A 100th birthday celebration in honor of the feminist raises the question: What was Ms. Friedan’s legacy exactly? ‘As with everything Betty, it’s complicated.’
“As with everything Betty, it’s complicated.”
— Rebecca Jo Plant, a historian at the University of California, San Diego
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If she were alive today, the feminist Betty Friedan would turn 100 this year.
It has been 15 years since she died on her birthday, Feb. 4, 2006, at age 85, and on Thursday there’ll be a pandemic-approved digital celebration in her honor.
Betty Friedan’s “100th Birthday Webinar,” produced by the Veteran Feminists of America, will be streamed on multiple platforms and will feature a veritable who’s who of speakers, including Gloria Steinem; Senator Elizabeth Warren; Alicia Garza, a founder of Black Lives Matter; and Christian Nunes, the president of the National Organization for Women, or NOW, which Ms. Friedan founded. There will be archival video footage, and two of Ms. Friedan’s children will talk about the difficulties of growing up with the so-called mother of the women’s movement. Senator Chuck Schumer will declare Feb. 4 “Betty Friedan Day.”
But less present in the event lineup are the voices of young, queer and lesbian feminists, which raises the question: What is Ms. Friedan’s legacy exactly?
“As with everything Betty, it’s complicated,” said Rebecca Jo Plant, a historian at the University of San Diego. “Today we celebrate an inclusive, intersectional feminism.” And Ms. Friedan came before that.
Ms. Friedan, despite her work fighting for reproductive rights, equal pay, equal representation and equality in hiring, was also known for calling lesbians “the lavender menace” and neglecting Black and working-class women in her book.
Her bristly character didn’t win her friends either. And she could be haughty. She also had a notoriously bad temper. She referred to Ms. Steinem and Bella Abzug as “female chauvinist boors” in her monthly column for McCall’s. These notorious explosions, which grew harsher over the years, tended to overshadow the work she was doing.
Publication of “The Feminine Mystique”
Ms. Friedan wrote what she knew.
Born Betty Goldstein in Peoria, Ill., the daughter of an unhappy housewife, she attended Smith College, where she graduated summa cum laude in 1942. She spent one year at the University of California, Berkeley, studying psychology in grad school then worked as a labor journalist in New York, where she wrote about Jim Crow laws and anti-Semitism. Marriage followed, then three children and a career as a women’s magazine writer. But she did not want to live her mother’s life. As she wrote, “I could not go home again to the life of my mother.”
In 1957, on the 15th anniversary of her graduation from Smith College, she began to interview the women attending her reunion. Out of those interviews came “The Feminine Mystique.” It sold three million copies and convinced many women they were not alone suffocating in their suburban homes with a “growing sense of dissatisfaction.”
“The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women,” Ms. Friedan wrote. “As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — ‘Is this all?’”
“Vacuuming the living room floor — with or without makeup — is not work that takes enough thought or energy to challenge any woman’s full capacity,” Ms. Friedan wrote.
Yet the book almost immediately received criticism. At least one reviewer thought it was derivative of Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex,” which had been published in English a decade earlier. It was criticized for its homophobic language and its comparisons between housewives and concentration camp victims. But perhaps the most widespread critique was that Ms. Friedan had pretty much omitted Black and working-class women from her manifesto. Working-class women, she wrote, were too busy working in factories to start the revolution, which is why it fell to the women of the middle class to “smash that empty image.”
The book “does read as if white, middle-class housewives’ lives are the lives of every American woman,” Ms. Plant said.
In a 1963 letter to Ms. Friedan, the historian Gerda Lerner applauded the book but also wrote, “Working women, especially Negro women, labor not only under the disadvantages imposed by the feminine mystique, but under the more pressing disadvantages of economic discrimination.” There is no record of Ms. Friedan’s reply, at least none has been found.
Nearly six decades on, the book still resonates, but so does that critique.
The book may still be considered a “blueprint for young feminists,” said Ms. Nunes, of NOW, but Jennifer Baumgartner, who co-wrote the 2000 “Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future,” said that Ms. Friedan’s book, which has “been labeled as retrograde” by scholars and activists, needs to be re-examined, especially in light of women’s backsliding because of the pandemic.
Barbara Smith, a Black feminist lesbian activist who in 1974 founded the Combahee River Collective, balanced her appraisal of Ms. Friedan. “Friedan really captured the repression and the oppression of middle-class women, but it left a lot of us out,” she said. But she added, “Most people of her generation would be homophobic.”
Founding of the National Organization for Women
Ms. Friedan herself recognized some of the book’s shortcomings. By 1965, she had started work on a second book, about the lives of women after “The Feminine Mystique,” which “contained a critique of systemic sexism,” said Katherine Turk, who teaches history at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. But Ms. Friedan abandoned that project when several women told her there was a need for an organization that could be “the N.A.A.C.P. for women.” This would eventually become NOW.
In June 1966, at a conference of state commissions on the status of women, frustrated by the lack of momentum on issues she cared about, Ms. Friedan came up with the name for NOW and, with other attendees, began working out its mission on a paper napkin: “The purpose of NOW is to take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men …”
The organization may be Ms. Friedan’s most enduring accomplishment — and certainly one of her more large-minded. Her stewardship of the organization “was more intersectional than we want to give her credit for,” Ms. Nunes said, pointing out that one of her co-founders was Pauli Murray, a Black lesbian minister.
In its first four years, NOW made extraordinary efforts to end sexism in America, driving forward legislation to help make women equal in spheres including jobs and housing, and “de-sexgregating” all-male bars and restaurants.
Eleanor Pam, 84, the president of the Veteran Feminists of America, said, “We were being led by a complicated leader who drove us, yet despite that, the victories were worth it.”
The historian Daniel Horowitz said: “I think of her in terms of Martin Luther King Jr. No one person is responsible for a movement, but she is terribly important.”
If “The Feminine Mystique” identified “the problem that had no name” — a phrase Ms. Friedan coined — NOW made strides in giving women equality in nearly every sphere of American life.
From NOW to NARAL to N.W.P.C.
By 1968, Ms. Friedan, then 47, and moving toward a divorce, was enmeshed in bruising fights with younger, more radical feminists impatient with her incrementalism, her defense of men, her refusal to support lesbians and her temper.
Finding NOW too conservative on reproductive rights, she co-founded the National Association to Repeal Abortion Laws, NARAL. At the same time, she tried to block lesbians from coming out in NOW at a 1969 meeting, calling them “the lavender menace.”
Her defenders, such as Muriel Fox, NOW’s first public relations director, said that Ms. Friedan feared that making lesbians central to the women’s movement would marginalize it.
In 1970, even as Ms. Friedan stepped down from the presidency of the organization, she organized the Women’s Strike for Equality, a nationwide celebration of the 50th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, and torpedoed the nomination of Judge G. Harrold Carswell, whom she deemed sexist, to the Supreme Court — thanks to her testimony at the nomination hearing, and that of Representative Patsy Mink from Hawaii.
The next year, with Ms. Abzug and Ms. Steinem, she founded the National Women’s Political Caucus. Yet her own gaffes and outbursts continued to plague her efforts. As a delegate for Shirley Chisholm’s campaign for president, she promised to host “a traveling watermelon feast,” which played into racist stereotypes. She publicly accused Ms. Steinem and Ms. Abzug of destroying the movement with radical politics.
Publication of “The Second Stage”
Ms. Friedan moved on. She became a Zionist, and fought to expose anti-Semitism in the women’s movement.
She was also laser focused on getting the Equal Rights Amendment passed, publishing “The Second Stage” in 1981.
The book, which contains many difficult-to-read passages railing against rape victims and anti-porn feminists, did not endear her to young feminists: Susan Faludi blamed her for destroying the women’s movement and Simone de Beauvoir threw the book across the room, according to Ms. de Beauvoir’s biographer. But Ms. Plant, the historian, said “The Second Stage” was prescient.
“All the work on the problems of reconciling work outside the home and motherhood — the ‘double burden,’ ‘second shift,’ and ‘motherhood penalty’ — came after ‘The Second Stage’ was published,” she said.
The Legacy She Leaves
LaToya Councill, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at University of Southern California who identifies as a Black feminist intersectional scholar, said that although “The Feminine Mystique” should be read, too much scholarship in the decades after its publication had followed Ms. Friedan’s lead, universalizing white suburbia. “Let’s not center the white, middle-class, heteronormative family,” she said.
And Koa Beck, the former editor of Jezebel and author of the 2020 book, “White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to the Influencers and Who They Leave Behind,” pointed out that one of Ms. Friedan’s solutions to the feminine mystique was to delegate housework. But “she did not unpack that in a critical way,” Ms. Beck said.
Ms. Fox, the former public relations director of NOW, pointed out that in 1977, at the International Women’s Year Conference in Houston, Ms. Friedan apologized for using the phrase “lavender menace.” She had been more concerned about getting the Equal Rights Amendment passed.
To many of today’s feminists, none of this redeems her.
Ms. Beck said, “It took a lot of work from her fellow organizers to get her to recognize the needs of queer woman.”
Almost until the end of her life, Ms. Friedan continued to complain about how women had not reached equality. The revolution “is not over,” she said, adding that in some cases, women contribute half of the household income, “but do men do 50 percent of the housework? Do men do 50 percent of the child care?”
Her book is still taught on college campuses and many still do look to her — and her work — for inspiration.
Last summer, Katelyn Batson, a freshman at the University of Albany, bought a copy at a bookstore in Massachusetts. The book made her want to join NOW.
“I think it’s still relevant today,” she said.
Rachel Shteir is working on a book about Betty Friedan.
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