Posted on 02/04/2006 7:53:10 PM PST by no dems
Betty Friedan, whose manifesto "The Feminine Mystique" helped shatter the cozy suburban ideal of the post-World War II era and laid the groundwork for the modern feminist movement, died Saturday, her birthday. She was 85.
(Excerpt) Read more at fredericksburg.com ...
IMO it's total B.S. that those are the only three choices in life. Not everyone desires to breed, or to be surrounded by a crowd 24 x 7. Some of us like peace and quiet but aren't nuns either (I'm not Catholic).
It wasn't that long ago that women who aspired to go on to professional school were basically advised to give up the seat to a man--for whatever bullsh*t reasons they were told. Now, of course, women are take it for granted that, for example, they can be doctors instead of nurses if that's what they want, or they can be attorneys instead of secretaries or paralegals, which *I* think is a positive change.
I have visited three different veterinary schools in this country... nowadays women make up the majority of many of the entering classes; but that's only happened within the last decade or so. At UC Davis and Colorado State, their graduating classes were nearly all men until fairly recently... you can see their class pictures in the hallways.
When Betty Friedan was born, less than 15% of Americans worked as white collar professionals and less than 15% went to college.
Only the wealthiest Americans could afford to send children to college or prepare them for professional careers.
But, as Americans became more and more affluent, more and more Americans became white collar, and more and more Americans could afford to send their kids to college.
The wealthy Friedans sent their pampered daughter to prestigious Smith college and after she graduated she went on to graduate study at Berkeley. Then she went to work as a journalist.
She was hardly the first little rich girl to go to college or graduate school or have a professional career.
My mother, who is not much younger than Friedan and who grew up poor in a one-parent household, put herself through college and accomplished everything she has in life (a 40+ year professional career, a happy 40+ year marriage and raising four children) without buying into this "women are oppressed" garbage. My mother was running a wing of a hospital before Betty Friedan published her first book.
You are selling a tired leftist myth.
Friedan was an ugly, spoiled, man-hating, child-hating, America-hating, self-proclaimed Marxist/Leninist troll.
Friedan's goal in life was to make as many women as possible as maladjusted and unhappy as she was.
My girlfriend goes there and Davis is less than *10%* males!
Good for your mother. You are selling a tired leftist myth.
Number one, I'm not leftist at all. Nor am I a conservative. I'm a libertarian.
Number two, you're assuming, from a few comments of mine, that I am somehow totally in agreement with Friedan. I'm not.
It is true, however, that in a lot of families, the female children were discouraged from getting an education, or as much of an education, as the males were.
The mother of a high-school girlfriend of mine prohibited her from even being in the marching band because it was somehow "unfeminine," according to her (Orthodox or Conservative) Jewish mother. And even though her father was a lawyer and could have well afforded to pay her way through undergrad school and law school, he totally refused. She had to work her way through both university and law school. She became a city attorney and they are now proud of her, but she had to do it all herself.
However, when the baby of the family, her youngest, extremely spoiled brother, wanted to go to law school, the family paid his way 100%. And he lived at home and mommy did his laundry for him.
Does that qualify as oppression? Probably not... but the difference in treatment between siblings would have made me puke.
Friedan was an ugly, spoiled, man-hating, child-hating, America-hating, self-proclaimed Marxist/Leninist troll. Yeah, yeah, what a tired old line you a$$holes keep dragging out. Because she wasn't attractive, that somehow invalidates everything that ever came out of her mouth.
Friedan's goal in life was to make as many women as possible as maladjusted and unhappy as she was.
I agree that she was misguided as h*ll. But having a goal to make as many other women as possible unhappy? That's a a big stretch, and qualifies as sheer bullsh*t, in my opinion.
Now it might be less than 10% males... now that women aren't prohibited from admission to the veterinary school simply by reason of their sex.
However, check out the graduation photo montages from previous classes up through the 1960s... you'll find maybe one or two women per graduating class, if that many.
That was A HALF CENTURY AGO...! Are you in A TIME WARP? Or just really old?
I visited those three vet schools in the time since 1990, 16 years ago. I was commenting on what I had seen and researched.
At one time, when I was still in my 30s, I had thought I'd make one last attempt at seeing if it would be possible for me to finish an undergrad degree and get into vet school.
I checked out the applicant-to-seat ratios in several places, and over the years visited three of them... UC Davis, U of Tenn at Knoxville, and Colorado State. U of Tenn was, at that time, the newest of the vet schools in this country, so it doesn't really count.
But at UC Davis and Colorado State, they did indeed have photo montages on the walls going back several decades. Up through the 1960s, some classes didn't even have any women in them at all, others one or two.
When I was a teenager and took my dog to the vet, I mentioned that I'd like to become a vet too... all I got was a grunt.
Sounds like you're taking for granted that just because a lot of women get into vet school NOW, things have always been that way. That's not true! I'm pointing out that things have changed, and fairly recently.
Last time I checked, though, most of the vet schools with predominantly women in their classes were on the coasts. If you go to a place like Kansas or another midwestern state which is still more traditional than California, you might not find so many women there in vet school even today. About 15 years ago, I think, places like Kansas lagged behind coastal places in admitting women to vet school.
No, I'm not in a time warp, nor am I old--but I'm obviously commenting on something that happened before your time!
You sound like a very angry person.
That feminism has become distorted in recent years doesn't mean there wasn't a real need for the feminism that brought us the vote and a more equal role in society.
Feminism of yesteryear is to feminism today as ML King was to Jessie Jackson. The first were pioneers, who tamed new ground. The latter are hangers on... fighting on for their own glory even though the battle that needed fighting has long ago been won.
Like all too many Communist agitators, she had no ability to hold a job, and needed somebody to support her. Her life revolved around her resentment over not being awarded a bigger role in life
...If I am more inclined to believe Mr. Friedan's side of the story, it is only because his ex-wife has a long and well-documented history of lying.Betty Friedan presented herself in The Feminine Mystique—the 1963 book that launched modern feminism—as a suburban housewife who had never given a thought to "the woman question," until she attended a Smith College reunion which revealed the dissatisfaction of her well-educated female classmates, unable to balance traditional roles with modern careers.
But, as Smith College professor Daniel Horowitz (no relation) revealed in his book Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminist Mystique, Betty was not very candid about the facts of her own life and the sources of her radical perspective. She was hardly a suburban housewife when she wrote those words, but a twenty-five year veteran of professional journalism in the Communist Left, where she had been thoroughly indoctrinated in the politics of "the woman question" and specifically the idea that women were "oppressed."
As Horowitz's biography makes clear, Friedan, from her college days and until her mid-thirties, was a Stalinist marxist (or a camp follower thereof), the political intimate of leaders of America's Cold War fifth column, and for a time even the lover of a young communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects with J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Not at all a neophyte when it came to the "woman question" (the phrase itself is a marxist construction), she was certainly familiar with the writings of Engels, Lenin, and Stalin on the subject and had written about it herself as a journalist for the official publication of the communist-controlled United Electrical Workers union.
Friedan's secret was shared by hundreds of her comrades on the Left – though not, of course, by the unsuspecting American public – who went along with her charade presumably as a way to support her political agenda.
The actual facts of Friedan's life—that she was a professional marxist ideologue, that her husband supported her full-time writing and research, that she had a maid and lived in a Hudson river mansion, attending very little to household duties—were inconvenient to the persona and the theory she was determined to promote. ...
Say what? No, not really angry... just totally amazed that someone of your generation seemingly has NO sense of what came before his time.
I stated that I had seen changes in the gender balance of entering classes of vet students, based on my research and actual viewing of the photo montages of vet school graduating classes over time... you chose to make a big deal of it, stating that I must be in a time warp or very old... what the h*ll is your problem? Sheesh!!
When my parents got divorced when I was about 14 (nearly 40 years ago), my mother had a very difficult time getting credit on her own, even a department store credit card... I guess that all the credit they had had when married had been in his name.
Today men and women may take everything for granted, but it hasn't really been that long that women's identity wasn't separate at all from their husbands' identity, and I'm talking about more than just women giving up their names when married. Married women also, in the not-too-distant past, had a hard time owning property in their own names.
Betty Friedan is dead.
Good.
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