Betty Friedan, Who Ignited Cause in 'Feminine Mystique,' Dies at 85

The New York Times ^ | February 6, 2006 | MARGALIT FOX

[Jenny Hatch]

Ms. Friedan's private life was also famously stormy. In her recent memoir, "Life So Far" (Simon & Schuster, 2000), she accused her husband of being physically abusive during their marriage, writing that he sometimes gave her black eyes, which she concealed with make-up at public events and on television.

Mr. Friedan, who died in December, repeatedly denied the accusations. In an interview with Time magazine in 2000, shortly after the memoir's publication, he called Ms. Friedan's account a "complete fabrication." He added: "I am the innocent victim of a drive-by shooting by a reckless driver savagely aiming at the whole male gender."

Ms. Friedan's other books include "It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement" (Random House, 1976); "The Second Stage" (Summit, 1981); and "The Fountain of Age" (Simon & Schuster, 1993).

The recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, she was a visiting professor at universities around the country, among them Columbia, Temple and the University of Southern California. In recent years, Ms. Friedan was associated with the Institute for Women and Work at Cornell University.

Despite all of her later achievements, Ms. Friedan would be forever known as the suburban housewife who started a revolution with "The Feminine Mystique." Rarely has a single book been responsible for such sweeping, tumultuous and continuing social transformation.

The new society Ms. Friedan proposed, founded on the notion that men and women were created equal, represented such a drastic upending of the prevailing social norms that over the years to come, she would be forced to explain her position again and again.

"Some people think I'm saying, 'Women of the world unite — you have nothing to lose but your men,' " she told Life magazine in 1963. "It's not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners."

[Jenny Hatch]

Here is my blog entry on the death of Betty.

Every single position she stood for and promoted was a slap in the face to home makers like me who have embraced motherhood as the highest calling of women.

Here is what I wrote this morning upon learning she was dead...

Betty died. She was a closet Marxist who used the women's movement to further the Communist cause.

Go here, here and here for more info...

Quotes:

David Horowitz:

"Even the much-abused Mr. Friedan – also a leftist -- continues to praise his wife for her political "achievements." On his website, he writes, "I am proud of what she did for the world… Betty being monstrous in pursuit of her goals doesn't bother me at all. She changed the course of history almost singlehandedly and it took a `monster' perhaps, a driven, super-aggressive, egocentric, almost lunatic dynamo to rock the world the way she did. Unfortunately, she was the same person at home, where this kind of conduct does not work."

What Mr. Friedan seems to be saying is that it was all right for his wife to abuse everyone else, but not to abuse him. This sort of thinking is typical of the Left."

"And why are people like Friedan lying long after they have anything to fear from McCarthy committees and the like?

Surely no one seriously believes that people who reveal their Communist pasts these days have anything to fear from the American government."

"The idea that America punishes those who betray her is laughable, as is the idea that leftists have anything to fear from their government if they tell the truth...

...So why the continuing lies? The reason is this: The truth is too embarrassing. Imagine what it would be like for Betty Friedan (the name actually is Friedman) to admit that as a Jew she opposed America's entry into the war against Hitler because Stalin told her that it was just an inter-imperialist fracas?

Imagine what it would be like for America's premier feminist to acknowledge that well into her 30s she thought Stalin was the Father of the Peoples, and that the United States was an evil empire, and that her interest in women's liberation was just a subtext of her real desire to create a Soviet America. No, those kinds of revelations don't help a person who is concerned about her public image.

Which is why it probably has seemed better just to lie about this all these years. The problem, however, is that lying can't be contained."

Click on the image to get to the Amazon link

"With 'The Feminine Mystique,' Friedan began a long tradition among American feminists of seeing compulsory domesticity as the main consequence of 1950s McCarthyism." Well, perhaps it's not American feminists Friedan has sold this bizarre version of reality to, so much as American Communists posing as feminists and unsuspecting young women whose only understanding of this past will come from their tenured leftist professors."

Richard Poe

Hardline Stalinist

"Beginning in college, Friedan – then known by her maiden name of Betty Goldstein – was already a hardline Stalinist, active in the communist movement. Though Jewish, she supported Stalin’s 1939 nonaggression pact with Hitler. When orders went out from Moscow to all Communist Parties worldwide to treat Hitler as a friend, many communists couldn’t stomach it and broke ranks with Stalin. But Friedan was among the loyal few who obeyed.

"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," writes David Horowitz (not Daniel), in a 1999 FrontPageMagazine.com article called "Feminist Icon Debunked."

Friedan later married a fellow leftist, Carl Friedan, and devoted her life to the cause of Marxist revolution. Friedan spent her married years working as a "labor journalist" – a professional propagandist for the Left. Her full-time maid did the housework. As her ex-husband Carl later noted, Friedan "was in the world during the whole marriage" and "seldom was a wife and mother.""

Betty Friedan - Feminist Icon

[dfwgator]

Well now she's having lunch with her hero Stalin in Hell.

[Just mythoughts]

She is the mommy of "feeling" speak.

[lOKKI]

I admit to stealing this comment from a blog entry:


"In the death of Betty Friedan, the world lost a real class broad and a pretty good lay too."

[Jacquerie]

Funny, I didn't hear of her communist ties yesterday on National People's Radio paean. /sarcasm

[RedBloodedAmerican]

Feminism Pioneer Betty Friedan Dies at 85 ^
	Posted by no dems On News/Activism ^ 02/04/2006 10:53:10 PM EST · 41 replies · 837+ views The Free Lance - Star ^ | 2-4-06 | Hillel Italie 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.
Feminist Author Betty Friedan Dies at 85 ^
	Posted by GeneD On News/Activism ^ 02/04/2006 4:10:18 PM EST · 250 replies · 5,118+ views AP via Yahoo! News ^ | 02/04/2006 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...

[theBuckwheat]

And what do women have to show for feminism? Beyond 'equal pay for equal work', we have the destruction of marriage and family. We have women thinking that a husband is not necessary to raise children, even as we have much higher crime rates from fatherless children. We have women who become frantic to have children as their biological clock starts to run down because they haven't been able to find a suitable husband. We have a lot of young males who got the message that they don't have to buy the cow because they can get the milk for free.

And strangely, we have women thinking they are better off acting like men than like women.

Friedan fixed a few social problems that probably would have fixed themselves in time. In the process she set in motion trends and forces of social change that wreaked many lives.

[Jenny Hatch]

Thanks for the links, I knew other threads had been started, but I wanted to post the obit from the new york times. They also seemed to miss the fact that she was a die hard commie and never mothered her kids.

The bit about her being a battle ax of a wife was a nod to the truth, but forgetting her roots in communist political ideology, which wafted like a stink through everything she wrote....just the New York Times being the New York Times...

Now that she is dead, I'm sure we'll get some interesting factoids from the people who really knew her.

ANyone ever notice that if you say Bella Abzugs name real fast it sounds like Beelzebub???

Jenny

[IncPen]

"In the death of Betty Friedan, the world lost a real class broad and a pretty good lay too."

Not according to her husband.

I followed a Google link from a thread yesterday dealing with her accusations of abuse at his hands during their marriage

His site is offline now, but the cached version contains this gem: Nineteen years of marriage and not one bl*wjob"

Mr. Friedan, it would seem, has 'issues'. And even a little bit of reading will reveal that this woman was reviled by everyone who knew her, and worshipped by everyone who didn't.

I suppose it's nice that Satan has a new lunch partner, for what that's worth...

[kenth]

Well now she's having lunch with her hero Stalin in Hell.

It'd be funny if she was serving lunch to him.

[Jenny Hatch]

"In the process she set in motion trends and forces of social change that wreaked many lives."


Oh those darn unintended consequences....

Fact is, she knew what she was doing. Marx and Engels had called for the abolition of the family decades before she began her work. She knew that stirring the pot and convincing women that they were better off without men would help to disintegrate the family.

I suppose only God knows how many families have been ruined because of Mothers giving in to the temptation to believe feminist lies.

I'm an anti-feminist because I completely acknowledge my dependance on my husband to provide me and my little ones with food, clothing, and shelter, especially while I am pregnant and nursing.

I just cringe when I see a young mom trying to do it all. She burns out so fast, and the ones who truly suffer are the babies.

Jenny

[RedBloodedAmerican]

Glad to help with other cross links. She was a real piece of a person; man hater, child hater; she never really liked women, only what she wanted them to be.
And yes, I always have thought that about Azbug since I first heard her name! LOL
Hey you could post your blog under the bloggers topics, you know, instead of under a NY Times. It might get more exposure. Just a thought.

[GeorgeW23225]

Good riddance!!

Another Commie bites the dust. No tears from me!!

[Continental Soldier]

Betty Friedan -- A woman now praised for her 'feminist' work, was, in truth, the originator of so much disharmony, so much discord between men and women, so much misdirection in the life of the sexes, so much misplaced ambition, so much falsity in her private agendas. She, and the others who took their lead from her, should look at what they have wrought -- is the world really better than it was? Is it now the world you wanted? Are women as respected, honored and loved as they used to be? Hmm...?

[freekitty]

She set women back a thousand years.

[PzLdr]

Even funnier. He was a misogynist AND an anti-Semite.

[A6M3]

She is lunch, for satan.

[A6M3]

Instead of burying her, they should feed her to the pigs.

[SweetCaroline]

PING

[Jenny Hatch]

"the originator of so much disharmony,"

By dissing the important work of home making and mothering, what she did is ensure that millions of American children grew up in filthy homes with no home cooked meals. We have a generation or two of women who have lost all sense of what it means to nourish a family.

And for so many women who are dedicated stay at home moms, the need to "find themselves" by going to school to learn how to be even better socialists, perhaps gaining skills in one field or another, skills that are often required in a society that has lost its foundation, and by this I mean doctors, dentists, chefs, nannys, and working in homes for the aged.

C.S. Lewis said the homemaker is the reason for all other professions. And my feeling is that conversely, the better run each individual home, the more thoughtful intent put into mothering, the less the need for the doctor, the dentist, the day care, and the nurse.

When mothers understand and EMBRACE their roll as consumate nurturer, the health of the family goes up in direct relation to her efforts, and the less need for the rest of society to pick up the pieces.

I love reading about the time before the revolutionary war in America. One book I read talked about how the only cash expense the average farmer had, because they were so completely self-sufficient, was to hire a midwife for all the babies being born.

When you think about the exponential explosion is careers that have been started and expanded since Betty started yelling in the 60's, which have been created to "replace" the work that women traditionally did, I wonder if anyone has taken the time to list all of the jobs, and the pro/con list of the trade off of women's work being replaced by careerism.

I KNOW when I prepare my family's food each day, and live intentionally as a mother that I am doing the absolute most important work in the world.

Jenny