Posted on 02/09/2006 7:39:43 AM PST by dukeman
Promiscuity and STDs, abortion- and divorce-on-demand, fatherless children—these are parts of her legacy.
With her death this week, Betty Friedan’s legacy is complete. Actually, Friedan herself closed the books years ago on the movement that she started when she rejected modern feminism and those leaders who followed her.
The final knell for the movement was left for the current generation; they have rejected feminism outright. A CBS poll revealed that three out of four women described the word “feminist” as an insult. Another study found that the number of working women who believe that a career is as important as being a wife and mother has fallen 23 percent since the ’70s.
Clearly, feminism today –– a movement that spawned hatred for men, fostered lesbianism, and pushed radical politics –– is out of step with mainstream women.
Feminism has “come a long way”; a long way . . . the wrong way!
In the early ’60s, the book Feminine Mystique took the women of America by storm. By becoming an advocate for women’s power, Betty Friedan brought her cause into the living rooms and bedrooms of America and launched the so-called “women’s movement.” Claiming that frustrated and thwarted women were downing tranquilizers “like cough drops,” she said, “Some people thought I said, ‘Women . . . you have nothing to lose but your men.’ It’s not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners.”
Friedan obviously struck a responsive nerve over 45 years ago. Women of the ’60s were happy to have a sophisticated-sounding secular analysis for their spiritual hunger, and thousands sought to fill their emptiness with feminist manna. In contrast to Oprah, who teaches women to seek power from within, Friedan sought to find power in the external marketplace. Strong women pursued power, she proclaimed –– power provided the path toward self-actualization and happiness.
Far too many women, including Betty Friedan herself, crashed their lives on the shoals of faulty reasoning about the path to power. Their grasping attempts to seize power led not to self-actualization but disillusionment and cynicism.
Friedan was foremost among those who became disillusioned and cynical. She talked about the “problem that has no name” and viewed women as victims. She was the impetus behind the devaluing of women as wives and mothers. Being female, she said, meant having delusions and false values, and being forced to find fulfillment and identity through husbands and children.
Friedan worked nine hours a day so that, she said, being a wife and a mother would not “interfere with what I regarded as my real life.”
We are confronted through Friedan’s death with the reality of another utopian ideal, whose animating principles –– women’s rights, sexual equality and the fulfillment of women’s potential –– are high-sounding and noble. Even her friends describe her as difficult, ill-tempered, disagreeable, ego-driven, rude, nasty, self-serving and imperious. Unhappily married for 21 years, her three children had to undergo therapy to deal with what was called “the emotional fallout.”
Today, Friedan’s lament that “morality doesn’t have anything to do with what two people do in bed” has turned relationships between men and women to a matter of disease prevention. Charles Krauthammer summarized it this way: “Where once the health of the soul took primacy, now the health of the body is supreme.”
By devaluing home and hearth, far too many women have found their window of opportunity for marriage and family closed. Today in America, more women of typical marriage age (20-45) are unmarried than ever before. Late-marrying couples are spending billions on fertility treatments desperately hoping to have a child.
By eschewing marriage, single mothers have ended up both rocking the baby and paying the rent. The children of single mothers are paying an even higher price –– one-third of U.S. children are born out-of-wedlock, the majority of whom will grow up in poverty and at-risk in every outcome category.
Promiscuity and cohabitation have resulted in 10 million people under the age of 25 contracting an STD every year!
Divorce-on-demand has left 35 million kids bereft.
And, finally, tragically, more than 43 million babies have been aborted, leaving untold pain for the women who would have been their mothers.
Somewhere along the way, the feminist movement forgot that “having it all” included the personal dimension. Life is not just profession and career. Success is not measured just in power, paycheck and status. The 2003 Young Businesswoman of the Year, Gabrielle Molnar, explained that she didn’t want to be called a feminist because “feminism doesn’t support the cause of women.”
Certainly, women want the freedom to be all that they can be and they want to be treated with dignity and respect. They also want the opportunity to have meaningful careers and productive lives ––– but most aren’t willing for their ambition to harm their relationships or damage their children.
Janice Shaw Crouse, Ph.D., author, columnist and commentator, is Senior Fellow of Concerned Women for America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute.
You can have it all! Skip the husband, have a kid via in-vitro or just get a friend to donate the sperm. Continue to pursue your career and just put the kid in day care, and bitch and moan that the government does not provide a solution to you. It's all men's fault anyway!
She must've been a real peice of work, when a very liberal paper can even have a eulogy without saying something negative.
Excellent article, thanks! My generation suffered greatly from Ms. Friedan's misguided views.
I've often wondered why it is that lesbians and ugly women
always seem to be the biggest "feminists".Why is it that most of the leadership of NOW are lesbians?
Feminism killed civil rights.
Women were demanding places in the predominately white male work force at just the time that black husbands and fathers were gaining acceptance.
Racist employers opted to support white feminism rather than give black men the chance they deserved. Other
Employers were faced with a dilemma and often avoided hard choices by hiring "twofers" (black women).
We are still dealing with the resulting havoc in African-American families.
This sentence is very telling. If the women of the 60s weren't ready to buy into Friedan's illogical view of "women's rights" there would never have been a feminist movement, and American culture would have been much different than it is today.
By devaluing home and hearth, far too many women have found their window of opportunity for marriage and family closed.
How can a "closing of a window of opportunity" be anyone's fault other than the women who bought into liberal Utopian ideals -- and why should we care?
It's true. Most "lesbians" of that ilk are only so because they don't take the time or effort to try and win a good man. But feminism has even lessened the numbers of good men, by brainwashing men into becoming liberal wusses, all in the name of political correctness.
Gee, sounds suspiciously like a senator from New York
Exactly. Commentators on both sides seem to think that Friedan had some sort of magical powers that made happy housewives want to become career women all of a sudden. Friedan's book would have been just another book had not the conditions had not been right for change. If Friedan had never been born, the feminist movement would have still happen, and probably would have been just as successful. You would be better off blaming technology than Friedan for feminism.
"...have a kid via in-vitro or just get a friend to donate the sperm."
By-passing the sex part of procreation; that's why all these feminist old bags were "frustrated". Making kids is the fun part. But then, most of them were so ugly they probably couldn't get a man to do it "to" them so they had to get a man to do it "for" them.
Gee, what a gal!!!!
I distinctly remember when I first heard the word "feminist" and I turned around to the TV and looked at the UGLIEST "women" I had ever seen, and thought that "feminist" was a new word for "Very Unattractive Female"! It HAD to be a JOKE because there was NOTHING feminine about these women!!
Betty Friedan and people like her have "led children astray" by telling them abortion is OK...I certainly hope she begged God for forgiveness and atoned for her sins.
VERY interesting! I had NEVER thought about what women's rights did to the black man!!
LOL
BTTT
Feminist--a 60's radical leftist female from an east coast ivy league university too ugly to get a date, who bemoans the 'tyranny of a male-dominated world' but in the 80's succumbed to the tyranny of her glands.
And sometimes threefers.....black, Hispanic women.
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