Feminist Author Betty Friedan Dies at 85

All these strong women passing away, and in contrast all I can see is how relentlessly macho-obsessed our leaders are. I hate it.

I met Betty Friedan about a decade ago when she came to sign copies of her book, The Fountain of Age, at a local bookstore. Though my politics were more radical than hers, her contribution to the public conversation about women's rights was invaluable, and no matter how "bourgeois" she was or seemed, I'm not one to throw the baby out w/ the bathwater. I am one to thank my feminist foremothers for their courage and bloodymindedness. It takes a village, folks, and we need Betty like we need me and you and so-and-so and her sister.

I took off work, excited to meet her, and arrived just as they were closing up shop. She signed my copy of The Feminine Mystique, I thanked her for founding the National Organization for Women, of which I was a card-carrying member, and we chit-chatted for a moment (I'd met Bella Abzug through a mentor, whom she knew). She was surprised, I think, that a young person took such interest. I was surprised that she was surprised that a young person would take such interest.

I was wearing my Girls Kick Ass t-shirt for the occasion, and the last thing Betty Friedan said to me was, "Keep on kicking ass." Thanks, Betty. For everything.

Feminist Author Betty Friedan Dies at 85.

Betty Friedan, whose manifesto ''The Feminine Mystique'' became a best seller in the 1960s and laid the groundwork for the modern feminist movement, died Saturday, her birthday. She was 85.

Friedan died at her home of congestive heart failure, according to a cousin, Emily Bazelon.

Friedan's assertion in her 1963 best seller that having a husband and babies was not everything and that women should aspire to separate identities as individuals, was highly unusual, if not revolutionary, just after the baby and suburban booms of the Eisenhower era.

The feminine mystique, she said, was a phony bill of goods society sold to women that left them unfulfilled, suffering from ''the problem that has no name'' and seeking a solution in tranquilizers and psychoanalysis.

''A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, `Who am I, and what do I want out of life?' She mustn't feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children,'' Friedan said.

In the racial, political and sexual conflicts of the 1960s and '70s, Friedan's was one of the most commanding voices and recognizable presences in the women's movement.

As a founder and first president of the National Organization for Women in 1966, she staked out positions that seemed extreme at the time on such issues as abortion, sex-neutral help-wanted ads, equal pay, promotion opportunities and maternity leave.

But at the same time, Friedan insisted that the women's movement had to remain in the American mainstream, that men had to be accepted as allies and that the family should not be rejected.

''Don't get into the bra-burning, anti-man, politics-of-orgasm school,'' Friedan told a college audience in 1970.

To more radical and lesbian feminists, Friedan was ''hopelessly bourgeois,'' Susan Brownmiller wrote at the time.

Friedan, deeply opposed to ''equating feminism with lesbianism,'' conceded later that she had been ''very square'' and uncomfortable about homosexuality.

''I wrote a whole book objecting to the definition of women only in sexual relation to men. I would not exchange that for a definition of women only in sexual relation to women,'' she said.

Comments

[The Fat Lady Sings]

And that makes three - Wasserstein, King and Friedan - all gone the same week. Think of what they stood for - individually and as a group. Strong women, ethnic women, women who helped their generations define what being female in America was all about. Damn. It's been a sad week all around.

[handdrummer]

I first read The Feminine Mystique in junior high, sometime in the early/mid-sixties. I saw my Mom and her friends on every page. Thank you, Ms. Friedan for making me a lifelong feminist.

[ae]

TFLS, it's been a terrible week, 'tis true, and I'm waiting for the strength of these amazing women to lift us up again. I still can't collect my thoughts long enough to say something about Wendy Wasserstein. She was so young, and I laughed so much.

handdrummer, I've been missing you! Grants all turned in? Papers done? Is "The Daily Blatt" coming back? Re: your comment, I'll thank Ms. Friedan doubly to think she's had such an impact on your thinking. What a gift to the rest of us!