Betty Friedan 1921-2006

It was the timidity and fear of magazine editors that changed the world forever for American women in the 1960’s.

Publications like McCall’s, Redbook and Ladies Home Journal had commissioned one of their regular freelance writers to do a story on the role of American women after World War II.  When the writer, Betty Friedan, came back with an essay on the increasing sense of unhappiness of American housewives, she was met with skepticism, if not downright hostility.

McCall’s and Redbook rejected the article.  Ladies Home Journal rewrote it in a way that stated the exact opposite of Friedan’s point.  Pulling the article, Betty called her agent from a subway station:

“I told her, ‘I’ll have to write a book to get this into print.’  What I was writing threatened the very foundation of the women’s magazine world - the feminine mystique.”

Three days a week, Betty took the bus from Rockland County into New York City, where she diligently worked on her book, sitting alone in the Allen Room of the New York Public Library. 

The book took five years to complete.

The rest, as they say, is history.  The Feminine Mystique rocked American society and was the catalyst for what has been called the “Second Wave” of feminism - the call for equal rights in education and the workplace.  Editors, writers and critics were outraged; American women were inspired and empowered.  The message of the feminine mystique became the rallying cry of women across the country and spawned the women’s liberation movement led by Friedan and Gloria Steinem.

Since its publication in 1963, The Feminine Mystique has sold more than 3 million copies, has been translated into numerous languages and is easily considered one of the best all-time non-fiction books.  Betty Friedan has written new introductions for each decade of reissue (included with the original introduction); it has been fascinating to read her perspective on the metamorphosis of American women since the book’s publication.

Betty Friedan died yesterday, on her 85th birthday.  I’d like to think she went peacefully, knowing her life had purpose and had changed the world.  I’d also like to believe she was watching over the latest transition of American women with delight - an era I call the “Third Wave” - women rallying for equality in media, advertising and marketing.  Without Betty Friedan, who knows how much longer it would have taken us to get here.

“Grown-up men and women... become more and more authentically themselves.  And they do not pretend that men are from Mars or women are from Venus.  They even share each other’s interests, talk a common shorthand of work, love, play, kids, politics.  We may now begin to glimpse the new human possibilities when women and men are finally free to be themselves, know each other for who they really are, and define the terms and measures of success, failure, joy, triumph, power, and the common good, together.”
                                          Betty Friedan, 1997

Comments

[bilbo]

If you only knew how many lives feminism has destroyed.

America will collapse because of feminism.