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» babble   » walking the talk   » feminism   » R.I.P. Betty Friedan

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Author Topic: R.I.P. Betty Friedan
audra trower williams
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posted 04 February 2006 04:01 PM      Profile for audra trower williams   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 

quote:
Betty Friedan, the visionary, combative feminist who launched a social revolution with her provocative 1963 book, "The Feminine Mystique," died Saturday, which was her 85th birthday.

Friedan died of congestive heart failure at her home in Washington, D.C., family members told the Associated Press.

Her bestselling book identified "the problem that has no name," the unhappiness of post-World War II American women unfulfilled by traditional notions of female domesticity.

Melding sociology and humanistic psychology, the book became the cornerstone of one of the last century's most profound movements, unleashing the first full flowering of American feminism since the 1800s.


Full story.

[ 04 February 2006: Message edited by: audra trower williams ]


From: And I'm a look you in the eye for every bar of the chorus | Registered: Apr 2001  |  IP: Logged
skdadl
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posted 05 February 2006 10:15 AM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
That's a good historical summary. From the conclusion:

quote:
The book's focus on the struggles of educated, middle-class white women was attacked by other critics as a major shortcoming. To many black women more concerned with survival than self-fulfillment, Friedan's call to women to find meaningful careers "seemed to come from another planet," according to historian Paula Giddings.

The personal narrative that gave "Feminine Mystique" much of its power was misleading in another way: It omitted references to Friedan's earlier career as a left-wing journalist, creating the impression that the author had never been anything other than a suburban matron.

Years later, biographer Daniel Horowitz would accuse Friedan of obscuring her past to sell books. But Friedan insisted she was only being politically savvy. "It was the McCarthy era . . . and I didn't go around parading my left-wing background because it wouldn't have helped in organizing the women's movement," she told the Times a few years ago(5/00). "On the other hand, I never kept it secret."

Friedan's radical past explains "how she came as a housewife to politicize so deftly the 'problems that have no name,' " said historian Ruth Rosen. "People in the old left got experience in naming things. That's not unimportant. It explains the power of 'The Feminine Mystique."'


Even at the time, Friedan and her book seemed to some of us, those of us who were heading into the New Left, somewhat limited in class and cultural terms, but then so did Ms magazine.

But she and Ms had much the higher profile, and their impact was much more widespread. Many, many important political and legal changes could not have been brought about without their broad influence on the American middle class.

She did what was there for her to do, and she stayed tough and independent-minded. A great life, well worth celebrating.


From: gone | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
anne cameron
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posted 05 February 2006 01:05 PM      Profile for anne cameron     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
And had she written of the challenges facing black women, women of colour, minority women or even immigrant women she'd have been flayed alive for daring to interpret someone else's cultural reality.

Sometimes you're hooped if you do and hooped if you don't.

A writer has to start SOMEWHERE. Sooner or later, usually sooner, you wind up staring at what is going to be page one chapter one...and sometimes there are two or even three books worth of material prior to page one as it is chosen.

And then, of course, there is the fact that a very male supremicist culture was looking for things to criticize!!

"You did good, Betty. Good on ya!"

We should all do as well.


From: tahsis, british columbia | Registered: Jan 2005  |  IP: Logged
skdadl
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posted 05 February 2006 01:18 PM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Oh, yes, anne. The older I get, the truer I know that is.

Gee: did I sound grudging? That was petty of me.

It is true that I had some struggles - by the late 70s, say - with the way strict equality feminism was going. The power suits and the networking got on my nerves a bit.


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anne cameron
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posted 05 February 2006 02:27 PM      Profile for anne cameron     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
A dear friend gave me a "banner" which I hung on the kitchen wall, it said "Sisterhood is Powerful. It can fuckin'well KILLYA!".

I think I did okay until "Lies Secrets and Silences" became de rigeur. I've always resented questions like "penny for your thoughts" and "what are you thinking about?". My thoughts are worth more than a penny (to me!) and if I wanted you to know what I was thinking I'd be talking...that book just about sent me into rant mode!! Then it was followed by that hellish time of "politically correct" humourless academic formula-speak and I don't do well with euphemism, to me it is baffle-gab and all too often oxymoronic (and the rest of the time downright moronic).

Ah, them was the days!!

Now I'm just an isolationistic curmudgeon. It's way lots easier.

I'll burn smudge for Betty and then have a couple of cups of tea, my non-alcoholic equivalent of a wee drammy.


From: tahsis, british columbia | Registered: Jan 2005  |  IP: Logged
brebis noire
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posted 07 February 2006 10:21 AM      Profile for brebis noire     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I came across this article by Germaine Greer in today'sGuardian so I thought I would post it - a tribute that's reminiscent, informative and not at all sentimental about Betty Friedan.

A piece of history, unvarnished?


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skdadl
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posted 07 February 2006 10:35 AM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I've read the article and I think it's tonic, but then I always enjoy Greer. If anything, I think she's being relatively controlled and respectful here while refusing to be pious, as of course she always does refuse.

There were indeed serious differences within the women's movement(s) of the sixties and seventies, and Greer has caught some of that here. I like the way she writes of the women who responded to Friedan, though. Greer doesn't caricature them in class or political terms, although she makes clear what Friedan's own class and political limits were. Fair enough, and pretty much a view I share.

[ 07 February 2006: Message edited by: skdadl ]


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anne cameron
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posted 07 February 2006 11:28 AM      Profile for anne cameron     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I remember when I read "The Female Eunach". I was still married but seriously wondering WHY I was, and I laughed. And laughed. And then I LAUGHED. Peter Pan asked why I was laughing, I said oh, just something in this book...he must have thought I was reading Bennet Cerf...and a couple of weeks after I'd read the book, while I was still pondering and wondering, Peter Pan came into the room, with the book, and tossed it aside. He told me the book was trash, full of lies, and filthy in the bargain. And I howled with laughter. Then I watched on TV a programme taped when she debated William Buckley. I did not laugh. I just watched, and thought what a champion she was. I knew she was one of those women my mother warned me against...

and her personal life is about as bizarre as she describes Betty as being...

Just more reason to concentrate on the WORK, and not on the flawed person who produced it. I think the "star fucker" mentality must be very hard to have to endure.

I don't think I fully understood the "class" rift in the women's movement until there was an ad for a networking banquet (or some dam thing) in Toronto, with a picture of tables of four, women seated, while waitresses served food and I thought right, our lot is still serving the toffs. Resentment took root. Then I read an academic thing from a woman prof at the University of Victoria, a study on women in the founding years of trade unionism on the Island and I just about boiled over with fury; that someone with tenure, making what to most of us would be huge bucks, was writing about women who had held firm even when their kids were so skinny they looked like wraiths. The paper was well written and extensively researched and there was nothing emotional in it, I felt that the union supporting women had been reduced to ciphers, marginalized all over again, and USED by someone who would never understand their courage or their commitment.

And my "class" awareness began to grow. To the point I now feel there are two women's movements, perhaps a wave within a wave, and one is the theoretical talkers, the other is the women who LIVE the oppression they struggle against. And until we give more respect to and honour the women who wait the tables where the talkers are having their pleasant little lunches, we're going to continue to be split on questions of class.

I was at a healing conference years ago and every evening at suppertime we all clapped and cheered for the women doing the cooking. We need to do more of that and less of guaranteeing the "honoured speakers" have the best rooms, accomodations, and seats at the tables.


From: tahsis, british columbia | Registered: Jan 2005  |  IP: Logged
skdadl
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posted 07 February 2006 02:41 PM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Yeah. Those are hard thoughts, anne. How do we change all that? Because really, the class situation hasn't changed much at all.

That debate you saw between Greer and Buckley - that was at the Cambridge Union in the UK, yes?

I remembered that too, for years, after I'd seen it. When I was teaching at a junior college here, I mentioned it one day to another teacher when we were trying to figure out how to teach our flocks formal debating techniques. She had the bright idea of checking the library, and lo and behold, someone had taped the show! That show!

So after that, we were running it over and over again for all our classes, mixed groups of men and women, twentysomethings mainly, enrolled in business or marketing diploma programs. They would just be riveted. I always pretended, of course, that I was using it purely to teach speaking and debating style.

One funny thing: At the end, there would always be students who turned on me and said, "But Miss dadl, they weren't doing what you taught us at ALL!" (I had been forced to teach very basic pro and con formulae - stay rational; stay consistent; the rebuttals should address what opponent said in careful order; etc.) And of course neither Greer nor Buckley talks that way at ALL!

They damn well said what they had to say. And she won, eh?


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anne cameron
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posted 07 February 2006 03:19 PM      Profile for anne cameron     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
She was magnificent! And left him floundering around and seeming to be SO personally uncomfortable, which is not something I think the fine man is used to feeling.

But the class split..yeah, it continues, possibly even worse than it was when we were all bright-eyed and not-so-exhausted. What I see is more and more and more non-academic, non-priviledged women not only ignoring the nit picking of academia but openly scorning it (which I regret because the guys are doing a fine job of scorning without any help from any of us). It looks as if women have turned to union work and done a great job of enlightening them, and maybe that's where we put our energies for the next while because God knows with the Cons at the helm of this leaky ship of state the unions are in for a real shit-kicking.

I was doing a creative writing course at a Community College and got them to make a list of "power" words with male and female versions. Steward - stewardess...governor-governess... and before the excersize was anywhere near finished a young man hotly asked What difference does it make. I said well if it doesn't make a difference why are you so upset? In a feminism class we spent (wasted?) entire hours debating whether or not we should go into the court records and "out" the upstanding pillars of the community convicted of sexual offences particularly against children...a strong contingent said no because How would their wives and mothers feel if it became public knowlege...the editor of the local paper claimed that was why they never reported the cases or the sentences...one guy was a former mayor...another was a teacher...


From: tahsis, british columbia | Registered: Jan 2005  |  IP: Logged
'lance
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posted 07 February 2006 03:42 PM      Profile for 'lance     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
She was magnificent! And left him floundering around and seeming to be SO personally uncomfortable, which is not something I think the fine man is used to feeling.

Bested by Gore Vidal, and by Germaine Greer, in the space of just two years or so... I can almost feel sorry for the man. And I can almost admire him for the fact that his head didn't explode.

Almost, I said.


From: that enchanted place on the top of the Forest | Registered: Jul 2001  |  IP: Logged

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