Posted on 12/09/2003 12:47:21 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
In 1963, the course of American history was changed with the publication of Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique. Over five million copies of this explosive book eventually would be sold.
In the book, Friedan claimed she had lived in a "comfortable concentration camp" of New York City suburbia. And for years afterwards, Friedan claimed that her awareness of woman's rights did not coalesce until the late 1950s when she sat down to write the book in her stately mansion in Grand View-on-Hudson.
But based on his analysis of Friedan's personal papers at the Smith College library, historian Daniel Horowitz has dramatically refuted that claim.
In his book, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique, Horowitz acknowledges that Friedan had a brilliant mind, was a prolific writer, and pursued her cause with a single-minded devotion.
But Horowitz also reveals a dark side to Friedan's social activism: Betty Friedan was a long-time participant in the American Communist movement.
Here is Betty Friedan's true story (page numbers from the Horowitz book are in parentheses):
It is important to note that Horowitz did not intend to write his book as an exposé. Indeed, throughout the book, Horowitz is clearly sympathetic to Friedan's feminist objectives.
But this much is clear: beginning in 1940, Betty Friedan became a committed and articulate advocate for the American socialist movement.
It is true that after 1952, her views become less strident. But Friedan's basic outlook still reflected the socialist worldview of capitalist oppression and female victimization.
Take this quote from Frederick Engels' famous 1884 essay, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State:
"The emancipation of women becomes possible only when women are enabled to take part in production on a large, social scale, and when domestic duties require their attention only to a minor degree."
Engels was saying that equality of the sexes would only happen when women abandoned their homes and become worker-drones.
Friedan copied that sentence into her notes sometime around 1959, while she was doing her research for The Feminine Mystique (p. 201).
That revolutionary passage would become the inspiration and guiding principle for Friedan's book, and eventually for the entire feminist movement.
I wish this expose had come out earlier to expose her sham. (But why am I not surprised?)
Apparently they didn't even tell her that she "had a great personality" and "was a really good dancer".
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