Dutch Strike Defended Jews from the Nazis

Few photos of the February Strike survive.  Here Dutch police watch a small street meeting.

It goes without saying that the Nazis were bad dudes.  If you are tempted to forget just how bad, fresh evidence pops up all the time.  When the Germans took over a country, they took it over with plenty of tanks, troops, and usually a loyal gang of local Nazis and collaborators to do their dirty work.  Open dissent and open resistance were savagely crushed.  Which is why, across Europe, there was so little of it.  Resistance was usually forced underground.

In 1941, however, the stolid Dutch rose up in a general strike to protest attacks on Jews.  It was the first and almost the last such mass act of civil defiance.  Later workers in Luxembourg and Denmark would also stage brief protest strikes.

The action, which began on February 25, 1941 is remembered and celebrated in the Netherlands as the February Strike.  It is commemorated with a monument in Amsterdam—a statue of a portly dock worker, his sleeves rolled up and his hands curling into fists standing defiant.  Although a source of national pride, the story of this epic resistance is little known outside the Low Countries.

With few natural defenses and a tiny army, the Netherlands had little choice but to surrender to the invading Germans in May of 1940.  The Nazis settled to occupy the country with the enthusiastic assistance of local fascists, the Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging in Nederland (NSB), and their force of street thugs the Weerbaarheidsafdeling (WA.)  It didn’t take them long to start putting he screws to Holland’s well assimilated Jewish community.

Almost immediately the petty harassment of Jews began and an escalating series of edicts began restricting their options.  By November the Nazis decreed that Jews must be removed from all public employment and institutions, including as both faculty and students at universities.  Student in Leiden rose in protests that spread to other universities.

Tensions were also growing among workers, particularly ship yard workers in Amsterdam.  Rumors—well founded—were circulating that many of the highly skilled workers would be sent to Germany and impressed as virtual slave labor in Nazi ship yards.  Communist led unions began organizing protests.

In response to unrest on campuses and in the dock yards the Dutch WA began Storm Trooper style raids into Jewish and working class neighborhoods.  Street assaults and vandalism of shops was common.  Both Jews and unionists formed self-defense groups and began resisting the WA in escalating street brawls.

On February 11, the most intense street battles yet resulted in the critical injury of a WA member.  The next day German troops and Dutch police intervened.  They encircled the main Jewish Neighborhood of Amsterdam not letting anyone in or out.  When the Dutch Nazi died on February 14 Dutch and German police began forays and raids into the Jewish neighborhood.

On the 19th a body of German Grüne Polizei (green police), the uniformed civil police now under SS command, attacked an ice cream parlor.  Defense units sprang to action and several police officers were injured.

The response was a full scale organized pogrom the following weekend, February 22 and 23.  Over 400 young male Jews were arrested and ultimately deported to concentration camps in Germany where all but 2 of them died.  Jewish business were sacked and burned.  Those not arrested were beaten in the streets.

All of this was following a familiar pattern witnessed in other conquered cities.

A large open air protest was organized on February 24 at the Noordermarkt, the city’s main open air market square.  Most Jews were staying off the street.  The meeting was largely made up of Dutch Gentiles, mainly unionists and students.  They protested the attacks on Jews and demanded the release of the arrested men.

Over night the Communist Party and the labor unions it influenced printed and circulated a flyer calling for a General Strike against the repression.

Around 8 am on the 25th the strike began with tram drivers.  Roving bands of picketers called out more and more workers.  Others lay down tools and walked out when they heard about the action.  By noon the shipyards were shut down and word of the strike was reaching other Dutch cities.

Response by German and cooperative Dutch authorities was massive and predictable.  The last hold outs were forced back to work on the 27th.  Scores of Communist and union leaders were arrested.

Despite the repression, there continued to be public protests.  There were student strikes that November.  And in 1943 mass strikes were launched in tandem with the rise of national armed resistance.  The Dutch had one of the largest and most successful of all Resistance armed forces in occupied countries.

Ordinary Dutch citizens from every walk of life continued to come to the aid of the beleaguered Jewish community, which by 1943 was facing mass deportation to the death camps.  Ann Frank and her family were just some of thousands harbored by their Dutch neighbors who saved many.

Infuriated by the knowledge, Nazi authorities slashed rations to Amsterdam and other cities as punishment for feeding and harboring Jews as well as for the regular assassinations of Dutch Nazis, police, and collaborators.  Starvation was endemic in many cities as a result.

After the war, surviving Jews and resisters alike began commemorations of the February Strike.  In 1951 there was the dedication of De Dokwerker, the monument to the strike.  During the 1950’s, however, the Communists were dis-invited to the public commemorations and their central role obscured.

They are celebrating again today in Amsterdam.  Leftists of all stripes are back.  The Dutch have much to be proud of. 

Conservative Jurist Seizes Power for the Courts to Curb Liberal President

John Marshall's bold assertion is enshrined on the wall of the Supreme Court Building.

Note:  Adapted from a post two years ago on this date.

On February 24, 1802 Chief Justice John Marshall handed President Thomas Jefferson a narrow political victory by asserting a power that Jefferson was convinced the Court did not have in the case of Marbury v. Madison.  

The details of the case were as convoluted and tiresome as Marshall’s hair splitting decision.  Those of you who have not been tortured in first year Constitutional law will undoubtedly find it confusing. 

The case had its origins with John Adams’ famous “Midnight appointments” of judges aimed at packing the Federal bench with avowed Federalists before Jefferson and the new Democratic-Republican Congress could do anything about it.  The new circuit court judges and Federal justices of the peace so appointed needed receipt of an official commission from the Secretary of State before taking office.  

John Marshall had been Adams’ Secretary of State before accepting appointment as Chief Justice and was still acting in that position in lieu of a new appointment.  He rushed as many certificates as possible to the new officers of the court, but he could not finish the job.  He left it to the incoming Secretary, James Madison to routinely process the rest of the documents.  But Jefferson believed that the unfulfilled appointments had expired with the Adams administration and directed that no action be taken on them.  

William Marbury, a prominent Maryland businessman and staunch Federalist did not receive his credentials as Justice of the Peace for the District of Columbia and, believing the job his legal due, sued Secretary of State Madison to compel him to issue his commission.  Meanwhile the new Congress overturned the Judiciary Act of 1801 under which Adams had acted and largely re-instated the previous Judiciary Act of 1789.  

Marshall, now Chief Justice, did not recuse himself from hearing the case despite his personal involvement in the appointments, Instead the staunch Federalist and sworn political enemy of Jefferson wrote the opinion in the case.  It was a doozy .  

First, he held that Marbury had a right to receive a legal appointment and suffered an injury for which there must be a judicial remedy.  So far it looked like Marshall was going to affirm the case and the old President’s authority to make the appointments.  

But then Marshall answered an unasked question:  did the Supreme Court have the authority to provide Marbury the remedy he sought through a writ of mandamus?  After examining the Article III of the Constitution which sets forth the power of the Supreme Court and the Judiciary Act of 1789, Marshall concluded that the Court does not have original jurisdiction over writs of mandamus and therefore had no power to issue an order.  Score one for Jefferson who did not want to seat the judges.  

Then Marshall threw in his best curve ball.  He declared that Section 13 of the Judiciary Act, which seemed to allow the court to take original jurisdiction, was at odds with the Constitution and therefore “unconstitutional and invalid.”  

The results:  Marbury didn’t get his job, Jefferson wasn’t stuck with judges he didn’t want, and the Court had boldly asserted co-equal power with the Executive and Legislative branches of government and indeed had the power to overturn actions by either or both of the others when those actions were unconstitutional. 

The expansion of judicial power appalled and frightened Jefferson who believed that moneyed interests would always control the Court and stymie democracy.  

Thus began the judicial activism which modern Conservatives so abhor—except when that activism advances their own ideology.  

Lawyers, law students, and pettifoggers among my readers are invited to tear my summery of the case to pieces.  I’m sure they will be right.

Gutenberg Changed Everything

It is hard to imagine the startling changes the Johannes Gutenberg unleashed on the world when on February 23, 1454 he reportedly pulled the first sheets of his new edition of the Vulgate Bible off of his printing press in Mainz, Germany.  It would take two years to finish running off—it that term can be applied to the laborious process—about 160 copies of the 1,272 page book with 4 pages per folio-sheet, 318 sheets of paper, and 636 impressions for each copy.  About three quarters of the volumes were printed on high quality imported Italian paper and the balance on the calf skin vellum still used by scribes making books by hand.

The German craftsman did not invent either printing or moveable type.  The Chinese had been producing documents by printing for centuries and had employed hand cut moveable type at least two hundred years.  Because Chinese is represented in pictographs representing whole words, each piece of type represented a word rather than a letter in a word.  While there are thousands of pictographs, only a few hundred were commonly used.  Each image had to be hand carved from wood, but only a few of any would be required on a single page.

Europeans had long been familiar with the process, but ran up against the problem that scores of the same letter had be used on each page and that it took a master craftsman a day or more to carve each individual  letter making the production of books unaffordable.

Guttenberg solved this and two other critical problems.  First he devised a way to cast multiple copies of each letter from molds made from original carvings.  

Second, he essentially invented the printing press which allowed uniform impressions to be made from locked and set blocks of type.  Previously images were struck by patting the paper against the type by hand, striking it with mallets, or drawing a wooden blade across the back of the paper.  The new method not only improved the uniform quality of images, it was faster on each sheet.

Finally, Guttenberg experimented until he found an oil based ink blackened with carbon that also contained high concentrations of metals including lead and copper.  This thick mixture adhered to type, spread evenly under pressure, and dried satisfactorily leaving a sharp black image.  Previous experiments with printing had found that the thin water based ink used by scribes unsuitable.

Guttenberg had been experimenting with these elements for at least five years when he began production of the book to perfect the process.  He had produced single page broadsides, short double or triple folio works, and short prayer books—pamphlets really—before undertaking the massive Bible project.

All of his hard work paid off.  The book sold out almost immediately.  Copies went to universities, monasteries, libraries, and public archives across Europe.  The cost—60 Florins for an edition printed on paper and much more for a vellum edition in special hand-tooled bindings—was far beyond most individual purses.  In fact only one is known to have been purchased and kept a single person, although very wealthy individuals bought copies as pious gifts for institutions.  Still, this was much less than the cost of a hand-illuminated volume from a monastery scribe.  And the quality was excellent.

Guttenberg’s success spawned imitators and competitors.  Within decades a small printing industry sprang up, first centered in Germany then spreading across the continent.  With the supply of books suddenly increasing, literacy took an upswing as well.

With literacy moving beyond a small circle of clerics, scribes, court functionaries, clerks and physicians to the new growing class of Burgers—the merchants, master craftsmen, and guild members who were gaining influence in the cities of plague depopulated Europe—big social changes were in the offing.

The first were religious.  Bibles fell for the first time into the hands of laymen who could read and interpret it on their own.  What many discovered was at variance with what the Church had been teaching.  Result—a little something called the Reformation.  Within a hundred years men and women were being burned at the stake for books they wrote or read.

And of the making of books, there seemed no end.  Soon topics other than religion were being covered.  The new printing presses of Europe eagerly disseminated the news of voyages of discovery around Africa to the Orient and across the Atlantic to a new world.  Works on philosophy re-introduced the ideas of Aristotle and Plato then expanded on them.  Observation and inquiry into the natural world increased.  The very heavens opened up.  The songs and poems of bards and minstrels were finding their way to printed pages and popular literature in national languages was springing up.  Result—the Renaissance. 

Within two hundred years literacy had spread to the level of journeymen mechanics, petty shop keepers, professional soldiers, mariners, and was virtually universal among the gentle classes.  Result—the Enlightenment and political and social turmoil.

If this seems like a long time to us who have seen revolutions in communications come and go like revolving doors, it was but a trice in the long history of humanity on the globe.

To paraphrase the father of a latter communications breakthrough, “What Guttenberg hath wrought.”

Ash Wednesday, George Washington, and Poetry

The General did not do this at Valley Forge--or in Church.

For some odd reason, calendar coincidences have often started my poetic juices flowing.  First was the coincidence of the First Sunday of Advent and World AIDS Awareness Day some years ago.   That one made it into my book We Build Temples in the Heart.  There was the time in 2005 when Rosa Parks was laid out in the Capitol Rotunda on Halloween.

Then there was the congruence one year of the first day of Ramadan, Rosh Hashanah, and the day before the anniversary of September 11 that resulted in a piece called If I Wore Stars on a Pointed Hat.  In 2010 the Winter Solstice coincided with a Lunar eclipse.  Last October the a new moon fell on the mutual birthday of Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath so naturally I wrote a poem called How Black the Night.

Last year Ash Wednesday was very much later in the year and ended up on Earth Day.  So I had to write about that.

The thing is, this is not necessarily a good idea.  Most of these events are a onetime only or a once-in-blue-moon occurrence.  So a poem honoring the occasion may have limited general appeal.  Worse yet, I usually don’t become inspired until the day is upon me.  This means that I have no time to send it out for placement in some prestigious venue which could time the publication.  So I end up posting the verses here on the Blog where they are always in danger of becoming immediately ephemeral.

But I can’t seem to help myself.  This year Ash Wednesday comes round on Washington’s Birthday.

What’s a fellow to do?

The Vestryman

Ash Wednesday/Washington’s Birthday 2012

The Vestryman performing the duty expected of the local Squire

            attended chapel when absolutely necessary

            and when no good excuse like fighting an Empire

            or Fathering a Country was handy.

He sat bolt upright on a rigid pew

            contemplated the charms of Lady Fairfax

                        or later dental misery.

            When came the Altar Call, he would stand up,

                        turn on his heel, and march straight out

                        as if a legion was at his back.

            No filthy priestly thumb ever grimed

                        that noble brow.

—Patrick Murfin

Fat Tuesday—Mardi Gras Envy

There are a downsides to having been raised vaguely Protestant and residing in sometimes inhospitable northern climes.  Perhaps the biggest is regarding with wistful envy the liberating extravagance of Carnival and Mardi Gras. It is the un-religious holiday—a day of wallowing in the ways of the flesh and merry making before getting down to the serious and unpleasant tasks of the proper piety of Lent.

Catholics seem to know how to take advantage of the opportunity, especially in warm places where the streets beckon—New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro most famously.  But folks from countries where Romance languages are spoken can find ways to celebrate even in icy Quebec City.  

The idea is simple.  Finnish up the Christmas season on the Feast of the Epiphany, the fixed day of January 11, and then coast down the hill of Ordinary Time until Ash Wednesday kicks off of Lent, which by the lunar calendar falls anywhere from  February to March, gathering speed all the while.  It is the “dead of winter.”  Even in Mediterranean countries it was dark and often cold.  Folks stayed inside more, got on each others’ nerves.  But by Fat Tuesday, the sap was running and Spring seemed just over the horizon.  Perfect for one last opportunity to bust loose before breaking out the sack cloth and ashes.

Protestants, particularly Calvinists, their decedents, and those who stood close enough by to be infected, took a dim view of the whole process.  More Papist/pagan nonsense to them.  A good Calvinist existed in a state of perpetual Lent.  The experience of any sensual pleasure was regarded as a sinful distraction from contemplation of the awesome majesty of God and our totally undeserving souls.  It was for good reason that Puritanism  has been described as the nagging suspicion that somewhere, somehow, somebody is having a good time.  

England, I am told, once celebrated Carnival—a cultural gift of the Norman French aristocracy.  Cromwell and his boys pretty much wiped that out at the point of the sword.  Even when Kings remounted the Throne and the Anglican Church regained the upper hand, the old traditions fell away.  Instead they shrank the celebration down to something called Shrove Tuesday, which is celebrated mostly by making and eating pancakes.  Now I bow to no man in my affection for the flapjack or griddle cake, but even a high pile drenched in butter and real maple syrup is a poor substitute for dancing semi-naked in the streets.  They passed this tradition on to all of the former pink spots on the globe where the Empire once ruled and to all of the Protestant sects derived from Anglicanism and Calvinism.

Of course, not all Catholics party with absolute abandon.  Those from northern and eastern Europe either never celebrated or toned down Carnival.  The Poles celebrate with Pączki Day (pronounced pŭtch-kē).  In the old country it was held on the Thursday before Ash Wednesday, but in the immigrant communities of North America it is held on Fat Tuesday.  Folks line up at bakeries at the crack of dawn to purchase pączkis, a kind of jelly doughnut made only once a year.  This is a much bigger deal than it sounds.

In Germany, the Baltic states, and Scandinavian Fat Tuesday is likewise celebrated with special local pastries meant to use up the supply of sugar and lard before the Lenten fast.

Tonight the biggest and most honored Krews will be conducting their parades in New Orleans.  Down there, they take Mardi Gras seriously and have stretched it to the whole season between the Epiphany and Lent.  Various parades have been winding down the streets of different neighborhoods for weeks, each followed by its own Ball.  The streets of the French Quarter will be crowded.  Many revelers will be drunken northerners and Calvinist escapees.  They will party next to the locals, drinking copiously, begging for beads cast from the parade floats, and eying the pretty young girls flashing their tits.  Everyone will forget that Rick Santorum or the Catholic Bishops exist.

And I wish I was with them.  It’s been far too long since I reveled in sin and degradation. 

It’s President’s Day So, What the Hell, Let’s Celebrate Franklin Pierce

It's President’s Day, the Rodney Dangerfield of holidays.  It gets no respect.  And for good reason.  The country used to celebrate George Washington’s Birthday, a noble bow to the Father of Our Country.  A lot of us, those of us in states that never seceded from the Union any way, also partied for the Great Emancipator.  Two dudes who deserve respect and their pictures on coins, bill, and stamps.

But businesses with union contracts calling for the observance of Federal Holidays and school districts were pissed off about having to close twice in February and part with that holiday pay.  So they convinced Congress a few years ago to make it a two-fer-one deal.  Congress thought even better of it, what with Republicans eyeing a Ronald Reagan Day and some Democrats countering with recognition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  So they threw in the whole kit ‘n caboodle and made Presidents Day, a holiday that celebrated every great man—and every mope—to hold office with perfect equality.

Stores may use dancing Washingtons and Lincolns in their President’s Day sale ads, but if you squint William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, and that herd of interchangeable bearded Republicans between Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt are doing the Can-Can in the far background.

So let’s really celebrate this year.  Let hear it for Franklin Pierce.

Franklin who? You might ask.  Why the 14th President of the United States, that’s who.  The noble son of New Hampshire who was certainly the handsomest man ever elected to that office.

Although born in a log cabin in 1804, Pierce came from reputable Yankee stock.  His father was a Revolutionary War hero and two time Democratic-Republican governor of the Granite State.

He was educated at Philips Exeter Academy and then attended Bowden College in Maine where he became the lifelong friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne.  In fact one of Pierce’s most notable accomplishments as President was keeping Hawthorne employed in plumb political appointments thus saving his family from virtual starvation.

After graduation, Pierce studied law in Massachusetts the returned to Concord, New Hampshire to start practicing in 1824.  Gregarious and charming, Pierce won friends and clients and was soon highly successful as a lawyer and rising in Democratic politics.  He served in the New Hampshire House of Representatives from 1828 to ’33 while his father was Governor and served as Speaker for the last two years.  Then he was elected to the U.S. Congress and at 27 years old was the youngest serving Representative.

During this time he married the beautiful but shy and frail daughter of the former President of Bowdin College.  He was devoted to the former Jane Appleton.  Highly religious, she abhorred her husband’s political career—and his heavy drinking.  She became an outspoken teetotaler.  Despite their differences, they made a striking couple and had three children together.  Their first son, named for his father, died in infancy and their second survived only four years before falling victim to a typhoid epidemic.  Jane regarded these tragedies as punishment for her husband’s political career.

In 1836 the New Hampshire General Court elected Pierce to the U.S. Senate.  He served as a Democrat without much distinction until he gave into his wife’s pleas and resigned in 1842.  He returned to a lucrative private law practice in Concord, and then was appointed Federal Attorney from 1845-47.

With the outbreak of the Mexican War, generally unpopular in New England, Pierce enlisted as a Colonel of Volunteers.  Once in Mexico, he was promoted, through political clout with the Polk Administration as brigadier of 1st Brigade, 3rd Division and joined Winfield Scott’s army in time for the Battle of Contreras where he was seriously wounded in the leg in a fall from his horse.  The next day while leading his troops in the Battle of Churubusco he fainted from pain and had to be carried off the field.  After recovery, he resumed command for the rest of the campaign and returned to Concord a middling war hero.

In 1852 the Democrats meeting in Baltimore were deadlocked between four candidates for President--Stephen A. Douglas, William L. Marcy, James Buchanan and Lewis Cass each with significant regional support.  The party was split on the expansion of slavery, but tied to place itself above “agitation” on the issue.  The platform called for support of the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act. None of the candidates could win a majority.  On the 35th ballot Pierce’s name was put up as a possible compromise—a northern man with southern sympathies and a record as a war hero.  He finally the won nomination on the 49th ballot, probably the most obscure man ever to win a major party nomination.

If the Democrats were in disarray that year, the Whigs were busy dying after the disastrous accidental presidency of John Tyler.  Their great men—Daniel Webster and Henry Clay—refused to get out of each other’s way.  Instead the party nominated war hero Winfield Scott.  But Scott was a pompous campaigner and as an anti-slavery Virginian lost the support of the south.  

In the general election Old Fuss and Feathers was humiliated at the hand of his former subordinate.  Pierce won the electoral votes 27 of the 31 states, including Scott’s home state of Virginia.

He was, at 48 years old, then the youngest man ever elected to the office.

But tragedy struck before his inauguration.  On his way to Washington the train carrying the President elect and his family derailed.  His wife was injured and his last surviving son, 11 year old Benjamin was decapitated before his eyes.  The tragedy unhinged both Pierce and his wife, who blamed the death on her husband’s career.

Once in Washington Jane withdrew from her husband and official duties as hostess.  Pierce spent most of the first year in office alone in a darkened room drinking himself insensible.  When his Vice President, former Alabama Senator Rufus King died just thirty days after inauguration , Pierce’s friends fearing for his sanity and ability to serve his turn fretted that he had no clear successor.

Pierce eventually recovered enough to perform his duties, although he continued to drink heavily.  He steadfastly supported the Kansas Nebraska Act, including the hated provisions of the Fugitive Slave act and generally pursued a policy of conciliation with the South while decrying the “agitation” of Northern Abolitionists.  His closest adviser and political supporter was his Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis.  

His policies led to a decade of virtual civil war in Bloody Kansas between slave state settlers and their Missouri Border Ruffian allies, and northern Free Soil settlers supported by Northern Abolitionists.

At every juncture where there was sectional conflict, Pierce sided with the South on the justification that it was necessary to preserve the Union.

By the end of his four year presidency his party was splintered sectionaly.  No one wanted a second Pierce term.  The party finally settled on his Secretary of State James Buchanan, another Doughface Democrat—a Northerner with Southern principles.

Pierce retired to New Hampshire to try and win back the affection of his alienated wife.  They traveled abroad.  When they returned home, Pierce began speaking publicly against “abolitionist agitation.”  He was briefly considered for re-nomination in 1860 but declined and the Democrats split among three sectional candidates.

During the war he was an outspoken opponent and critic of the Lincoln Administration and the President’s war aims.  When Secretary of State William Seward accused him of being a member of the seditious secret Knights of the Golden Circle—a militant Copperhead group flirting with allying themselves with the Confederacy in armed rebellion in Ohio and border states.—Pierce demanded he present proof in what became an embarrassing scandal for both men.

At the end of the war when Jefferson Davis’s  papers were captured, very friendly letters from Pierce to the Confederate President were found—so friendly many thought they verged on treason.

Pierce’s wife Jane had died in 1863.  And now his reputation was in tatters.  He was drinking more than ever.  On October 8, 1869 he died in Concord of cirrhosis of the liver.

With no close heirs save a nephew, he divided his estate with generous gifts to several friends, including a provision for the children of old pal Nathaniel Hawthorne.

He is unanimously included in all lists of the worst presidents in American History.

Happy Presidents Day, Mr. Pierce.  This one’s for you.

A Woman Spoke Up—The Book that Changed America

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.

Almost 50 years later the spasmodic eruption of the extreme right wing in the country, empowered by the election of Republicans to national and state level legislative power,  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 it that they thought they could never be challenged again.  About 25% 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 paper—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, 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.

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 main stream 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 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. 

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.

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 and became more accepting.

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 indispensible 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 their 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 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.