Karen Fletcher
"Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?" — The Feminine Mystique, 1963.
In 1963 Betty Friedan published the ultimate zeitgeist book debunking the myth of women's fulfilment through household drudgery, The Feminine Mystique. By her own account she was a fellow-sufferer with the middle-class women in the United States to whom the book was directed — a stultified, frustrated and, yes desperate, housewife cooped up in the suburban home she so unforgettably called her "comfortable concentration camp".
But Betty Friedan, now both lauded and derided as the founding parent of second wave, liberal feminism, did not spring fully formed from suburbia.
Born in 1921 to a Jewish jeweller and his "brainy" wife in Peoria, Illinois, Bettye Naomi Goldstein apparently became aware early on that her feisty and intelligent mother resented giving up her job at a local newspaper to raise a family. Bettye, also "brainy" by her own account, enrolled at the prestigious Smith university where she studied politics, economics and psychology against a background of the rise of fascism in Europe and the outbreak of World War II.
Bettye thrived at Smith, soaking up the ideas of leftist teachers, and becoming the radical, firebrand editor of the campus newspaper and an outspoken anti-fascist and advocate for the working class. According to biographer Daniel Horowitz, under Bettye Goldstein the Smith campus paper became notorious for its radicalism, taking on the student union for holding closed meetings and successfully challenging the university administration's right to control what the paper printed. "With an advertisement for a dress in which students could 'twirl away at teatime!' on the same page, one editorial asserted that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness mean very different things to employers and employees. The inequality of power in the US, the editorial argued, 'has to be admitted and dealt with if democracy is to have meaning for 95% of the citizens of this country'."
In 1943 Betty dropped the "e" and moved to New York to work for the labour movement press. In 1943-46 she was a staff writer for the Federated Press, a left-wing news service that provided stories for union papers across the country.
While there she interviewed Ruth Young, an organiser of women workers with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). The article described the way the thousands of women entering industry during the war were treated by employers — the lack of childcare, escalating prices, poor wages and conditions — and called on the US government to address these problems rather than "merely pinning up thousands of glamorous posters designed to lure more women into industry".
In 1946 Goldstein went to work as a journalist for the UE, then recognised as one of the most militant unions in the US, active among black and women workers and firmly in the sights of increasingly powerful anti-communist forces. The stories filed by Goldstein in the six years she spent at UE News include many stories of working women, black, white and Latina, struggling in their "two jobs" — breadwinner and housewife.
In 1952, UE published a pamphlet by Goldstein, UE Fights for Women Workers, in which she analysed how US industry was profiting from its exploitation of women workers and emphasised how this placed downward pressure on the wages and conditions of all workers. "Fighting the exploitation of women is men's business too", she concluded.
Controversy surrounds the way in which Betty Goldstein departed UE News. Friedan later said she was fired because she requested maternity leave. The union maintains that she was "laid off" because of the crisis the union faced as a result of McCarthyism and its struggle for survival. Horowitz speculates that this incident may have been one of a series of events that "made her skeptical about how seriously American labor unions, even radical ones, took their commitment to advance the cause of women".
Certainly, the eventual disappearance of working-class women and their struggle from Friedan's writing is remarkable. The Feminine Mystique, published under her married name, Betty Friedan, despite its radical analysis of the system (the "c" word is never used) offers only a limp "New Life Plan for Women" for white, middle-class, house-bound women to throw off the mental chains of their "feminine mystique" and claim self-realisation. It's a prescription that has palpably failed the millions of women still popping anti-depressants in their comfortable concentration camps.
But Friedan's two decades of radical training remained evident, and effective, in other ways. The Feminine Mystique contains a masterful critique of capitalism crafted for the consumption of the suburban mum. Friedan's understanding of the power of organisation was also critical to the formation of the National Organisation for Women (NOW) and, especially, its organisational links to black civil-rights organisations and trade unions.
Most tellingly, on August 26, 1970, Friedan led a march of tens of thousands of women and men in New York City in a "Strike for Equality". Thousands more marched around the US. From this rose the mighty second wave.
Friedan has been rightly criticised as socially conservative and homophobic — a failing she shared with her old left contemporaries — but wrongly portrayed (including by herself) as "just a little housewife from Peoria". As others have pointed out, Rosa Parks did not take a seat on the bus just because her feet were tired and Betty Friedan did not write The Feminine Mystique just because she was a bored housewife. The mother of liberal feminism had a Marxist-feminist history that should be told.
From Green Left Weekly, February 15, 2006.
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