Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique and numerous other books, has died at age 85.
Gah. If someone would alert the mods and request a coding fix I’d appreciate it.
Yeah, i was going to post a thread about this last night.
Friedan seems, in many ways, like a pretty conservative feminist when viewed from post-60s America, but her contribution to feminism and to American intellectual life generally was extremely valuable and groundbreaking.
My undergrad students will be reading some selections from The Feminine Mystique later this semester.
RIP
It’s a shame that younger people don’t appreciate how groundbreaking (and even revolutionary) her ideas were, and how courageous she was in attacking the status quo. RIP, Betty.
Is anyone else not that taken with Betty Friedan? I acknowledge the good she did for the women’s rights movement, but I still shudder when I think of the phrase “lavender menace”. I have trouble honoring a person who fought for women’s rights, but didn’t fight for the rights of all women.
-Mosquito
Well, for me it’s a matter of trying to understand her in the context of her time and her own social backgrond and situation. We all bring certain predispositions to our thinking, and there are, for many people, certain things that simply fall outside the realm of the possible.
We could, for example, excoriate Lincoln for saying that his own feelings would “not admit” freeing blacks and “making them socially and politically our equals.” But this would be, in my opinion, to miss the importance of Lincoln’s place in history, and to adopt and excessively present-centered and unsophisticated understanding of his historical significance.
YMMV.
She did eventually come to understand the error of her ways. Which does not excuse her early failures regarding lesbian issues but does to an extent mitigate them.
The last few posts here make an interesting contrast to the last couple pages of the concurrent “man-hating Nazis” thread, in which Evil Captor (among others) has opined along the same lines as Friedan in her “lavender menace” statement, i.e., that the women’s movement should disavow Those Women and not allow them into the movement leadership lest the movement be tagged as anti-male etc etc.
This sounds like you’re saying that only the perfect are worthy of honor.
On a personal aside: my family moved to Peoria IL in 1968, when I was 9. A couple of years later my mom told me that Friedan had grown up there. I don’t remember the full context of the conversation, but my inference was that Mom thought Peoria had something to be ashamed of. No doubt this is a reflection of her own internal conflicts. While Mom grew up in a conservative, semirural environment and held strongly to those values in many ways, she also felt the impact of sexist attitudes and restrictions on her educational and career opportunities. For example, her father required her to go to a local teacher’s college, in spite of the fact that she had a scholarship to the U of Nebraska. Also, my father prohibited her from working until her youngest child was in high school.