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.
All I can is "better have died".
Let me squint and muster up a tear. Here we go, boo friggin hoo.
Never really cared for her myself. Much of what she said applied to very bored upper class elities. She should have had a talk with my mother who had to work and support a family during the "birth" of the woman's movement.
I'm pretty sure my Mom would have given anything to be able to stay at home and be with us kids. She's often said that's the one thing she regrets.
Oh well prayers for her family.
Never again will I hear her hysterical voice complaining how U.S. (read capitalist) society oppresses women.
Btw... she was no regular housewife. She was very much around the world while servants took care of her comfortable concentration camp.
Sad. She started a movement with intelligent thoughts, that went bad, as she herself somewhat acknowledged later on, as the kooks took over. It also reminds me of my age - she was 85!. That is rather annoying.
Betty was a truly ugly person ... inside and out.
Good Riddence!
The world has just become a less ugly place.
Her views were offensive, and her work was destructive.
A dishonorable legacy for a life of the same quality.
I thought she was already dead.
Damn, that means the Sunday paper will preempt some potentially interesting article for this witch's obituary. Couldn't she wait another day?
There was a lot of truth in her early ideas. I have daughters now who have both families and interesting careers. No valium for them.
It's all about finding balance in life. After all, we cannot encourage our daughters to go onto higher ed. and get advanced degrees, and then expect them to sit home and watch soap operas.
There's a right way to do it and a wrong way.
The really ugly feminists are the ones who started the proabortion movement and influenced young women to kill their babies in order to have careers.
That's Yahoo!News.....Yahoo!
Friedan probably did more damage to women than any in
history.
I think she was a despicably hateful and ugly woman. Her death does not diminish me in the least, so instead of asking for whom the bell tolls...I'll just say good riddiance.
Thanks for the reply. This thread is an excrescence, and shameful, and I appreciate your composed interjection. As an aside, the way some freepers focus on physical appearance, one would thing they are all fashion models or something.
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