sold to women that left them unfulfilled, suffering from"the problem that has no name" and seeking a solution in tranquilizers and psychoanalysis.
"A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, `Who am I, and what do I want out of life?' She mustn't feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children," Friedan said.
I wouldn't be the first historian to say that Friedan's claims were far reaching, but based on the experience of an important, but narrow, demographic among American women. Recall the year in which The Feminine Mystique was published: 1963. The civil rights movement had yet to achieve its most important national legislative goals. For African American women, the problem did have a name – Jim Crow – and they'd never had the luxury of"selfish and neurotic" fantasies about"goals of her own." There were families to house and feed, even as you fought class and racial discrimination.
In his fine review of Taylor Branch's At Canaan's Edge, Anthony Lewis helps to contextualize the claims of civil rights and feminism in 1963.
Southerners had added a ban on sex discrimination to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a way to mock the bill, and at first it was widely treated as a joke. A Page 1 article in The New York Times in 1965 raised the question whether executives must let a"dizzy blonde" drive a tugboat or pitch for the Mets. In 1966 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission wondered, in a newsletter, whether an employer could be penalized for refusing to hire"a woman as a dog warden."
It further helps to contextualize things to recall that, when Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, Georgia's governor, Lester Maddox, gave no thought to allowing the Nobel Prize winner to lie in state in the capitol building. Rather, even as King's mule-drawn funeral cortege moved through the nearby streets, he kept the state flag, with its Confederate stars and bars, flying high.
But there's another story to be told about Coretta Scott King and feminism. When I was affiliated with the Martin Luther King Papers Project, I urged Mrs. King to follow her book, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., with a second one, My Life since Martin Luther King, Jr. My three autographed copies of the former, which was still sold at an astonishingly low price of $6.95 in the 1980s, just went way up in value. She was still working on the latter with a California ghost-writer when she died, twenty years later. There are glimpses of her story in Thomas R. Peake's Keeping the Dream Alive: A History of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from King to the Nineteen-Eighties, but it's a chapter in late twentieth century feminism that remains to be told.
In the days and years immediately after Dr. King's death, the male leadership at SCLC was willing, even anxious, for Mrs. King to continue to play a role in its work – a figurehead and fund-raising role. Coretta was one prodigious fundraiser. But the male-chauvinists at SCLC made clear that she would not have an influential voice in policy-making. So, Mrs. King took her name and fundraising skills elsewhere to found the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Inc. The Center has never lived up to what many of us hoped that it might be and her quarrelsome children have made a scandal of the place, but you can't tell me that Coretta Scott King didn't live out a mind of her own. Thanks to Chris Richardson for the tip.