Posted on 02/04/2006 1:10:18 PM PST by GeneD
WASHINGTON - Betty Friedan, whose manifesto "The Feminine Mystique" became a best seller in the 1960s and laid the groundwork for the modern feminist movement, died Saturday, her birthday. She was 85.
Friedan died at her home of congestive heart failure, according to a cousin, Emily Bazelon.
Friedan's assertion in her 1963 best seller that having a husband and babies was not everything and that women should aspire to separate identities as individuals, was highly unusual, if not revolutionary, just after the baby and suburban booms of the Eisenhower era.
The feminine mystique, she said, was a phony bill of goods society 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.
In the racial, political and sexual conflicts of the 1960s and '70s, Friedan's was one of the most commanding voices and recognizable presences in the women's movement.
As a founder and first president of the National Organization for Women in 1966, she staked out positions that seemed extreme at the time on such issues as abortion, sex-neutral help-wanted ads, equal pay, promotion opportunities and maternity leave.
no reply necessary...just having fun with you
I read the article. I still don't see the nexus between Friedan's feminist writings and Marxism, and none are elucidated in the hit piece you linked.
Someday. There is still time, there is always time. It is a Boomer thing. It is still a goal.
Follow me on this: they got to live a life of leisure and they WERE COMPLAINING?!?!?!
You know what? Give me the box of bon-bons and the daytime trash TV because I will take it. Let the wretched "unfulfilled" harridans work for a living, then.
Gotta tell ya Bernie I understood this about myself at 18. And I well understand because of the uniqueness of my own personal situation, how difficult it would be to have it all. For all kinds of practical reasons (such as possible premature death of a spouse for one) women should be educated and trained to support themselves.
I abhor the Betty Friedan's of the world. They along with the sexual revolution, are the reason by the time I came of age, too many of the men I dated were corrupted. They pursued sex but were not interested in marriage. Women to them were "things."
Many men also pushed for feminism because it meant they could abdicate sexual and marital responsibility, and thus the male of the species also deserve the blame.
Maybe others didn't notice that you totally ignored the substance of my post and jumped immediately to lawyerly language parsing. I did. Life is far too short for such shallowness.
God rest her soul. He is the only one who can.
I absorbed your anecdotal story, and reminded you about what I said. One size does not fit "all." That is a rather continual theme of mine.
I am still waiting for you to respond to what you still agree with me on, by the way. :)
Changes in technology in and of themselves, would have lead more women into the workplace, without women like Betty Friedan AND society could have been spared all the bitterness and confusion.
I always thought Margaret Thatcher played it exactly right.
The gender issue of the day is just why males are failing in school, and failing to go to college, and losing interest in achievement, as a generalization. THAT issue has really interred feminism as of any interest. It is just so yesterday.
They thought they were wll on their way to winning the revolution then. The '70s was a giddy time for her ilk. The ones today are wondering what ever happened to their revolution.
Boomp! Boomp! Boomp! Another one bites the dust!
Bingo.
Her sentence, for eternity, is to be tormented by the souls of millions of aborted babies.
Speaking from personal experience, man-hating was implicit in the movement. Whipping up womens' resentment with their lives tranlated immediately into a perception of male 'oppression,' true or not. Certainly, some men were guilty of that but all mass movements paint with a broad brush. Friedan established N.O.W. and it was just as man-hating in the beginning as now, just less open about it. As a Communist, Friedan had as one of her major goals the infliction of maximum damage upon the nuclear American family.
To interpret my comments as blaming Friedan alone for all the problems between men and women over the past 45 years would be wrong. Many trends and people came together in a decade or two to cause the paradigm-shift. The Pill, relaxed social mores after WWII, greater international sophistication and interaction, such shams as the Kinsey Report, the lessening of religious influence -- all these things and more were in play.
The sad part is that women of my ex's generation were among the first in U.S. history to be mostly college-educated. I strongly believe matters would have sorted themselves out much more positively and with much greater civility without firebrands like Friedan.
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