Feminism Pioneer Betty Friedan Dies at 85

The Free Lance - Star ^ | 2-4-06 | Hillel Italie

[nightdriver]

"I AM WOMAN! HEAR ME ROAR!!

No more.

[son of caesar]

whoa, let me tell you something. there is nothing on this earth that a real man appreciates more than a good woman. there is a reason for the saying behind every good man is a good woman. stand tall and dont let the idiots bother you.

[x1stcav]

Good riddance.

Thanks Betty, for all the wreckage you and your 'sisters' have left behind. It'll take us decades to clean this mess, called feminism, up

[NoExpectations]

A boyfriend in college gave me the Feminine Mystique. I never read it.

[Joe Boucher]

You go there cubreporter and GOD bless.

[x1stcav]

Adios, commie b!tch.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1096

[Notwithstanding]

http://web.archive.org/web/20010217062349/www.nypost.com/07052000/news/32270.htm

EX-HUBBY FIRES BACK
AT FEMINIST ICON BETTY

By LEAH GINSBERG

---

SHE WROTE the book that inspired a generation of feminists, and 30 years later branded her ex-husband a wife beater.
Now he's fighting back and says she's nuts.

Carl Friedan, who was married to feminist icon Betty for 22 years, says his ex-wife's claim in her memoir, "Life So Far," that he beat her up and gave her black eyes are "S&M fantasies."

"The charges are part and parcel of a streak of lunacy that permeates her personality and came forth full-strength in episodes of uncontrollable hysteria and physical violence during our marriage," Carl Friedan said in an exclusive interview.

He added that the only violence that occurred during their marriage was directed against him by Betty.

He also claimed that the groundbreaking author of "The Feminine Mystique" was clinically insane and that in the mid-'60s, a doctor prescribed Thorazine for her.

"She took [the drug] for a week or two," he said, "until she discovered it was widely used at that time to subdue mental patients. She stopped taking it, insulted that a doctor would consider her nuts."

Carl, now 80, said his wife often came at him with knives, and regularly kicked and scratched him viciously until he bled. It was while he was fighting her off during these tantrums that he said Betty got her bruises and black eyes.

"The day before we separated for good, she slammed shut a bedroom bureau drawer with such force that a huge mirror attached to it shattered," Carl claimed. "In her fury, she took huge pieces of sharp jagged mirror glass and came at me. For the first time, I seriously believed she could actually kill me.

"I slept with one eye open until the next day, when I escaped forever. Or so I thought. We've been divorced for 30 years, and Betty still haunts me."

Faced with Carl's claims - he has set up a Web site to contest her version of the marriage - Betty has been trying to downplay her allegations of abuse.

"It's been sensationalized out of context. He's no wife beater," she told "Good Morning America," and she's told other interviewers not to "overdo" the wife-beating allegations.

But Carl Friedan said his ex-wife's atonement has been too little, too late.

"It's in her book," he said. "It's permanent. She's a historic figure now, so it will always be there that her husband beat the hell out of her."

Scores of publications have printed Betty's wife-beating allegations as fact without checking with Carl, he claims.

CARL says he had no idea what he was letting himself in for when he married 26-year-old Betty Goldstein in 1947.

Carl, a transplanted Bostonian, says he was lonely in New York, and a mutual friend arranged the first date. Betty seemed smart, if homely, and had a lot of "spirit," he said.

They eventually moved in together and, after several breakups, Carl said, he gave in to Betty's demands for marriage.

"It was a common thing back then, where a guy moves in with a gal and he starts having regular sex - before he knows it, he's married. It was a sort of gravitational marriage," he said.

While Carl insists Betty was impossible to live with because of her tendency to act out her anger, it's clear also that the marriage had other problems.

With a hint of regret in his voice, Carl, who owned a successful advertising agency, told how the woman he vowed to spend his life with hardly knew him.

"She didn't know what I was doing," he claimed. "I won prizes and had full-page ads in all the New York papers. She didn't care."

While Carl was bringing home the bacon, Betty tried to be a housewife. But according to Carl, she was no stay-at-home mom.

"We had a full-time maid during our entire marriage. That's who took care of the kids, cooked - everything," he said.

"I would say as a housewife, on a scale of 0 to 10, she was a 2."

In the "Leave It to Beaver" "happy housewife" times of the '50s and '60s, Carl said had to fend for himself.

"I used to keep all my suits at the dry cleaners. They kept them for me and I'd go in and change them," he said. "One day, the gal there said, ‘I have a nice lady for you.' I said, ‘But I'm married.'

"She thought because my clothes were there, I was a bachelor," he chuckled.

Once "The Feminine Mystique" was published in 1963 and the National Organization for Women got off the ground, things only got worse.

"All of the big NOW meetings, where they drew up the charter, that was all done in our apartment in the Dakota," said Carl, referring to the couple's tony Manhattan digs.

"By then, I didn't come home much. But when I did, the meetings were still going on.

"Somebody told me that they heard I came in about 11:30 one night and said, ‘OK, you can all get the f- - - out of here.' I don't remember saying it, but if I didn't, I should have."

Carl admits to having extramarital affairs, starting as early as the '50s. He says he and his wife led virtually separate lives. She had her cause, and he spent many late nights at work, discos, clubs or the Dogwood Room, Manhattan's hot spot at the time.

But, he concedes, there were some good times - including a great sex life. And, of course, he was proud of her work.

"I was the person she turned to and said, ‘I want to start an NAACP for women,'" Carl said. "She changed the course of history almost single-handedly. It took a driven, superaggressive, egocentric, almost lunatic dynamo to rock the world the way she did. Unfortunately, she was that same person at home, where that kind of conduct doesn't work. She simply never understood this."

Since the marriage broke up, Carl Friedan married twice more, and retired to Sarasota, Fla., where he lives with his two Jack Russell terriers.

"In one sense, it had to be interesting," he said of his marriage to Betty. "If I was married to a gal who was a housewife, it wouldn't have been as exciting.

"I may have been happier and I may have gone further in the world, but it wouldn't have been as exciting. She was exciting."

[AlbionGirl]

feel ridiculed, uninformed, ignorant, and stupid. I personally love being a wife and get total fulfullment out of this.

You forgot to mention her famous analysis which stated you are probably living a life of 'quiet desperation.'

Here's what I think. She was a smart woman, but quite unattractive. She resented the fact that though smart, other things got in her way of receiving proper recognition. She knew she was smart, and was egotistical, and blamed other women who found what was nearly impossible for her to find, i.e. the satisfaction of being a woman, and liking it.

I read that she had almost no friends who were women, had mostly men friends. She probably didn't like women, 'cause she had to compete with them, and found that, according to her, what should have mattered most in the competition, did not.

I'm unmarried, have no children and have always worked. I can see how you feel the way you do, but you shouldn't let it get to you. Most women work 'cause they don't really like being 'at home' all the time, and because they want money. Money for themselves for their kids and home, etc. You can't tell me that any woman joined the workforce because she had an all-consuming ambition to be a 'manager of administrative protocol.'

All kids whose Moms choose to stay home, rather than work, have a foundation that nothing can wear away. That is contribution to the world that is very significant.

[pbmaltzman]

All I can say to that is B.S. The best thing a man can do to make sure that his daughters actually like men and want to get married in the first place, is to treat their wives and daughters well.

In my opinion, regardless of what you personally may think of feminism and "women's place" vis-a-vis men, if men treat their wives and daughters like SH*T, then there's no wonder some of them might be attracted to feminism.

But my father believed that a woman's place was to obey, regardless of how stupid he and his edicts might be. He seemed to truly believe that he owned his wife and his daughters. Now, maybe that's your idea of heaven, but personally it makes me want to puke. I would never have married any man who reminded me of my father.

I was so glad to finally get male teachers in grammar school... from then on, I tried to please them instead of my father (the old b*stard was impossible to please anyway).

If some men resemble chest-beating, moronic, 800-pound gorillas with testosterone poisoning, who the h*ll would want to marry one of them in the first place?

I'm glad that not all men are alike, but nevertheless, I was never attracted to the role of the self-sacrificing female who gave up everything else in the world in order to obey some man and spend most of her life taking care of other people.

Why should half of the population, simply by virtue of their plumbing, be required to be subservient to the other half, simply by virtue of their plumbing? Doesn't make sense to me and never has.

In my quest for decent male companionship, I *never* viewed my purpose as finding the right man to *obey.* Yecch.

[pbmaltzman]

You were basiing your decisons on the bad marriage you saw between your parents. How do you know you could not have met a good, kind, loving man and lived out a wonderful life together????

When I was very young, I was scared of men, because I was terrified that I'd marry someone and he'd turn out to be as much of a b*stard as my father was.

When I was very young, I was actually fairly good-looking (so don't spring the excuse of "unattractive" as a reason why I was sympathetic to feminism). However, I was also over six feet tall, I didn't get much attention from males in high school, and it didn't take me very long to realize that most men prefer their women smaller, and in fact a lot of men prefer their women tiny and, yes, some of them DO like their women dumb and helpless. I'm not either dumb or helpless.

I also didn't think I'd be very happy being a totally at-home wife and mother. I don't like housework, except for cooking and eating food... and I don't like being someone else's maid. I also didn't think I had a huge amount of patience for dealing with small children; I also didn't like children all that much.

I didn't want to depend on a man for my livelihood, because I could see that some men resented supporting their wives and families (not just my father). I've known more than one woman, besides my mother, who was dumped or widowed in her forties or fifties, without any job skills, and I was bound and determined not to be in that situation... so I got job skills.

I have always thought it extremely stupid and unrealistic to raise a female child with the expectation that someone else will always provide for her, and that she need never bother her pretty little head with such a thing as job skills... even if the guy loves you, is devoted, and never leaves her, he could still walk out the door tomorrow and be hit by a truck.

I'm a wife and mother and now a grandmother and I wouldn't trade it for all the money in the world. It's one of the most rewarding jobs in the world. Payment is love with raises coming in the form of children, grandchildren and a husband who loves and respects me and we are growing old together loving and caring for each other. Show me something better than that.

That's all very nice that it turned out that way for you. But it's also good to live in the modern world in a Western nation, where I can choose other things if that's what I want. I hope you do realize that not all women in the world want what you had. There is no way to know whether I would have found your situation nirvana... but I suspect that I would not have been that happy with it, given what I grew up with.

I did briefly date someone who went on to become a famous and wealthy neurosurgeon and businessman... maybe it would have been a good thing had our relationship led to the altar. But the guy is so busy that his wife and kids have to make an appointment with him for any attention.

Anyway, it's MOOT at this point in my life. As far as I can tell, time only flows one way.

I am not trashing your way of life; I am simply saying that I don't think I would have been happy doing it. So please don't trash my way of life.

I remember reading a book about Mary Wollstonecraft, she who wrote "Vindication of the Rights of Women." In her day (the 18th century), there truly were very few options for women... either marry someone with enough money to support you, become a nanny or a caretaker to a family, become a nun (depending on your religion), or become a prostitute. That was about it.

Wollstonecraft found that a lot of men in her day didn't like women with brains; the man she lusted after was married to a bimbo. She also died a few days after the birth of her last child.

So please pardon me if I prefer a different lifestyle than you. In my view, women are good for more than just one thing.

[pbmaltzman]

Thanks Ms. Friedan for making us women who choose being a wife and homemaker as our "career" feel ridiculed, uninformed, ignorant, and stupid. I personally love being a wife and get total fulfullment out of this. It makes me so sad that I continually get flack for this.

Frankly, I wish both sides would quit ridiculing each other. I used to live in an apartment building where I was flanked by two young mothers whom I found particularly hateful... they looked down on me because I had to work a lot and paid my own bills. They ridiculed me for no good reason that I could see. I never trashed them, but I finally couldn't stand the B.S. any longer and told them where to get off.

[pbmaltzman]

I remember reading a book about Mary Wollstonecraft, she who wrote "Vindication of the Rights of Women."

Note to self: S/B "Vindication of the Rights of Woman." That's what I get for posting in the middle of the night.

[Pittsburg Phil]

Well, what can one say but one less POS in the world.

[cubreporter]

Thank you Joe Boucher...I appreciate that. :)

[Old Professer]

We've always had a number of old maids; most of them were content to teach school and collect cats.

[pbmaltzman]

I'm not an "old maid." I have a significant other, and I had sporadic boyfriends across the years.

Being a wife and a mother is a job... just not one that I have had any desire to do. And from what I have seen, putting up with some men out there DOES deserve "combat pay" or "hazard pay."

While I had a teaching scholarship out of high school, as it's turned out, I'm glad I didn't go that route, as most public schools nowadays seem to be h*llholes and physically dangerous."

And as for collecting cats, well, in many cases they're nicer than humans, easier to put up with, and they more often return good treatment with affection (instead of sh*tting on those who help them), and I sincerely look forward to becoming an old lady so that I can collect more.

[wideawake]

Mhy comment is that I would not feel worried about wagering my life savings on a bet that she is burning in hell.

[wideawake]

Well, as a woman who didn't want to marry and have children, I'm glad there are more choices available for women

The exact same choices that exist today were available to women before Friedan was born: marriage, consecrated life or being a loser.

And, parenthetically, men have and have had the exact same three choices.

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