The Book that Changed America and the Damn Pushy Woman Who Wrote It

Betty Fridanon book tour to promothe The Feminine Mystique.

 

On February 19, 1963 W.W. Norton and Company issued Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.   That book, along with the nearly contemporaneous arrival of the Pill as a reliable and affordable form of contraception, ushered in the social and political movement sometimes called the Second Wave of Feminism.

With astonishing speed—less than a decade—that movement would embrace and personally empower millions of women with local level consciousness raising groups, sophisticated national organizations, political operations, and a network of publications.  Long held assumptions about home, family, work, and other issues would be turned on their heads.  It was in a real sense a revolution.

56 years later the spasmodic eruption of the extreme right wing in this country, empowered by the election of Republicans to national and state level legislative power and Donald Trump to his golden toilet throne  has turned its attention to undoing that revolution.  That is what the current uproar over contraception and abortion is really all about—attacking the gains women felt so confident in that they thought they could never be challenged again.  About 35% of the American population wants to turn back the clock to what they imagine was a safer world where everyone knew their place and “morals” ruled.  They want to recreate the very environment that Friedan rebelled against.

Friedan was born Bettye Naomi Goldstein in 1921 to a Jewish family in overwhelmingly Goyish Peoria, Illinois.  Her father owned a local jewelry store and her mother wrote society news for the local newspaper—until she was forced to give up her career after marriage, something she urged her daughter never to do.

Growing up in the Depression years, she became inflamed with a passion for social justice.  She also acutely felt the sting of common anti-Semitism.  She developed an interest in Marxism while still in high school, which may have been why, despite being a regular contributor to the school paper, she was turned down for a spot as a columnist.

In 1938 her family found enough money to send her to prestigious Smith College, one of the Seven Sister Schools to the then all-male Ivy League.  Excelling academically, she won a scholarship to continue her education, pursuing a degree in psychology.  She also continued writing, including placing several poems in the campus literary magazine and rising to editor of the newspaper in 1941.  Under her leadership, the paper took a sharply political and leftist tone.

Young Betty Friedan looking every inch the young Marxist.

After graduating with honors in 1942, she went to the University of California at Berkley on a Fellowship.  She plunged into radical political activity there as well.  But in 1943 she abandoned her academic aspirations at the urging of her then boyfriend.

After leaving school she went to work as a journalist for left wing and labor outlets, first  The Federated Press and then beginning in  1945,  the United Electrical Workers UE News.

While working at the UE News, she married advertising executive Carl Friedan in 1947.  As she continued her career the couple would have three children and move to a comfortable suburban life.  Ironically, here union employers forced her out in 1953 after the birth of her second daughter.

Friedan then turned to freelance writing, often contributing to mainstream women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan.

In 1957 Friedan was asked to write an article on what happened to members of her graduating class for their 15th reunion.  She sent questionnaires to as many as she could find and received over two hundred replies.  Most of her classmates, it turned out, had abandoned careers to raise families.  And they were miserable and unfulfilled.  Intrigued by what she called the problem that has no name, she embarked on further research and study.

When the women’s magazines to which she regularly contributed all rejected an article on the subject, Friedan was furious and went to work expanding the article into a book. 

Among other things, she came to the conclusion that popular women’s magazines and cultural in general had abandoned independence as a goal for women and pushed the ideal of finding fulfillment in marriage and family life.  When the nuclear family could not fulfill women and when they lost their identity and sense of self, women became conflicted, guilt ridden, and neurotic.

Friedan advocated for women to pursue careers either in lieu of marriage and traditional family life or within a re-defined marriage of equals.  She outlined the cultural, political, and economic barriers to fulfillment and advocated action to tear them down.

The result was The Feminine Mystique.  It created an immediate sensation, zoomed to the top of the non-fiction best seller list and stayed there for months.  Its notoriety was stoked by the shocked and horrified response of many, mostly male, reviewers and the press in general. 

The Feminine Mistique was already a run-awy best seller but when it hit the drug store paperback racks later in 1963 it became accesible to students, moms, and struggling young working women.

But women, especially middle class women, responded urgently to the books message.  They began meeting in living rooms, libraries, church basements, and coffee shops in small groups to compare their own experiences creating a boom in consciousness raising groups that gave women the support of their sisters and empowered them to act.

A sudden celebrity, Friedan found herself anointed de facto the leader of a new movement.  In 1966 she helped make that status official by being among the founders of the National Organization for Women (NOW), which quickly gave political muscle to the new movement.  She was elected NOW’s first President and launched their first major initiative—a push to revive the moribund Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution and get it ratified by the States.

Friedan on an early NOW picket line.

She served NOW as President until 1970 and then went on to lead the national Women’s Strike for Equality, and led a march of 50,000 women in New York City.  The next year she teamed with her sometimes bitter rival for leadership of the movement, Gloria Steinem, to found the National Women’s Political Caucus.

Friedan was also a founder of the organization that became the National Abortion Rights Action League.  Despite this she later regretted the emphasis on abortion and sexual rights, believing that the core of the women’s struggle was economic opportunity.  She was also uncomfortable with the rising visibility and importance of lesbians in the movement, although over time her notorious iciness to them softened and became more accepting.

Leading an ERA march in Washington onJuly 9, 1978.  From left: Gloria Steinem, Dick Gregory, Betty Friedan, Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, D-N.Y., Rep. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., Rep. Margaret Heckler, R-Mass. 

Friedan was not without critics—and not all of them were enemies of the women’s movement.  She was abrasive, often angry, and hard to work with for associates.  She demanded deference to her position as an indispensable founder.  Beyond personality, some critics of her landmark first book took her to task for writing only for highly educated women in the solid middle class.  Indeed they were the focus of The Feminine Mystique and the backbone of the early movement.  Non-whites and working class women—women who had always worked to support their families and had jobs instead of careers—were at best the subject of benign neglect.

Friedan, originally a socialist and labor person, seemed to have forgotten some of her own experiences.  But she firmly believed that the ERA and reforms like insuring equal pay would raise all boats and elevate the status of pink collar workers along with educated professionals.

But the seeming disdain of the early movement for working class women, and the perceived antagonism to women who chose a traditional family role, quickly became the nucleus around which the rising right wing movement of the late 20st and early 21st Century spun its fantasy of snobbish elites turning class resentments against feminists and other progressives. 

Friedan remained adamant and defiant to the end of her long life.

Friedan continued writing, speaking and organizing almost to the moment of her death.  She never mellowed. She died on her 85th birthday, February 4, 2006.  She left behind three children—and the Women’s Movement.

Women’s History Month Returneth

Note—I seem to have woken up channeling a Trumpling…

Well that was close!  The country just escaped the annual ordeal of Black History Month.  There should be an investigation of that.  Clearly a Barack Hussain Obama Muslim Commie Plot to bring this Great Country to its knees.  We have to endure those smug Black History Minutes on our TVs and other assaults on White goodness.

Now no sooner is that nightmare behind us than we discover the whole damn month of March is supposed to be given over to Women’s History!  Don’t get me wrong, I adore women.  Love ‘em to death!  I always open the door for Ladies and tip my Make America Great cap to them.  My sainted Mother was a woman and my wife—when she is not in one of her moods—is an angel on earth.  But lately it like Satan has taken possession of most of them!  They have forgotten their proper duty as obedient wives and pure daughters waiting to be the vessel of the race. 

A lot of the blame goes to this Women’s History Month which has filled their airy heads with ridiculous notions, holding up harpies and nags as heroines, and making examples of women pushing their way into the God-given realms of men.  The whole thing even started with those damn socialists and was pushed by the black helicopter crowd at the United Nations!  Look it up yourself.

I say we put an end to this now!  Let’s declare this White Man’s History Year.  It’s always been that way before.  Let’s make it official.  That’ll shut ‘em all up!

Phew!  That was exhausting and draining.  I can’t keep it up even in the tradition of internet snark.  Let’s play it straight now for a look back at the real origins of Women’s History month. 

The first Women's Day march grew out of the struggle of female garment and needle trade workers in 1909 and their Socialist allies.  It was the root of International Women's Day and eventually American Women's History month.

***

The loonytoon I was channeling got one thing right—we owe it to trade unionist and members of the Socialist Party in New York City who on February 28, 1909 organized a Women’s Day to celebrate the anniversaries of a garment workers’ strike the year before and a march by women in the needle trades for the 10 hour day back in 1857.  The event was such a success the Socialists made it an annual event and took it national the next year.  In 1911 the Socialist International took it up and spread it across Europe.  After the interruptions of all solidarity movements caused by World War I, the celebrations resumed and spread.  They were also adopted by the new Communist International (Comintern.)

In America, however, the post-war period was marked by a Red Scare and a wave of the greatest repression in U.S. history aimed squarely at Socialists, Communists, anarchists, and militant unionists.  Despite the long fought for victory of women’s suffrage in those same years, the mostly middle class women who had led the struggle did not want to identify their movement with the radicals.  Even as Women’s Day spread globally, its observance here was limited to a kind of labor ghetto.

It took decades to regain a foothold in this country spurred by the new wave of feminism in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s the rise of Women’s Study and History in the colleges and universities.  They got a boost in 1975 when the United Nations officially adopted International Women’s Day on March 8.

First to act were educators at the Sonoma, California school district in 1978 who added a Women’s History Week centered on International Women’s Day the official curriculum.  It mostly centered on age appropriate projects highlight leaders of the suffrage movement.  The press picked up the story and spread it.   Sonoma teachers spread the idea in state and regional conferences and by the next year school districts across the country were adopting or adapting the idea and curriculum.  

National Women’s History Project cofounders Molly Murphy MacGregor, the Sonoma County California educator who helped pioneer a National Women’s History Week curriculum on the left with Paula Hammet, Mary Ruthsdotter, and Maria Cuevas.

Sonoma’s Molly Murphy MacGregor brought the idea to a 15 day conference of the Women’s History Institute at Sara Lawrence College in September 1979 organized by Professor Gerda Lerner.  The idea of Women’s History week caught fire and Lerner became a vocal national spokesperson for creating an official national event.

President Jimmy Carter acted quickly.  In February of 1980 he proclaimed National Women’s History Week centered around National Women’s Day on March 8.  His proclamation read:

From the first settlers who came to our shores, from the first American Indian families who befriended them, men and women have worked together to build this nation. Too often the women were unsung and sometimes their contributions went unnoticed. But the achievements, leadership, courage, strength and love of the women who built America was as vital as that of the men whose names we know so well. As Dr. Gerda Lerner has noted, “Women’s History is Women’s Right.” It is an essential and indispensable heritage from which we can draw pride, comfort, courage, and long-range vision. I ask my fellow Americans to recognize this heritage with appropriate activities during National Women’s History Week, March 2–8, 1980. I urge libraries, schools, and community organizations to focus their observances on the leaders who struggled for equality—Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Tubman, and Alice Paul. Understanding the true history of our country will help us to comprehend the need for full equality under the law for all our people. This goal can be achieved by ratifying the 27th Amendment [Equal Rights Amendment] to the United States Constitution, which states that “Equality of Rights under the Law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

School Districts, municipalities, and states began making proclamations.  Politicians of both political parties were eager to curry favor with the growing women’s movement realizing that women not only made up a majority of the electorate but also actually went to the polls significantly more often than men.  Even Carter’s explicit endorsement of the ERA was not then as partisan an issue as we might now believe.  Republican Party platforms from the 1920’s on had endorsed the ERA.  Many Republican women—and some male politicians—even supported the Roe v. Wade decision and reproductive choice.  In fact middle class suburban white women were a major force in the GOP.

Conservative icon Ronald Reagan was comfortable annually renewing Women’s History Week proclamations.  Republican First Ladies Betty Ford and Barbara Bush were both vocal supporters of the ERA, abortion rights, and other feminist issues.  Although not so vocal during her Born Again Christian husband’s Presidency, Laura Bush was known to hold similar views.

The non-partisan nature of support for women’s issues was illustrated when Utah Senator Orin Hatch and Maryland Democratic Representative Barbara Mikulski co-sponsored the first Joint Congressional Resolution proclaiming a Women’s History Week for March of 1992.

By the latter year Congressional Republicans were in full retreat on women’s issues as they became more and more beholden to the Religious Right who opposed both the ERA and reproductive choice.  From then on Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all resumed issuing Presidential proclamations. 

In recent years under the influence of the Tea Party  Congressional Republicans have abandoned virtually any semblance of supporting women’s rights and have become actively hostile to the point of prideful and open misogyny while Republicans in control of state legislatures propose ever more bizarre attacks on women.  The elevation of exposed sexual predator and open misogynist Donald Trump to the Presidency and his alliance with the hard core Religious Right has made transformation of the Republican Party into a bastion of White male privilege and hostility to women.

Meanwhile on the Democratic side the Obama administration initiated the landmark 2011 Women in America: Indicators of Social and Economic Well-Being report and advanced women’s causes and defended their interests via appointments and executive orders when Congress has blocked action.

The bitter and hard fought contest between  Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic Presidential nomination last year largely centered on which candidate was best for women, and on if women owed their support to the possible first major party female presidential candidate.  There was a bitter and divisive split between older women and traditional feminist leaders on one hand and many younger, poorer women on that hot button issue.

Business and labor leaders were carefully chosen to balance the list of 2017 Women's History Month Honorees.

This year the theme of the 2017 National Women’s History Month harkens back to the origins of Women’s day in the Socialist and labor movements.  But the sponsoring National Women’s History Project (NWHP) was also careful to balance that by co-honoring business leaders.  That reflects the search for respectability by middle class feminists and their obsession with career advancement and the glass ceiling.  Thus the theme:  Honoring Trailblazing Women in Labor and Business.

So the official honorees for the month carefully match labor leaders and radicals with hard charging executives and entrepreneurs.  Former Labor Secretary Alexis Herman is offset by former Commerce Secretary Barbara Hackman Franklin.  Anarchist and agitator Lucy Gonzales Parson and pioneer banker Maggie Lena Walker make a matched set of Black women.  Addie Wyatt, founder of national organizations of Black and Women Trade Unionists is offset by stockbroker Norma Yeager.  The lists go on, but you get the picture.

If I seem nit-picky in my annoyance, it’s not that I don’t think that the achievements of successful women in business are worthy of note or attention, but am saddened that leading feminists are still afraid that singling out the achievements of labor and radical figures will get them identified as some sort of commies on one hand and fear that it will alienate middle class supporters on the other.