A note on Betty Friedan
I wrote yesterday that I had mixed feelings about Friedan's legacy. On the one hand, there is no question that she deserves tremendous credit for helping launch the revival of the feminist movement in the 1960s, first with the extraordinary Feminine Mystique of 1963 and then with her pivotal role in founding the National Organization for Women three years later. It's impossible to imagine the modern feminist movement without her. As so many others have said, Friedan gave voice to an entire generation of women who had been told the greatest of lies, the lie that says that happiness is ultimately only found in a life lived for husbands and children. She exposed that lie beautifully, and helped millions of American women realize "Wait, I'm not the only one who feels this way." Plenty of women of my mother's generation still remember how amazed they were when they first read the Feminine Mystique, and realized that what they had thought of as their own personal dissatisfaction was, in fact, damn near universal.
But even in a time of tributes and accolades, we can't forget the "lavender menace", a term that Friedan infamously coined in 1969. Friedan, like a number of conservative feminists, saw her movement as calling for a reconfiguring of heterosexual relationships along more egalitarian lines. But throughout her life, she seemed bewildered by those women who shared her political commitments but did not share her romantic and sexual interest in men. Rather than build feminist solidarity between lesbians and straight women, Friedan sought to purge NOW of lesbians. She feared for the future of the movement, but she also -- according to those who knew her -- seemed genuinely and persistently unnerved by queer folks.
Friedan also quarreled with most of the later leaders of the feminist movement, like Gloria Steinem and Patricia Ireland. Her 1981 manifesto, The Second Stage, was a startling statement of essentialism (the notion that women are, biologically speaking, more inclined to be nurturing and relational than men). A long excerpt from that book is here. She wanted the movement to de-emphasize sexual issues, for fear that they were inflaming the right. She wrote: ...the sexual politics that dis-torted the sense of priorities of the women's movement during the 1970's made it easy for the so-called Moral Majority to lump E.R.A. with homosexual rights and abortion into one explosive package of licentious, family-threatening sex.
To be fair, it was written right after the election of Ronald Reagan, and Friedan was trying to reconfigure her movement to be successful in a more conservative era. From a political standpoint, she made some wise suggestions, but she also managed to alienate an exceptional number of young feminists, particularly those who did not share her color, her affluence, and her sexual identity.
In the end, I can't help but think about the death just ten months ago of Andrea Dworkin, another -- very different -- icon of the feminist movement. Dworkin, like Friedan, quarreled with and horrified a number of erstwhile allies. Indeed, Andrea was almost a mirror image of Betty Friedan: almost everything Friedan embraced, Andrea rejected. Dworkin was so eager to include the marginalized and the wounded that she frightened folks with her powerful rhetoric; Friedan was so eager not to frighten middle America that she tried, time and again, to purge the feminist movement of its more radical voices. In different but oddly similar ways, both women ended up on the outs with most of the contemporary leadership of the women's movement. And yet the feminist movement was better for their work, their writing, and, perhaps, even their passionate, devoted and often curmudgeonly criticism from the sidelines.