Interviews with

Betty Friedan
Edited by Janann Sherman
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/interviewswithbeOOOOunse
Interview) with Betty friedan

Conversations with Public Intellectuals Series

Douglas Brinkley and David Oshinsky, General Editors
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Edited by

Janann Sherman

University Press of Mississippi

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 Books by Betty Friedan

The Feminine Mystique. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1963.

It Changed My Life. Writings on the VKometi's Movement. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1976.
The Second Stage. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981.
The Fountain of Age. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
Beyond Gender: The Rea! Politics of Work and Family. Brigid OFarrell, ed. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Life So Far: A Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

www.upress.state.ms.us

Photograph on page iii: © 2002 Nancy Crampton

Copyright © 2002 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America

10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 4 3 2 1
©
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Interviews with Betty Friedan / edited by Janann Sherman

p. cm.—(Conversations with public intellectuals series)
Includes index.
ISBN 1-57806-479-1 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 1-57806-480-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Friedan, Betty—Interviews. 2. Feminists—United States—Interviews. 3.
Feminism—United States—History. 4. United States—Social conditions—1960-1980. 5
United States—Social conditions—1980— I. Sherman, Janann. II. Series.
HQ1413.F75 158 2002
305.42'0973—dc21
2002022718

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

 Contents

Introduction ix
Chronology xix

Betty Friedan's Pet Pique: The Feminine Mystique—

Angry Battler for Her Sex 3
Jane Howard

Mother Superior to Women's Lib 7

Paul Wilkes

The Liberation of Betty Friedan 25

Lyn Tornabene

Should You Accept Alimony? An Interview with Betty Friedan 35

Kathleen Brady

Once More to the Ramparts 39

Mary Walton

My Side: Betty Friedan 52

Paula Gribett Gottlieb

Betty Friedan: Her Brave New World 59

Curt Suplee

v
vi Contents

The Emancipation of Betty Friedan 64

Marilyn French

A Feminist in the Late '80s 74

Bettyann Kevles

Betty Friedan Is Still Telling It Like It Is 84

Marian Christy

Playboy Interview: Betty Friedan 88

David Sheff

Portrait of a Feminist as an Old Woman 1 17

Michele Kort

Betty Friedan: The Fountain of Age 1 30

Brian Lamb

Betty Friedan: Now She's Making Waves in The Fountain of Age 147
Alice V. Luddington

An Interview with Betty Friedan 153

Kathleen Erickson

A Conversation with Betty Friedan 161

Denise Watson

After the Mystique Is Gone 166

Jennifer Chapin Harris

Feminism's Matriarch 171

Robert Selle

Friedan's New Agenda: Fairness to Men, Too 174

Linda Myers
 Contents vii

The New Frontier of Feminism: Busting the Masculine Mystique 177

Nathan Gardels

A Conversation with Betty Friedan 181

Barbara Mantz Drake

Behind the Feminist Mystique 189

Michael Shelden

Index 195
 Introduction

Writer, teacher, and public intellectual, Betty Friedan has been in the spot¬
light almost continuously since the publication of her landmark book, The
Feminine Mystique, in 1963. In the conversations that follow, this complicated
and intense woman speaks frankly and with considerable passion to a host of
journalists and academics. This collection of twenty-two interviews spans
thirty-six years and publications as diverse as the New York Times, Working
Woman, and Playboy. Although the interviews are inevitably shaped by the
views of the interviewers and the publications in which they appear, the nature
of the genre requires that interrogators step aside and let her speak for herself.
While Friedan's extensive body of published work spells out her positions on
a host of important public matters, the immediacy of these public conversa¬
tions captures her passion and her wit, her candor and contradictions. The
logic of her arguments for equity and fairness, and the remarkable consistency
of her views about men, women, and the American family, provide a rich
resource for scholarly research, while the nature of the format raises important
questions about the role of the media in the personification of complex ideas
and the limits that imposes on both the person and the ideas.
No one recognized women s oppression in fifties America, not even the
women themselves, until Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique named the
phenomenon and made a coherent argument about its causes. Postwar pros¬
perity had provided women with a life of ease their mothers hadn t imagined
and a standard of living that was the envy of the world. At the same time,
women were assailed by a public discourse that contended they could find
true happiness only in domesticity. Any discomfort with the limits of their
assigned domestic vocations was experienced as a personal failing. Friedan was
alerted to the dissonance between the ideal of the contented suburban house-

IX
x Introduction

wife and the reality of discontent—what she called "the problem that had no
name"—by the results of a survey she circulated for the fifteenth anniversary
of her Smith College class, reinforced by her own difficulties in balancing
motherhood and a writing career. For her book, she interviewed hundreds of
housewives, analyzed the embedded messages about gender roles in women's
magazines, advice columns, movies, and advertising, and dissected assertions
from experts in scientific and psychological circles. Friedan uncovered a
noticeable shift against women's autonomy after World War II. Women who
had experienced independence and cultural validation for their contributions
to the war effort faced intense pressures—economic, cultural, and psychologi¬
cal—after the war to make homemaking their primary career. These women
had become victims, Friedan said, of the patriarchal ideology of "the feminine
mystique." The problems women experienced as personal, she wrote, were
instead a reflection of a culture that did not "permit women to accept or gratify
their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings." In
prose saturated with indignation and passion, Friedan called for nothing less
than "a drastic reshaping of the cultural image of femininity that will permit
women to reach maturity, identity, [and] completeness of self" through a ful¬
filling career. "The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to
know herself as a person," Friedan wrote, "is by creative work of her own.
There is no other way."
Friedan expected, and perhaps even hoped, that her book would be contro¬
versial. Earlier efforts to publish articles based on her findings had been
soundly rejected, even though she had amiable working relationships with a
host of women's magazines. No one, it seemed, wanted to print something
with which, as Redbook indicated, "only the most neurotic housewife could
possibly identify." Her publisher cautiously printed only 3,000 copies. This
perhaps partially explains why Friedan, in her conversation with Jane Howard
just after the book was published, comes out swinging. The subtitle to the
interview, "Angry Battler for Her Sex," seems an apt description of a pugna¬
cious Friedan who drew a sharp dichotomy between "women" and herself.
Women, in her estimation, were frivolous, evaded using their intellect, and
generally took the easy way out by marrying young. They were guilty, she
implied, of colluding in their own oppression. These women, sold the bill of
goods she called the feminine mystique, felt dissatisfied but helpless. She
exhorted women to wake up: "Don't be an appliance, a vegetable, or a service
 Introduction xi

station," she said. "As for me, I'm very unbored I'm nasty, I'm bitchy, I get
mad, but by God, I'm absorbed in what I'm doing." All this rhetoric seems
overly combative and defensive, especially in light of the enormous popularity
of her book. Still, at the time, she couldn't know that it would be a success,-
she apparently assumed that a controversial book by an unconventional author
might earn the publicity to make it so. The Feminine Mystique became an instant
bestseller. Mainstream women to whom the book was addressed would
remember where they were when they first read The Feminine Mystique and fre¬
quently remarked to her, as she relates in numerous interviews, that "it
changed my life." Ultimately the book set off a movement that virtually rede¬
fined the role of women in American society.
Throughout the 1960s, Friedan granted few interviews. Preferring to dis¬
seminate her views unmediated, she wrote her own articles. This seems a wise
choice, given that those who wrote about her seemed to focus at least as much
on her physical characteristics, her life story, and her personality as they did
on what she had to say The leader of any movement sets its tone, and for the
nascent women's movement, Betty Friedan was the message. Hers was the face
of feminism, as numerous interviewers indicate. Physical descriptions abound
in these interviews, many of them unflattering. They emphasize her big nose,
her 'droopy, basset-hound eyes," her tendency to pudginess, her flamboyance,

her profanity, her drinking.

Similarly, these writers mine Friedan's biography for clues to her psyche
and produce a handful of well-honed parables: her early experience with anti-
Semitism, her mother's disappointment at sacrificing career for family, her
decision to decline a prestigious fellowship because of the disapproval of a
boyfriend, her romance with leftist politics, the job she lost because she
requested a second maternity leave, her confinement in suburbia where she
hid her writing from family and friends like drinking in the morning, her

violent marriage.
This effort to achieve the essence of Betty Friedan and, by extension, the
women's movement she launched turns most tellingly on discussions of her
personality. All who interviewed her had strong feelings about her, many of
them negative. They provide a veritable litany of liabilities: she is messy,
imperious, self-serving, aggressive, demanding, temperamental, rude. What
everyone seemed to find fascinating was how unladylike she was.
Although one person's imperiousness is another s charisma, close associates
xii Introduction

admitted Friedan was difficult, at best. Nonetheless, many recognized her

enormous contributions to feminism. "She is a terror to deal with and there is
an overpowering ego at work," NOW activist Jacqui Ceballos told interviewer
Paul Wilkes. "But this is the first person who awakened women to their oppres¬
sion and for that alone we should pay homage."
Betty Friedan was the most radical woman in America in 1966 when she
founded the National Organization for Women "to take action to bring
women into full participation in the mainstream of American society NOW.”
Ironically, within less than a decade, she would represent the conservative,
even reactionary, wing of the feminist movement. NOW was organized by
the kind of women who responded to the message of The Feminine Mystique—
white, middle-class, highly educated women who had embraced liberal indi¬
vidualism, with its emphasis on independence, equality before the law, and
personal development. These liberal feminists defined women's rights largely
in material terms: equal pay for equal work, equal job opportunity, affordable
childcare. Friedan's plan for NOW was to employ political pressure, litigation,
and public mobilization to change laws and public policies limiting women.
NOW membership quadrupled in the first year, and before long, Friedan
found herself embroiled in conflict. As Marilyn French points out, it was
"exceedingly difficult to unify women" whose "common cause is obscured by
the clashing of classes, races, religious and ethnic categories, and subcultures."
Moreover, Betty Friedan's outsize personality sold her book and her ideas,
built her reputation, and launched a movement, but it was also her undoing as
leader of that movement. F4er abrasive personality undercut her message and
her rigid adherence to her vision of a gradualist political agenda denied the
movement a critical flexibility. Friedan was pushed aside by younger, more
radical feminists, whose agenda went well beyond Friedan's call for self-real¬
ization in a career to a full-fledged assault on sexism in all of its forms. These
feminists, schooled in the crucible of civil rights and New Left movements,
were committed to social transformation. They called their movement "wom¬
en s liberation" and contended that the gut issues of women's oppression could
not be legislated away. To them, the Equal Rights Amendment, considered by
liberal feminists the pinnacle of social change, was inadequate and beside the
point. Impatient with evolution, they sought revolution.
Central to this new radicalism was a focus on sexual politics, a term that
encompassed everything from rape to abortion to pornography to sexual iden-
 Introduction xiii

tity. Friedan saw this shift as wrong-headed and self-defeating, a costly diver¬
sion from economic equality issues. Through forums provided by interviewers,
Friedan savagely attacked her radical sisters as the ‘'bra-burning, anti-man,
politics of orgasm school," and warned women not to be seduced by their
divisive rhetoric. Perhaps the most devastating split in the movement, as far
as Friedan was concerned, was over the issue of lesbianism. When radicals in
the movement argued that lesbianism was the only fully feminist position,
Friedan's response to what she termed the "lavender menace" was both per¬
sonal and political. She was both shocked by this public declaration of sexual¬
ity, she told Marilyn French, and concerned that it endangered her campaign
"to gain rights for women without alienating men." She believed, rightly as it
turned out, that this focus would fuel a media circus, alienate mainstream
women, and divert attention from avenues of meaningful change in the status

of women.
Though Friedan remained synonymous in the minds of millions of Ameri¬
can women with the women s movement, she had lost control. She was hurt
and angry. She turned to teaching, writing, and getting even. Believing that
"nothing is taken seriously unless it is written in a book," as she told Mary
Walton, she pulled together It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement,
a compilation of old and new writings, a catalog of slights, and a self-serving
recital of power struggles. Friedan poured out her fury and frustration that her
movement had been stolen from her by a pro-lesbian, man-bashing cabal.
She had bones to pick with a host of individuals and groups, especially
Gloria Steinem, a younger and more photogenic feminist, who had become a
media darling. Their dispute was political and it was personal. "1 was really
opposed to the radical chic, anti-man politics she espoused," Friedan told
David Sheff. What made her angriest, though, was that the press seemed
unaware that Steinem was merely a "public relations person" while she was the
"founder." During many of these conversations, Friedan persists in claiming
sole credit for both launching the movement and for sustaining it. "If Betty
Friedan weren't alive," she asserted to Paul Wilkes, "she'd have to be invented
to see the movement through. The movement was foundering, she makes it
clear, because feminists stubbornly resisted her counsel.
Her movement was about equality, she said, not, as the word liberation
implied, about rejecting men and marriage for some abstract notion of free¬
dom. While radicals indicted men and the sexual double standard, with
xiv Introduction

Steinem calling marriage a form of prostitution, Friedan indicted sex roles

rather than men. Blaming men, Friedan told Denise Watson, was a "perversion
of feminism," one she found to be "ideologically and politically and actually
fallacious." She had very intentionally named it the National Organization for
Women, not of Women. "It wasn't going to be women against men," she said.
Men had to be included in negotiations for women's equality. Man was not
the enemy, she maintained, but a fellow victim. Friedan drew a compelling
parallel between the feminine mystique and the "masculine mystique." It was
surely no accident that men, as Friedan reiterated in numerous interviews, who
were forced to stifle their emotions and under intense pressure to be the sole
provider, died much younger than women. Just as women should be free to
express ambition and intelligence, Friedan believed that men should be free
to express nurturance and sensitivity. True women's liberation would liberate
both sexes from oppressive gender roles.
As the movement matured and the battle for the ERA was abandoned, Betty
Friedan began to formulate what seemed to her to be the next logical stage of
the women's movement. Feminism needed to evolve, she said, with changing
realities. The first stage had been to break into man's world. The Second Stage,
as she called her 1981 book, should be to construct a shared world with men.
Without this second stage, Friedan presciently told Paula Gottlieb, "women
could be stuck halfway through, and there might be a real reaction against the
women's movement in the next generation." Younger women in the 1980s "had
a whole new set of problems" related to trying to sustain work and family.
What is needed," said Friedan, "is an integration of the two." Unfortunately,
radical feminists, she told Gottlieb, were still locked into first-stage thinking
which had overlooked, indeed denigrated, the important biological and psy¬
chological blessings of motherhood and family. In place of the feminine mys¬
tique, they had espoused a "feminist mystique," a preoccupation with women's
individualistic needs at the expense of more traditional sources of women's
identity. To be sure, this was a mystique she had helped create, but she had
modified her position, as she tells Mary Walton, in light of a new generation
of young women who had absorbed the message of women's liberation and
believed that they could have it all. What they were finding, however, was
that women's career opportunities had been merely added to women's respon¬
sibilities in the home, resulting in a "superwoman syndrome" that, far from
liberating women, doubly oppressed them.
 Introduction xv

Over the years and in countless interviews, Friedan maintained that femi¬
nism had always been about choice. And that choice must include a woman's
right to choose the traditional role of wife and mother. "No feminism that was
opposed to family," Friedan told Sheff, could be embraced by "the great major¬
ity of women." If family duties continued "to stifle women's autonomy," Frie¬
dan wrote in The Second Stage, "the solution is not the break with family—as
radical feminists would have it—but the reorganization of it." She elaborated
on that idea in her conversation with Bettyann Kevles, describing "a basic
remodeling of American society" into one in which "women and men could
have equal access to both family and career For Friedan, who never wavered
from her belief that the solution to women's oppression lay in economic jus¬
tice, such an overhaul required not only fathers sharing parenting but also
national policies to support women with paid maternity leaves, flexible work
hours, job-sharing, and state-supported childcare. Parenting must now, she
told Gottlieb, "be shared between the mother, the father and the government."
Such a possibility may have seemed reasonable when Friedan published The
Second Stage in 1981, but the rise of the conservative right, and the presidencies
of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, moved public policy in the opposite
direction Conversations with Gottlieb and Curt Suplee in the early eighties
reveal an optimistic Friedan, certain that her "critical mass theory" would work.
Women were close to 50 percent of the workforce, more than half the regis¬
tered voters, and feminism, she said, had become mainstream. Women would
soon harness their own political power to turn the tide. But her optimism
faded as conservatives set about dismantling the machinery to enforce sex
discrimination laws, undoing equal pay for comparable work, and crusading
against a woman's right to choose. And women failed to respond in an orga¬

nized way to these developments.

Characteristically, Friedan cast the blame widely. The message and the
attainments of feminism, she claimed in several interviews, were being dis¬
torted by an unholy coalition of radical feminists and the conservative right,
leaving mainstream women stranded. "The language of rage and sexual poli¬
tics" rendered the movement vulnerable to attacks from the right as anti-fam¬
ily, making it easy, she told Mary Walton, "for the so-called Moral Majority
to lump ERA with homosexual rights and abortion into one explosive package
of licentious, family-threatening sex." Moreover, the hollow rhetoric of family
values was being cynically employed to reinvigorate the feminine mystique,
xvi Introduction

suggesting that any woman who assumed a non-conventional role, regardless

of necessity, was responsible for neglecting her family. The terms may be
social, but Friedan saw the source as economic. "I think family values are very
important," she told Robert Selle, "but we have to reframe them in terms of
new economic and demographic realities." Feminists need to embrace the fam¬
ily and take the rhetorical high ground away from conservatives who deny
that women must work. When she looked at American society, Friedan said
to Nathan Gardels, she saw "a big, stagnant pond covered by the green scum
of materialism." Women and minorities were being scapegoated in order to
shift attention and blame from a skewed economic system that favored the
wealthy. "If the kids are suffering," she told Sheff, "it's society's fault for not
making accommodations for working mothers and fathers who put in twelve
hour days." These were issues she would return to again and again.
In the early 1990s, Friedan took a respite from feminism and its discontents
to turn yet another personal challenge into a public crusade. As with the femi¬
nine mystique, she found the catalyst for this new project in her own experi¬
ence. The springboard was her sixtieth birthday party in 1981. Dispirited by
the prospect of facing her old age in a youth-obsessed culture, in typical Frie¬
dan fashion, she decided to plunge into research. At gerontological confer¬
ences and meetings at Flarvard, she reported to Brian Lamb and Alice
Luddington, she heard "a definition of age only in terms of deterioration and
decline." Depressed, she mined popular culture for positive images of age and
came up empty. So she turned to a favorite research tool and began interview¬
ing active seniors like herself. That's when, she told Lamb, she "began to
realize that I was dealing with another mystique."
The resulting book, The Fountain of Age, a compendium of scientific studies,
anecdotal evidence, and personal experiences, sought to explode the myths of
age just as, thirty years before, she exploded the myths of the contented
housewife. The "mystique of age" she contended, was "more pernicious and
pervasive" than the feminine mystique, because it became a self-fulfilling
prophecy. People who believed the rhetoric prematurely gave up on life. In
the interviews that followed the publication of her book, Friedan laments the
wasted wisdom and experience of lives cut short by hasty retirement, early
preparation for death, and withdrawal from society into "manicured age ghet¬
tos, a term that echoed her critique of the "comfortable concentration camps"
of 1950s suburbia.
 Introduction xvii

Many of the themes of The Fountain of Age reflect similarities to The Feminine
Mystique. Both women and the aged are culturally defined as weak and help¬
less. And Friedan's solutions for both groups are similar. In her conversations,
she emphasizes that it is largely a question of mind over matter, "changing the
very way you think about yourself could have an effect on the aging process."
But positive thinking only goes so far,- change requires individual action. Both
groups—the aged and women—she asserts, must find ways to enrich their
own lives by finding purpose and projects, and by taking control of their own
lives. "When people give up control over their lives and have no purpose to
their days," she tells Alice Luddington in 1993, much as she told interviewers
in 1963, "it is a dehumanizing experience." Just as she redefined the feminine
mystique to liberate afflicted women, she redefines old age as an adventure, a
liberation from the concerns and problems of the first two-thirds of life, a
period of growth and "generativity." And just like with the feminine mystique,
Friedan predicts a "paradigm shift" in Americas response to aging which she,

of course, will lead.

Betty Friedan's model for a vital old age, like her model for overcoming the
feminine mystique, was herself. And perhaps the chief beneficiary of her new
way of thinking was, in both cases, also herself. In writing The Feminine Mystique,
she told interviewers, she had liberated not only other women, but also herself
from that patriarchal ideology. And in the process of writing The Fountain of
Age, she told Lamb, "I've liberated myself. [I've] moved from this denial and
dread of age to an affirmation of where I am now."
As the century turned, Friedan was still living the vital life she championed,
directing a million-dollar, four-year project based at Cornell University to
design a "New Paradigm: Women, Work, Family and Public Policy," to transfer
her feminist principles into a broad societal agenda for the twenty-first cen¬
tury. Once again, as Linda Myers puts it, "she aims to transform the world."

This brief discussion of Betty Friedan's life and work traces the develop¬
ment of her ideas as a public intellectual as presented in the following inter¬
views. In many respects, Betty Friedan was her own worst enemy. As Paul
Wilkes noted in 1970, "Betty has offended, at one time or another, virtually
everyone she has worked closely with." From the accompanying commentar¬
ies that group included those who wrote about her. It is ironic that the genre
she resented for misrepresenting her serves so well in this volume in letting
xviii Introduction

her speak for herself. The juxtaposition between her ideas and writers' percep¬
tions of her make this collection a rich source for the analysis not only of
Friedan and her work, but also for myriad other topics concerning the role of
media in politics, public perceptions, and social movements.
The interviews here have been selected to represent a wide range of publi¬
cation venues and a broad array of Betty Friedan's views and commentary.
They are arranged chronologically for easy reference and presented unedited
so as to be of maximum value to scholars. Naturally there is a certain amount
of repetition, which often functions to reveal the importance of a particular
subject to both Friedan and her interviewers and, in some cases, how her
attitudes and ideas have changed over time.
This collection could not have happened without the cooperation of the
many interviewers and publishers who granted their permission to reprint the
selected interviews. 1 wish to thank Rhonda Charnes for her persistence in
helping me locate interviews, Paula Casey for her encouragement, and Seetha
Srinivasan, director of the University Press of Mississippi, for her patience and
support in seeing this manuscript through to production And finally, I'd like
to extend my abundant gratitude to my chief collaborator and gentlest critic,
Charles Sherman.
 Gironolo?y

1921 Born on February 4 in Peoria, Illinois, to Fdarry Goldstein and

Miriam FJorwitz Goldstein. Bettye Naomi Goldstein is oldest of
tFiree children (sister Amy and brotFier FJarry).
1927-33 Attends Whittier School in Peoria.
1933-35 Attends Roosevelt Junior FJigh School in Peoria,- writes for the
school paper, The Reflector.
1935-38 Attends Central FJigh School in Peoria,- on staff of the school
newspaper, Opinion, and founds a literary magazine, Title, graduates
June 9, 1938, one of six valedictorians of her class.
1939-42 Attends Smith College, psychology major,- studies with gestalt
psychologist Kurt Koffka,- writes for and later edits the student
newspaper, The Smith College Associated News [SCAN],- Phi Beta
Kappa, junior year,- graduates summa cum laude.

1943- 44 Attends the University of California at Berkeley on scholarship,

studies with Erik Erikson, declines fellowship for Ph D.

1944- 45 Moves to New York City,- employed as assistant news editor for
the Federated Press, a left-wing news service.

1945 June, loses job to returning veteran.

1946-52 Reporter for UE News, newspaper of the United Electrical, Radio

and Machine Workers of America.

1947 Marries Carl Friedan on June 12.

1948 Gives birth to son, Daniel, on October 3.

1952 Gives birth to son, Jonathan, on November 27,- fired from job at
UE News after claiming second maternity leave.

1952-62 Freelance writer for mainstream women's magazines and stay-at-

home mom.

xix
xx Chronology

1956 Gives birth to daughter, Emily, on May 23.

1957 Fifteen-year Smith college reunion, circulates questionnaire to
Smith graduates concerning their lives as wives and mothers.
1963 Publishes The Feminine Mystique.
1966 Co-founds the National Organization for Women.
1966-70 President of the National Organization for Women.
1969 Divorces Carl Friedan after twenty-two-year stormy marriage,- co¬
founds the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws
(NARAL—later called the National Abortion Rights Action
League).
1970 Leaves presidency of NOW, leads Women's Strike for Equality,
August 26.
1971 Co-founds National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC).
1972-75 Holds numerous visiting professorships to discuss gender and pub¬
lic policy.
1973 Organizes the first International Feminist Conference.
1975 Receives honorary doctorate from Smith College,- attends the first
International Women's Year Conference in Mexico.
1976 Publishes It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement.
1977 Attends International Women's Conference in Houston.
1978 Senior research associate at Columbia University's Center for
Social Sciences.
1980 Fellow at Harvard's Institute for Politics at the John F. Kennedy
School of Government.
1981 Publishes Second Stage.
1984 Democratic Party delegate at nomination of Geraldine Ferraro for
vice president.
1985 Chair of the American Jewish Congress's Commission on the
Status of Women.
1986-93 Fellow at University of Southern California's Andrus Gerontology
Center in the fall,- teaches at New York University in the spring.
1993 Open heart surgery,- publishes The Fountain of Age.
1994 Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
1995 Attends Fourth United Nations' Conference on Women in Beijing,
China.
1997 Publishes Beyond Gender.- The Real Politics of Work and Family.
 Chronology xxi

1998 Receives million-dollar Ford Foundation grant to conduct confer¬

ences on her New Paradigm: Gender, Work and Public Policy at
Cornell University.
2000 Publishes Life So Far: A Memoir.
Interviews with Bettn friedan
 Betty friedan'i Pet Pique: The Feminine
IliiptiqneAn?ry Battler for tier Sex
Jane Howard / 1963

From Life magazine, (1 November 1963),

84-88. © 1963 Time Inc. Reprinted by
permission.

"This whole society could erupt in one great big wave of boredom, just
because we've been conned into expecting more joys from our little houses
than they can possibly give us," says Betty Friedan. "As for me, Im very
unbored. I m nasty, I'm bitchy, I get mad, but by God, 1m absorbed in what

I'm doing."
Mrs. Friedan, an impassioned New York suburbanite, was never really bored
in her life. A native of Peoria, summa cum laude graduate of Smith, graduate
fellow in psychology, mother of three, free-lance writer, she never had time to
be. But she discovered the many homemakers she talked to were oddly dissatis¬
fied with their lot when according to the script they have been following they
should have been deliriously happy. She looked into the matter and came up
with an angry book called The Feminine Mystique. In it she indicts educators,
psychiatrists, anthropologists and all others who since World War II have
preached Freud's dictum—a "mystique" she has called it—that a woman can
only "fulfill" herself as a wife and mother. The book was an overnight best
seller, as disruptive of cocktail party conversation and women's clubs discus¬
sions as a tear-gas bomb. Its author has been vilified and praised in about equal
quantities. "What I say seems to arouse violent emotions," says Betty Friedan

3
4 Interviews with Betty Friedan

cheerily. "But if I can put across the idea that a woman is first of all a person,
not a mommy, not a sex object, not an unpaid dishwasher—that she needn't
choose between house and career but have both—it'll all be worth it."
In conversations with Life's Jane Howard, Betty Friedan aired her views on
the feminine mystique and related controversies:

• Being born a woman with a brain in America today can seem a handicap. You feel
like a freak. I used to think I might have enjoyed life more if I'd been born a
Frenchwoman in the time of Mme. de Stael, a bluestocking with salons and lovers
and lots of good talk. I've changed my mind. Now 1 think now is fine, now is
great. When I was doing the housewife bit, though, I thought it was awful.
• Women aren't brought up to think well enough to talk It's a revelation for a man
to find a woman be can really talk to. I began to realize a while back that many
of my best friends were men.
• A good woman is one who loves passionately, has guts, seriousness and passionate
convictions, takes responsibility and shapes society. Doing these things is every
bit as important as being a good mother and making men happy. I'm horrified by
the word "cool." Coolness is an evasion of life. Being cool isn't it at all. What 1
think you're supposed to be is passionate, fanatic and crusading. I'd rather be hot
and wrong. I'd rather be committed than detached.
• I guess a lot of women don't like my book because they probably feel they're
threatened by it. Perhaps it's because they don’t take themselves seriously, won't
work to the limit of their ability. For them it's easier—they can always say what
a great actress or writer they could have been if only they'd kept at it, but of
course they gave it up to make a home. They don't subject themselves to the
decisions and actions it takes to get started.
• 1 don't like this self-pitying, trapped housewife bit. I think women who have been
victims of the feminine mystique should do something about it, should attack the
things they used to take for granted, should grow. Growth is what human beings
are made for. If we don’t grow, we die.
• "Career woman" has been made an ooky phrase. The feminine mystique created
it and we've got to think of something to replace "career." "Vocation" maybe.
"Career woman" made me think that if I'd stayed in the academic world I'd have
had to be celibate.
• Capital C Career Women seem to resent my book, maybe because I say that all
women should try to do what the Career Women are already doing. Maybe
they're finding that they're not so special. Maybe they don't want others muscling
into the act.
• You don't have to choose a joyless celibacy if you want to use your brain. You
needn't make huge decisions, you have to make the right little ones—like study¬
ing for the exam instead of going to the movies and writing in the morning
instead of getting an early start for the beach.
 Jane Howard / i963 5

• There's so much unnecessary martyrdom. I'm not sure it wouldn't be better to

have a lot of eccentric old maids and scarlet women around than all these dreary,
dreary virtuous housewives. Not that plenty of women with husbands and chil¬
dren and homes aren't terrific people themselves. 1 know some, and I think soon
there will be many more, but they won't call themselves housewives.
• Women are like Negroes in that both got their rights on paper long before they
did in reality. Women achieved equality on paper the year before I was born, but
it won't become a reality until enough women choose to use their rights. It's
happening, it's going to happen more and more.
• Masculine mystique? Sure there ve been a lot of jokes. My husband was the first
to crack one. Theres some truth in it. Why should men be all that strong? This
man's-world-womans-world bit is for the birds. Men aren't barred from growing
as women are. Yet men are victims of the feminine mystique too because it keeps
them from knowing women as human beings.
• Can women who've been stifled for long years by the mystique come out from
under? Some can learn to, but women who don't have the discipline, won't make
the effort or are simply afraid to be tested may turn out to be the displaced
persons of our time. They'll be no more alive than their green stamps and grand¬
children’s snapshots can make them feel.
• Today a girl evades her identity crisis by getting married to a boy who doesn't
know who or what he is either. Love is so over-glorified as a solution to all
problems in America. It's wonderful but it isn't everything. One of the things I
most enjoy is good talk, deep communication, and it's absurd to think as alleged,
that you can only have this with a husband or lover There can be a whole rich
diversity of love and communication of which sexual love, long may it live, is

only one.
• Many boys never get any sense of purpose or identity because they're brought up
in the bedroom suburbs with their mothers and no men around except the gar¬
bage man, milkman and TV repairman.
• Community work can be an internship for women if they take themselves seri¬
ously. I'm all for politics, for example—it's one of the great passions. Women
should do more, though, than lick envelopes. I've never been much more than a
passive Democrat because I don't want to collect furniture for auctions, I want to
make policy. To a real politician politics is never boring—to envelope-lickers it
is. I was an assistant den mother a while and I was never so bored in all my life.
Even my son was bored. We both quit.
• I like revolutions. Revolutionaries are my kind of heroes. 1 dont even mind Joan
of Arc. What we need in America is more heroines. We have sex objects and
unreal creatures in love stories but nobody to model ourselves after. But the
delayed revolution, the real sexual revolution, the emergence of women as people,

will happen.
• Children don't need all that mommyness. It doesn't matter to them who waxes
6 Interviews with Betty Friedan

the floor. You don't need to make them your profession. They need not be your
jewels. The mom, the nagging, domineering mother, the castrative wife, is the
mother who lives through her husband and children.
• Some people think I'm saying, "Women of the world unite—you have nothing to
lose but your men." It's not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum
cleaners.
• I've always been the opposite of what the feminine mystique says a good mother
should be because 1 don’t find name tapes and car pools all that great. I don't live
through my kids. They're separate beings, apart from me, who continually sur¬
prise and delight me.
• Don't be an appliance, a vegetable or a service station. How will you get a man?
If you find yourself first you won't need any trickery. He'll find you, and he'll have
plenty of competition.
• Lincoln is my oldest hero, partly because I’m from Illinois where nobody can
grow up without being aware of him, partly because I'm passionate about any
kind of emancipation.
 Mother Superior to Women's Lib
Paul Wilkes / 1970

From the New York Times Magazine, (29 November

1970), 27-29, 140-43, 149-50, 157. Reprinted
by permission of The New York Times.

Her eyes glistening with tears, Betty Naomi Goldstein watched the sun set
dozens of times from a lonesome perch by the weed-filled, abandoned ceme¬
tery in Peoria, 111 Betty wasn't an attractive girl—her long nose had already
.

drawn the crude comments of the boys in school. On top of that, she was
doubly cursed for a young girl growing up in the late-1930s Midwest: she was
intelligent and a Jew. Her friends overlooked her appearance and brains, but
when it came time for the pubescent savagery of sorority-pledging at Peoria
High School, ethnics could no longer be forgotten. Lumped with the blacks
and girls from poor families, Betty Goldstein was not asked to join a sorority,
thus effectively banishing her from even the most meager social life. While
her classmates bubbled on to each other in the late afternoons, the outcast
looked out over the cemetery and vowed, "If they don't like me, some day

they'll learn to respect me."

Young Betty composed a simple prayer to see her through those days of
rejection: "I want a boy who will like me best, and I want a work to do. A
stormy twenty-year marriage to Carl Friedan, an advertising executive, that
ended in divorce over a year ago never quite fulfilled her first request, but the

second has surely been answered.

Betty Friedan (rhymes with "sedan"), starting with her book in 1963, The
Feminine Mystique, has presided as mother superior over the women's liberation

7
8 Interviews with Betty Friedan

movement. Although women's lib groups may number 100 in New York alone,
she started the first one, NOW, the National Organization for Women. It was
Betty Friedan who almost single-handedly held the shaky coalition of women s
groups together for the strike last Aug. 26 that saw thousands of women across
the country protesting their sexual bondage, and who preserved the coalition
that is now planning another strike for Dec. 12. For the past seven years it has
been Betty Friedan, protesting at all-male bars, prodding the consciences of
women (and men) in dozens of speeches each year, badgering Congressmen
to pass laws and enforce those on the books that give women the parity they
now lack.
It is mid-afternoon, and the mother superior is making preparations for a
trip to the provinces to talk to novices and drum up further recruits, in this
instance at male-dominated and -oriented Wake Forest University. She lives
in one of a string of brownstones on West 93rd Street just off Central Park
West that were collectively renovated and painted a vibrant shade of olive.
The scene is typical: Betty is late, she can't find what she needs (a copy of
Communitas by Paul and Percival Goodman), her clothing is in disarray (baggy
white panty-hose, two buttons undone on her dress) and there are further
complications (the family poodle has vomited twice on the oriental rug, and
the cat has just given birth to three kittens on fourteen-year-old Emily Frie-
dan's bunk bed).
"Omygawd," Betty hollers down to Jane, her FJaitian maid, in a gravelly
voice, "Mervin's made a mess.1' At forty-nine, she is a vision of somebody's
eccentric, middle-aged aunt, her hair a swirl of cowlicks, her face deeply lined,
her chin double, her brown eyes coursing back and forth. Then, mumbling to
herself as she steps over piles of papers that have spilled off the mound on her
office desk, "Where the hell is that book? Did I lend it to somebody? No, no.
I've got to sound like 1 know something in Washington tomorrow. Where the
hell is that book?”

Communitas, found on the top shelf of a bookcase, is stuffed, together with

plane tickets and various papers into a "Carl Friedan Advertising" blue-plastic
carrying case and a leather purse the size and shape of a horse's feedbag. In a
cab a few minutes later, she digs down into the bag to find a crumpled check¬
book and some overdije bills, including one from New York Telephone for
$132, that have to be paid. Blithely, she writes out the checks without entering
 Paul Wilkes / 1970 9

anything on the stub. "Oh, I have a girl who is sympathetic to the movement
at the bank," she says. "She calls me when my balance is down."
Stanley Aronson, a Brooklyn-raised and -accented cab driver, turns around
and without any preliminaries says, "You're her, ain't ya? Well, you’re the cause
of all my troubles, 1 just want you to know. My wife, she'd join the movement
in a minute, she would. She was O K. till she started believing all that
equality. . .
"But why isn't she equal?" comes the gravelly voice from the back seat.
"Slavery was outlawed a hundred years ago. Ubmm. What airport are we going
to anyway—La Guardia, right?"
At the Winston-Salem, N.C., airport, Betty is met by four girls who sheep¬
ishly admit they are about all Wake Forest has in the way of a women's libera¬
tion movement They apologize in advance for the scanty crowd they expect
for tonight's speech. "I'm afraid the awareness level is about zero around here,"
says one of the girls, dressed in a stylish midi and high, brown, laced boots.
During the half-hour ride to the campus, in between absent-minded rummag¬
ings through the plastic portfolio and the leather feedbag, Betty asks ques¬
tions, but does not seem to hear the answers.
"Hours, do you have the same house hours as men? How available are
birth-control pills? What kind of punishment do you get if they catch you in
a boy's room? Who administers the discipline system anyhow?"
During a dinner arranged by the coterie of women's lib advocates, Betty,
seated at a table of twenty people, is a target of questions. Some she doesn't
answer at all, others she smiles at, some she answers with a few terse sentences,
as often off the subject as on.
The mother superior's mind is somewhere else, and the four girls who
picked her up at the airport hope it will also arrive in Winston-Salem shortly.
"She looks so different—I've seen her on TV before," whispers one of the girls.
"Her hair looks like Phyllis Diller's. I hope they won't start throwing stones

when she talks."

The lecture agency that scheduled Betty at Wake Forest at a fee of $750
had told her to expect to speak before 600 people. The four girls said they
would be happy if 300 showed. Amid twitters from the males, a few catcalls
and a hush from the girls who are seeing Women's Liberation Herself in the
flesh for the first time, Betty is presented a few minutes later to a crowd of
1,700 people, the largest any speaker has ever drawn at Wake Forest.
10 Interviews with Betty Friedan

For a Southern audience, usually silent after the speaker is introduced and
courteously applauded, the Wake Forest gathering is noisy. The organizers of
the Friedan speech look around nervously, wondering if one of them should
say something as the speaker stands silently at the microphone and calmly
runs her eyes over the audience.
There is no need to worry. Like some great Shakespearean performer, the
seemingly disoriented Betty lowers the gravelly voice an octave and says,
"Many people think men are the enemy in the movement 1 represent. Man is
not the enemy. FJe is the fellow victim. The impish grins leave male faces,
and there is silence. The mother superior knows her audience, and if there is
an enemy out there she knows well how to blunt his attack.
With the deep lines on her face washed out by television lights, and with
long tongues of hair that look like sideburns swaying lazily as she speaks,
Betty works in slowly. "Why should men die ten years earlier? . . . Why should
man be saddled with his masculine mystique, his image as tight-lipped, brutal,
crew-cut—not able to cry out for help? . . . And women: are they only castrat¬
ing monsters, or Lolita sex objects, or morons whose greatest quest in life is
to have their kitchen sinks and husband's shirts as white as snow?"
The tempo builds and soon the Jewish girl from Peoria is doing justice to
the pulpit at Wait Chapel at Wake Forest, a pulpit complete with a green
cloth bearing the IHS emblem, a pulpit that has been beaten and caressed by
the hands of Baptist preachers who have come here to harangue students on
more cosmic problems than liberation of the female sex. "We have the rights
on paper, but what does that mean? . . . What does your university think of
you girls when they demand that you be in your rooms when the boys are
still free? . . . Obviously you aren't able to control your own conduct, that's
what they are saying. . . . We are tired of being in political movements and
looking up the zip codes. . . . We are tired of being in religious organizations
and making dolls out of dish clothes. . . . We are tired of being treated—and
all those discriminatory rules at Wake Forest say this—as sex objects.
"This is a two-sex revolution, and when it is completed we will have new
and honest patterns of life and profession, where ability and not gender count."
The voice goes low again. "And that man who is strong enough to be gentle,
yes, strong enough, will be strong enough to march with the woman who is
leaving behind her ruffles and her rage." A standing ovation, male and female.
Buoyed by the reception, Betty continues to teach and preach the move-
 Paul Wilkes / 1970 11

ment in the car going back to the motel with her reception committee. "Don't
be frivolous," she says in response to a question about Ti-Grace Atkinson, a
radical NOW member who split with Betty over ideology. "Don't get into the
bra-burning, anti-man, politics-of-orgasm school like Ti-Grace did. Confront
the Administration, demand the same rights as the boys, go door to door
when Sam Ervin [the North Carolina Senator who opposed the Equal Rights
Amendment] comes up for election and get him out." It is so much like Yves
Montand in "La Guerre est Fini," complete with flashes of oncoming headlights—
the monologue of a tormented leader and the reassuring nods of cell members.
Coming down from the euphoria of the moment, one of the girls confronts
Betty with a sobering question: "But will it be different now that you've been
here? Or will they all forget tomorrow?" Visions of the mother superior arran¬
ging the folds of her flowing robe and taking the novice's head to lay it on
her knee Betty Friedan smiles confidently, "Oh yes, my dear, it always is
different after."
At the motel bar, she plops into a chair and orders a double-gin-and-tonic.
"No mixed drinks?" she looks up in shock at the waitress. Against the law, the
waitress explains, but she'll be happy to provide the mix if Betty has the
essence in a brown paper bag. "Wine?" asks Betty. Nothing but beer without
a food order. She gives the menu a hurried once-over. "Egg rolls and . you
have champagne? Good, a bottle of champagne."
The next morning Betty is scheduled to testify before the Senate Select
Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs on women's requirements in new
housing. "Not dishwashers and garbage disposals," she laughs shortly after 7
A.M., still having the Oriental look of the recently arisen. "1 mean the captiv¬
ity of high rises and the isolation of suburbs. Women are trapped and new
housing has to free them to do something besides raise children."
On the flight to Washington, her conversation is sparse as she reads hur¬
riedly through Communitas, marking dozens of pages with snippets of paper.
Then on to The Feminine Mystique, and a few more markers. "1 can see why they
asked me to appear," she says as the cab pulls up in front of the New Senate
Office Building. "I can see why." She smiles slyly, but does not explain.
As experts are paraded before the committee, Betty is still at work, reading,
putting in more pieces of paper and refining her presentation outline. Televi¬
sion cameramen train on each witness,- then, a few minutes into each persenta-
tion, sensing that the worn professionalese will only make the pile on the
12 Interviews with Betty Friedan

cutting-room floor, they turn their attention to each other or to styrofoam

cups of coffee. Two committee members, Senators George McGovern, the
chairman, and Charles Percy, show a remarkable amount of interest in the
testimony and ask incisive questions of each witness.
When Betty Friedan is introduced, television crews leap to their positions
as if The Event were about to occur. The soft whir of camera motors indicates
Betty is being recorded from the start. "1 am here speaking for the silent major¬
ity, the truly silent majority," she begins. A smile crosses the face of Republi¬
can Percy.
The books and outline Betty had laid out before her are ignored. The prep¬
aration turns out to be for nought, as the rhetoric of the movement takes over.
The whir of the motors continues through much of the first twenty minutes
of her testimony, which builds until she is gasping for breath between sen¬
tences: "It is immoral for housing to be ruled over by men, old men mostly.
. . . The women of this country are tired of being prisoners. . . . The image is
of the moronic housewife whose sole aspiration in life is to have kitchen sink
and husband's shirts. . . ." The committee reporter, used to the drone of
experts, has a look of panic in her eyes as she tries frantically to keep up. As
Betty's voice goes higher in pitch—to a point where it sounds about to
break—Senator Percy becomes more restless.
In making pertinent points, Betty instinctively turns to her left, toward the
cameras and away from Percy and McGovern. "We have sexual ghettos all
over this country. . . . What we are saying is that the American woman's time
is worth nothing. . . . That her talents need not be utilized. . . . We are
polarizing male from female. . . . The violence in our cities, in the war in
Vietnam, is just another manifestation of that basic polarization. . . ."
"Mrs. Friedan," Senator Percy interjects.
"A few more minutes, Senator, and I'll be finished," she returns, and picks
up the last half of a sentence and goes on for another ten minutes.
At the end of her testimony, Percy asks a three-part question. Betty takes
eight minutes to answer the first third, and the Senator is not about to pursue
the remaining two-thirds. After he succeeds in gently stopping her with a
series of thank-yous, Percy is asked his impressions of her testimony. "The
Niagara Falls effect of it all! 1 just couldn't pick out the important parts. Some
men have the same prqblem, like Hubert Humphrey. He was Vice President,
but don't forget he never made President."
 Paul Wilkes / 4970 13

In the cab on the way to the airport, Betty's mood moves between guilt
and self-patronization. "I went on and on, didn't I?" she asks. "I panicked. All
my hangups from being the little girl from Illinois came through. I didn't have
a Ph D. like the other witnesses. 1 am a woman of self-destruction at times,-
the culture has built that in. All the preparation. And 1 gave them the old
speech, didn't 1? But 1 don't dwell on my failures the way 1 used to,'' she says
with a raised eyebrow and a tone of self-assurance. "As a matter of fact, it's a
good thing I testified at all. If they were listening. I said some important
things."
This little girl from Illinois was born in Peoria in 1921 to Harry Goldstein,
owner of the fine jewelry shop on Jefferson Street, and his wife, Miriam. Mir¬
iam was eighteen years Harry's junior and a former society editor for the local
newspaper, who, as custom required, put aside her professional life to become
mother and housewife. Just as her daughter was to be a misfit as a homemaker
some twenty years later, Miriam Goldstein did not enjoy her new role either.
"It took me until college to sort this out," Betty recalls, "but it was obvious she
belittled, cut down my father because she had no place to channel her terrific
energies. It's a typical female disorder that 1 call impotent rage."
It was not an unhappy home life, yet there was a degree of tension present,
with Betty wondering when the next flareup would occur. At school, she was
a hyperactive girl, bright, talkative, better able to make friends with girls than
boys. Describing her adolescent years, Betty closes her eyes so tightly the lids
show heavy folds and the words are punctuated by long periods of silence:
"Those were . . . such . . . painful . . . painful years."
Her small circle of friends abruptly went their separate ways when the
sorority selections were made at Peoria High School and Betty plunged into
a loneliness that she attempted to conquer by writing poetry and reading
voraciously. Trying to keep some balance in her daughter's life, Harry Gold¬
stein prohibited her from borrowing more than five library books at a time.
She thought this cruel punishment. "When I had dates, and it wasn t that
often, they were the rejects, misfits just like me. I guess Peoria is where my
awareness of injustices in minority groups and a passionate concern for them
was born. My father often told me that the people friendly to him in business
wouldn't speak to him after sundown."
In retaliation for being snubbed socially, Betty joined with two boys and
started Tide, a school literary magazine. Harriet Parkhurst, who met Betty in
14 Interviews with Betty Friedan

high school and went through Smith College with her, and who is now the
mother of six children in Peoria, remembers that she was very intense in those
days, everything she did had to be the best. Tide had to be the best literary
magazine every produced anywhere and at any time. She made the dramatic
honor society with a walk-through in Jane Eyre. It was evident even then that
she was drawn to a higher calling. Her intellectual abilities won her some
admiration, but so precious few of us cared about brains back then."
Betty was independent on the surface but, when she felt her girlishness
would not be rejected, played the typical schoolgirl. A brilliant physics stu¬
dent, she pretended that laboratory experiments were too difficult so that
athletes would work them for her. After her graduation as valedictorian of the
class of 1938, she went East to Smith and there moped through the first year,
continuing the heartbreaking, virtually dateless life of a young girl who would
have happily traded thirty points on the I.Q. scale for a modicum of good
looks and popularity.
In her last three years of college, however, Betty found herself becoming
more and more comfortable with her surroundings, the group of friends she
was making, and professors like Kurt Koffka, who thought she was brilliant.
"For the first time," she recalls, "I wasn't a freak for having brains " She wrote
biting editorials for the Smith newspaper SCAN, in one article warning the
wealthy Smithies not to feign martyrdom for the small sacrifices they were
asked to make in the early stages of World War II (like walking instead of
riding with their Ivy League dates, who had to cut back on gas consumption).
The girl in the messy Braemar sweaters and tweed skirts, who might have a
corner of her slip caught in the zipper, went on to election to Phi Beta Kappa
in her junior year and graduation at the top of her class, summa cum laude.
She won a fellowship in psychology to study at Berkeley, greeting it ini¬
tially with squeals of joy. Nights of moroseness followed. "I was that girl with
all As and I wanted boys worse than anything." When Betty tells about Berke¬
ley, as when she tells about other landmarks in her life, the sentences never
quite get finished. "I fell in love with a guy that ... I was so much in the mood
for love then . . . with all the brilliance, I saw myself becoming the old maid
college teacher."
There were idyllic picnics with cucumber sandwiches and wine, and, for
the first time in Betty Qoldstein's life, love. At the end of her first year, after
studying under men like Erik Erikson, she was offered a larger fellowship that
 Paul Wilkes / i 970 15

would have supported her through a doctorate. Her boy friend, whose name
she guards, but who she says went on to become a scientist, confronted her
with a choice that altered her life: "You can take that fellowship, but you know
I'll never get one like it. You know what it will do to us."
The discord that characterized her adult life was at its polarizing best that
day. "It was the kind of either-or situation that is my constant burden in life,-
either I pursue my career or 1 sublimate my wishes to a man's."
She turned down the fellowship and probably planted the seed of discon¬
tent that would bloom as a book almost two decades later. The romance didn't
last, even after her sacrifice, and Betty came to Greenwich Village to live and
to work for a news service and then for labor newspapers. Several times she
applied for a researcher's job at Time-Life, but never followed through. "1
knew the men got the bylines, and women got the coffee."
She met Carl Friedan through a journalist friend and the attraction was
immediate Carl, who was staging summer stock and little theater works,
moved into her apartment two months after their first date and they married
seven months later. For Betty, it was the end of a haunting loneliness that had
only a brief respite at Berkeley. For the Friedans, it was the start of a marriage
that would be stormy almost from its beginning and would end in violence.
(When they went out socially, the Friedans would as often fight as not. On
one occasion, Carl threw a bowl full of sugar in his wife's face. He carries an
oversized and scarred knuckle on his left ring-finger from stopping a mirror

thrown by Betty.)
After their second child was born, Betty left full-time work and divided her
time between family and freelancing four or five articles a year, usually for
women s magazines. On the census form, she made a new entry under Occu¬
pation" that confronted her with reality: "Housewife." For the second time in
her life, she was afflicted with serious asthma attacks. The first time was at
Berkeley, and there she had gone into analysis and found that my deep-seated
hostilities toward my mother were boiling inside me and had to be released.
This second time, the problem was more apparent, yet harder to resolve: Betty
Friedan was being forced into a role she detested.
When she began to dedicate more time to freelancing and less to dishes
and dusting, she was able to discontinue her visits to the analyst. Yet, a vague
feeling of emptiness often welled up in her. "Carl's vision of a wife was one
who stayed home and cooked and played with the children. And one who
16 Interviews with Betty Friedan

didn't compete. I was not that wife. In some of those early years, I made more
money a week than he did, and I took to doing stupid things like losing my
purse so we wouldn't have a fight." Her freelance income allowed the Friedans
to hire help at their home, at the time a sprawling, gingerbread house in
Rockland County. "My trips into the real world to do the interviews and visit
editors in New York was the difference between Betty Friedan in a mental
institution or out."
Then came the fateful fifteen-year reunion of the Smith class of 1942. Betty
was assigned the typical class survey, the results of which were to be delivered
at the reunion dinner. Thinking she could get a magazine story out of it, she
skillfully made up a questionnaire that plumbed the depths beneath the tran¬
quil surface of her classmates' lives. She thought it would show that education
did not prevent women from adapting to their roles as housewives. Betty Frie¬
dan wanted to believe that herself, to stop the gnawing in the back of her
own mind.
Instead she discovered, as she first called it, "the problem that has no name."
These suburban housewives had husbands climbing up the success ladder,
children in good schools, a daughter in ballet, a son in Scouts, modern appli¬
ances and dozens of magazines that extolled the virtues of being wife and
mother. Betty Friedan found her educated classmates were asking: "Is this all?
Is there nothing more to my life?"
She wrote her article and presented it to McCall's. Rejected. Ladies' Home
Journal rewrote it and gave it an opposite slant. She withdrew the article.
Redbook told her it wouldn't run an article about "a few neurotic housewives."
A year had gone by and she had no sale, W. W. Norton and Company had
wanted her to expand a story she had done for Harper's Magazine on the coming
ice age (her only scientific magazine piece and one that has been included in
anthologies), but she convinced them she was on to something more impor¬
tant. She was given $1,000 to begin a book about this problem that had no
name.
In 1963, Norton published 3,000 copies of what Betty Friedan had labeled
The Feminine Mystique, a book she had spent five years researching and writing,
a book that encompassed the experiences of hundreds of suburban housewives
she had interviewed. It was an indictment of the popularizers and translators
of Freud's male-oriented views, the mass media and advertising agencies that
she said had combined to portray the ideal American woman as a brainless,
 Paul Wilkes / 4 970 17

blissful homemaker, content to have men rule the world—and her. Through¬
out thirteen repetitive and often bludgeoning chapters she drove home well-
researched points that had the cumulative effect of making the U S. house¬
wife, who had been idolized in her starched cotton dress and gently chided
for her dishpan hands, feel she had been sold a bill of goods by conspirators
who were depriving her of the opportunity to use her own abilities and educa¬
tion. As Betty wrote in the book: "There was a strange discrepancy between
the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to
conform, the image I came to call 'the feminine mystique.'''
By the time the book came out, the Norton people were frankly tired of
this overbearing woman who was already years late in delivering her manu¬
script. They hoped that with publication, they could be rid of her, and
expected to mark off a small loss for the book. "But 1 knew I had something,"
she says. "I knew it was big but the book had to be promoted." Betty eventually
browbeat Norton into paying a freelance publicist, Tania Grossinger, to
devote a few weeks to the book.
Miss Grossinger, now with Stein and Day, recalls: "The book probably
would have died on the shelves,- it wasn't a subject people wanted to hear
about in those days. At first, Betty's enthusiasm was her worst enemy,- she
would talk so fast nobody could understand. My pitch to the stations was that
she had an important book but that she had to be shut up. She was willing to
take some direction then, but now I see her on television and shudder at this
all-knowing monster 1 created. There were few stations that asked her back
because she was a tough interview. I can remember her confronting Virginia
Graham on 'Girl Talk' and screaming, 'If you don't let me have my say, I'm
going to say orgasm ten times.'''
The book did take off and eventually sold over 60,000 hard-bound copies.
There are now 1,500,000 copies of the paperback version in print and over
the years Betty Friedan has made about $100,000 from the work. After The
Feminine Mysticjue became a best seller, Random House offered Betty a $30,000
advance for her second book. This prompted a call from Norton president
George Brockway for a luncheon meeting to bring his newly successful author
back into the fold. "I remember him pleading with me," Betty looks back, 'and
I remember looking him right in the eye and saying, 'George, you made me
feel Jewish for trying to sell that book. Go-yourself!
While the book brought her prominence in the public eye, it brought her
18 Interviews with Betty Friedan

grief in her private life. "I probably appeared on more talk shows with black
eyes than without," she says. "Carl hated my success and he would throw my
schedules, my notes all over the house.” Natalie Cittelson, the stunningly
attractive special projects editor at Harper's Bazaar, who has known Betty for
years, says.- "The book was a catharsis for Betty. She was trying to work out
the problems in her own marriage through it and then the success in a perverse
way came to haunt that marriage."
Hundreds of those who read the book wrote to its author. Many women
said that Betty had told them the sad story of their own lives and now they
were about to change them. Still others were hostile. "Betty was more threat¬
ening to women than men then,” says Mrs. Gittelson, "because she created
doubts in their minds that many didn't want to confront." Betty responded by
defining the ideal woman in her own image: "A woman who is passionate,
fanatic and crusading. I'd rather she be hot than wrong, rather she be commit¬
ted than detached."
Betty soon began her speaking tours, gathering material in the meanwhile
for a second book, which at various times was called The Unfinished Revolution
and The New Woman. She found instead that there was no book to be done on
the transition in progress in American womanhood.
"The trend just wasn't yet there," she explains. "What was needed was a
movement. So, 1 guess 1 started it."
With the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, race and sex discrimi¬
nation in employment were banned. From the start, the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission, empowered to enforce the act, made it clear it
would concentrate on racial discrimination, leaving women's rights for
another, less troubled day. When the state EEOC heads met in Washington
in 1966 to discuss the act's application to women, Betty Friedan, writer and
reporter, was there. A vocal minority in the EEOC, including Aileen Hernan¬
dez, the current NOW president, and Kay Clarenbach, decided that a resolu¬
tion should be passed asking the Government to begin the fight against
sexually discriminatory hiring practices. "But the Aunt Toms were on the Gov¬
ernment's side," Betty says. "Mary Keyserling, head of the Women's Bureau [in
the Labor Department], and Esther Peterson, Assistant Secretary for Labor
Standards, notified us that the group had no authority to pass anything. In
other words, they should generate their report and go home."
The incident that spurred Betty Friedan to found NOW took place when
 Paul Wilkes / 1970 19

a female EEOC lawyer closed her office door and broke down in tears: "Mrs.
Friedan," she said, "you're the only one who can do it. You have to start an
NAACP for women." Betty recalls her thoughts at the time: "five never even
been a member of women's groups. I have no patience for that kind of thing."
Nevertheless, the National Organization for Women was begun, and Betty
Friedan was elected its first president.
NOW's credo, which sounded so radical in those days, was ". . . to take
action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American
society now, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly
equal partnership with men. And for Betty Friedan, implementing that state¬
ment and leading a movement that was to gain the name women's liberation
became a full-time occupation. "1 think she was driven by something she
believed in," notes one writer friend, "but she kept her life in a frenzy to
counteract the marriage and the fact that she was a blocked writer who felt
guilty about it."
Betty Friedan, already known as an author, became known as the activist.
She sent letters to President Johnson asking for legislation to help women
elevate themselves to first-class citizenship. Protesting against paperpushing
at the New York office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,
she walked into the office carrying bundles of newspapers wrapped in red
tape, emblazoned with: "Title Seven [of the Civil Rights Act] has no teeth,
EEOC has no guts." She sat in at the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel during
the lunch hour, a time reserved for males for the past 61 years. NOW pro¬
tested against ads that exploited women, against political groups that refused
to write women's rights into their platforms and against textbook publishers

who underplayed the role of women in history.

The Friedan marriage worsened. "I was ridden with guilty from the begin¬
ning of the movement, but if 1 didn't keep things moving in those days, our
programs would have died." Looking back over the ten years he has known
Carl and Betty Friedan, psychologist Harold Greenwald says: "Her transition
was much like the blacks, from masochism to activism. The blacks used to
wail, 'Nobody knows the trouble I see,' and it got them nowhere. Betty real¬
ized that the choice she had made wasn't working, her self-destruction to keep
a marriage together was dragging her down further, so she became an activist.
And her audience, like the blacks, was ready to listen to anyone who said they
20 Interviews with Betty Friedan

didn't have to be victims. Publicly, I guess she's been very successful,- yet there
is so much in her personal life that she would have otherwise.
NOW and the women's liberation movement stumbled along during the
early months with sometimes only the strong and uncompromising presence
of Betty Friedan to keep factions from destroying one another. Jacqui Michot
Ceballos, active in NOW since 1967, says: "Betty's greatest strength—her
aggressiveness—is also her greatest weakness. In those days it was needed;
Betty was needed to completely dominate meetings, to get something accom¬
plished. And, as for consciousness-raising, there is no one close to her in that
department. She's spoken hundreds of times, and NOW chapters have sprung
up after she inspired an audience."
In her quest to keep the movement alive, Betty has offended, at one time
or another, virtually everyone she has worked closely with. A typical Friedan-
ism is related by Luci Kamisar, a vice president of NOW: "Betty wanted to
issue a press release so she called me at home to tell me—tell me, that is, to get
over to her house immediately and do it. She had the typewriter, she had the
facilities for reproducing it at hand, and I told her that she could get it done
just as easily by herself and that 1 had something else to do. The tirade that
followed was interrupted when I hung up on her. The woman needs to be
brought under control. F~Ier resignation speech from the presidency of NOW
took three hours [Betty admits to two]. Structurally, administratively, things
weren't getting done in NOW, and now they can be. There just isn't a place
for her in an ongoing organization like ours. She has been appointed to a new
position as chairwoman of the advisory committee. And there is no advisory
committee.”
Betty's swan song to the group she helped start was the Aug. 26 Women's
Strike for Equality. Conversations with a number of women in and out of
NOW show that Betty was locked in a bitter struggle with a faction, some of
them Lesbians, who wanted to move NOW toward a more militant, anti-man
posture. Betty was ready to step down from the presidency, but she felt some
dramatic action was needed before she left "to put the group back on the right
path, toward a positive end, toward a pro-life stand and not one that would
feed the fires of impotent rage. I didn't work for the past three years to see
the movement suddenly begin a rapid descent to its own demise."
Throughout the six months of preparations for strike day, the iron hand of
Betty Friedan was present—as it had been present in the movement at large—
 Paul Wilkes / 1970 21

and was, many women will agree, needed. Ruthann Miller, a young socialist
who believes Betty's attempts at changing the system are ill-fated and that a
total revolution is needed, fought with her over everything from tactics to the
parade route Radical elements within the broad-based coalition of women's
groups that joined to stage the strike wanted street theater and massive con¬
frontations. More conservative elements wanted a dignified march and that was
all. The mother superior, not so much reconciling as bulldozing, prevailed.
"And let's face it,” says Susan Brownmiller, the journalist and radical femi¬
nist, "if any other woman had called a strike press conference, she would have
been talking to herself. Without the name of Betty Friedan, the strike would
never have happened."
On Aug. 26, thousands of women filled New York's Fifth Avenue, curb to
curb, and marched. In Boston, Baltimore, San Francisco and Miami other
women marched, shattered teacups, dumped babies on the laps of wide-eyed
city officials. The scale that Betty Friedan had hoped for—with secretaries
abandoning their typewriters and homemakers leaving ther stoves—had not
been realized, but she and the women's liberation movement made the point
that anyone who thought their intentions frivolous was mistaken.
Betty Friedan looks back on it all—the book, the movement, the strike—
and says dryly, "I've been at work trying to liberate every woman in this coun¬
try, and I'm not yet liberated, I've not fulfilled myself." One of her oldest
friends, Columbia sociology professor William Goode, comments: "There is a
quality to this woman that takes a while to understand. She is essentially a
selfless person, she genuinely believes that she must do certain things to
accomplish good or defeat evil, even at expense to her own life. What shows
is Betty's enthusiasm, her indefatigability. What doesn't show is that this
woman, who could seemingly do without the love and tenderness of a man, is
crying out for these qualities all the more loudly.”
With Professor Goode, writer Arthur Herzog and Betty Rollin, a senior
editor at Look magazine, Betty lived this past summer in what she enjoys call¬
ing a commune. The rented house in East Hampton was more a halfway
house for unattached people rented by us old groupies," says Professor Goode.
"She is interested in far more than the women's thing,- she wants to explore
different life styles, life styles that somehow guarantee that people are going
to care and continue caring about each other. She had a very successful time
with group encounter in California and was going to do a book on that before
22 Interviews with Betty Friedan

the movement took over her life. Betty looks back on her life, as many of us
do, and says there have to be better ways to live. And she's the type to do

something about it"

Gloria Steinem, the writer, who worked with Betty on the Aug. 26 strike
says, "She found that love between unequals can never succeed and she has
undertaken the immense job of bringing up the status of women so that love
can succeed. Hopefully, so that her own emotional needs as a woman can
eventually be fulfilled."
To radical feminists, Betty Friedan is the albatross they would like to shed.
Sally Kempton puts it this way: "She misrepresents the case for feminism by
making people believe that reform is the answer. The problem is more funda¬
mental, the entire society has to be upended. And on top of that, she projects
the star image, the elitist, which is totally out of whack with what we believe.
And there she goes, in sexually suggestive clothing, saying she is the spokes¬
man for the movement. She is not the movement mother,- that is Simone de
Beauvoir."
Jacqui Ceballos won't gloss over Betty's faults: "She's a terror to deal with
and there is an overpowering ego at work. But this is the first person who
awakened women to their oppression and for that alone we should pay her
homage." Susan Brownmiller says: "Many younger women are horrified that
Betty can talk to the Establishment, that she has a black maid, that she is a
celebrity. There is a serious generation gap. For me, personally, this woman
changed my life. 1 read The Feminine Mystique when 1 was twenty-eight and a
researcher at Newsweek worrying myself to death that 1 should be aspiring to
suburban wifehood."
It has been more than a year since Betty was divorced. Friends claim she is
never at a loss for male companions and Betty herself says, "In the last two
years I've somehow become more attractive to men. They say power is sexy,
and that is a worrisome thing. Is someone dating you for your name?" She
knows she is often the brunt of jokes or talk behind her back because of her
flamboyance, her drinking—heavy, but not as heavy as it was in the waning
years of her marriage—and her use of profanity. "Still, Betty has three kids
who really know who their mother is," says Mrs. Gittelson. "In the fashion
business I'm surrounded by women who make a point of being women. Betty
has that marvelous quality—like Diana Vreeland of Vogue—of transcending all
that."
 Paul Wilkes / 1970 23

When she is with friends like Mrs. Gittelson and Ruth Greenwald, Harold's
wife, Betty is no proselytizer for the movement. "She introduces me as 'a friend
despite her ideological weaknesses,'" says Mrs. Gittelson, who is not a wom¬
en's lib advocate. “She might spend the evening talking about her children,
confiding sorrowfully that Jonathan wasn't accepted at Princeton [as his
brother Daniel was at age 15] because she is a revolutionary." Mrs. Greenwald
often gets calls from Betty before a party. "There is an unsure little girl inside
her. She'll call me to see what she should wear.'
Her friends often wonder how Betty manages financially. The royalties
from The Feminine Mystique and Random House's advance are long gone, and
the movement work has been nonpaying. School bills for her children, the
cost of a maid and an apartment, coupled with her own heedlessness about
money, keep her constantly on the verge of being broke. Her livelihood is
earned largely through her talks (which lately have been bringing as much as
$2,000 an appearance—although one-third is deducted as an agency commis¬
sion and she must sometimes pay her own expenses) and is supplemented by
$100 a week from her ex-husband, who has since married a former model.
On a recent day, from early afternoon until late into evening, Betty Friedan
talked about what she wants out of a life that she admits has been controlling
her more than she it. Braless in black blouse, reptile-patterned pants and vest,
she sat on a brightly patterned Victorian couch in her apartment and spoke,
sometimes huskily with eyes closed, but most often animatedly, with flailing
arms and in a voice that broke when the excitement level got too high:
''Amazingly, I've never had self-doubts about the book I wrote or the move¬
ment, although my personal life is a study in indecision. 1 wouldnt say that I
started the movement,- it surely is a product of historical forces, but if Betty
Friedan weren't alive, she'd have to be invented to see the movement through.
Seven years ago I was considered the most radical woman in America, now
the radicals in women's lib call me hopelessly bourgeois and all that. For
instance, it drove them crazy when I was photographed in a low-cut dress at
Ethel Scull's party that helped raise money for the strike. 1 don't like my boobs
all over the newspapers either, but I do like to look feminine and the fact is
that I had a women's lib button on the front of the dress and it pulled it down
somehow. Now I double-tie the top so that wont happen again.
"If anything were to be said about me when the history of the movement
is written, I'd like it to read, 'She was the one who said women were people,
24 Interviews with Betty Friedan

she organized them and taught them to spell their own names.' [james Baldwin
in a letter to his nephew said the white man had taught the blacks to spell
their names, and until the black man could learn to spell his own name he
would never be free ] And 1 guess it will have to read, She was the country's
most guilt-ridden writer.' That bothers me a lot that 1 haven't written, because
my conscience is basically a writer's, and when I feel something strongly I
have to put it down on paper. Writing is so much harder than being an activist.
I really will get to work now, 1 promise, and do a book that synthesizes what
I've been saying in my speeches. I will call it 'Human-sex ' It will not be
another Feminine Mystique. I've resigned myself to that.
"Right now, my biggest desire is to slow down, to stop being the prime
example of the either-or kind of life I oppose, the career-or-love choice. I
want both. Of course, there are things to get done. The next step in the
movement is to have marriage, divorce, families, communities re-evaluated so
we can somehow construct new life styles for groups of people. The nuclear
family—mommy, daddy, brother and sister—isn't meeting the needs of mil¬
lions of people.
"As for me, I don't know what my role in the women's liberation movement
will be. I would like to weld together a coalition of women, blacks and stu¬
dents. Thus far we have announced a permanent coalition of the women's
groups who put on the August strike. Our next act is a strike on Dec. 12. In
New York, we'll march on Governor Rockefeller's office to demand free, easy
abortions and to protest the people who are trying to sabotage the state's
abortion laws. Then, on to Gracie Mansion to let the Mayor know we must
have 24-hours-a-day, seven-day-a-week child care centers. We're going to
march down Fifth Avenue just like we did in August, and I hope women in
every major city will also be marching.
"But I think my own direction will be political. And I think the year will be
1972. I've done enough fighting against, it’s time 1 did more fighting/or, I've
helped and freed a lot of women, and I think 1 would have their vote,- in fact,
1 don't think there is another woman in America who could muster more votes.
And I'd love to be in the Senate. 1 don't want to sound corny about it, but . . .
well, you know about Joan of Arc and the voices that guided her? I think I
hear voices sometimes, too. It is no more than your own sixth sense telling
you what is best; but it's like hearing voices. I certainly don't want that burn-
ing-at-the-stake bit. No*either-or any more. I want a juicy personal life. 1 don't
want to go to bed alone until the revolution is over.''
 The Liberation of Betty friedan
Lyn Tornabene / 1971

From McCall's magazine (May 1971), 84,

136-40, 142, 146. Reprinted by permission of
Lyn Tornabene.

The handsome, young president of Ohio's Denison University walks jaun¬

tily to the podium of the crowded auditorium to introduce the evening's lec¬
turer who will speak on women's rights. He makes a Women's Lib joke or two,
and then presents Betty Friedan, "one of the most formidable women in
America . . the students giggle.
The speaker steps to the podium. Alas, the podium is so tall and she so
petite that she cannot be seen, so she steps out from behind it and stands
center stage. She runs a hand through her hair, pulls back her shoulders, and
to the shiny young man, growls in a voice that is Tallulah Bankhead with a
cold: "I am the serious leader of a serious movement. If I were Malcolm X, you
wouldn't dare make jokes. ... If there are any more jokes, I shall walk out of
this auditorium.''
That is only the beginning. By the time she has finished her speech, she
has vivisected the hapless president and left his remains for his startled,
affronted student body to reassemble.
Same speaker. Next night. Same subject: Women's Lib. Augsburg College,
Minnesota. One hour before her lecture, she learns that a man she has loved
has died in a New York hospital, despite transfusions of eighty quarts of blood
which she had solicited. She sobs with grief and with guilt,- she hadn't said
good-bye, she hadn't done enough. She takes a deep breath and a quick drink,-

25
26 Interviews with Betty Friedan

it is almost time to go on. In the car on the way to the auditorium, she deposits
her despair with the committee that has come to escort her. She is able to do
this, to take total strangers intimately into her life.
Her audience this night numbers nearly 2,000, and she faces them quickly,
with an almost whispered plea, not for the liberation of women, but for the
liberation of men. She rambles through visions of an emotional Utopia
wherein men and women will be free to love one another on an equal, lofty
plane, where no one will die lonely and unfulfilled. People in the audience—
male and female—weep off and on as she speaks, and when she finishes with
a husky call to make love not war, they applaud for seven minutes.
Same speaker. She is at a party in Manhattan wearing a pretty chiffon midi.
She is soft, happy, and outgoing,- she likes parties. At this one she is the
celebrity. Guests come to pay her homage. A bearded man follows her around,
moonstruck. She doesn't notice. She has eyes only for the other celebrity who
has just arrived: king of the male chauvinists, Norman Mailer. They talk. She
attacks his attitude toward women, but she is sending off strange, familiar
vibes. She leaves the party visibly atwitter. "Norman Mailer has never known a
woman like me."
Meet Betty Naomi Goldstein Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique,
founder of the National Organization for Women and the Women's Strike for
Equality, spiritual leader of the new feminism, and America's first Jewish folk
heroine.
"I am—and you will learn from the people you talk to—an ordinary, fallible
woman,'' she says at our first encounter. She turns out to be only half right.
Fallible, yes. Ordinary, no. She has the energy of ten preschoolers, more resil¬
ience than Richard Nixon. She is abrupt, fierce, and her manners are often so
bad they have become famous. She has friends so loyal they defend her exces¬
sively and enemies so hostile they won't even discuss her.
"Betty is a star," says a writer friend, Betty Rollin. "Once you know that,
everything else falls into place.”
Certainly there are facets in the life of Betty Friedan that place her in the
common sisterhood of women. She is fifty and would rather not be. She is
recently divorced from a marriage of two decades and groping, not without
pleasure, to find a new context for herself. She has raised three children:
Danny, twenty-two, a Princeton graduate at eighteen,- Jonathan, nineteen, a
student at Columbia,- Emily, fourteen, teeth in braces, the only one at home.
 Lyn Tomabene / 1974 27

She houses a dog named Mervin and a cat named Penelope which has not
been spayed. But these are the only suggestions of ordinariness in her life.
Sit next to her on an airplane, up front, in first class. She settles herself
amidst hand luggage, reading matter, Manila folders, and takes out a large,
plastic envelope in which she has stuffed a random selection of mail. She picks
up a letter and holds it almost against her eyelashes, due to a difficult eye
problem. She hasn't paid for her apartment in three months and her bill is
nearly a thousand dollars. She makes out a check, seals it into an envelope,
records it nowhere. Other assorted bills are older, unopened.
Betty is submerged in disorder. "Not a low-level mess, says Betty Rollin.

"A high-level mess."

Walk around her duplex apartment on the unfashionable side of Central
Park. The living room is done in Prince Valiant colors-, rich, vibrant reds,
blues, and purples. It has Victorian furniture Betty bought at auction when she
lived in suburbia—no item over $35. In a hall there is a mammoth pirates
trunk filled with The Feminine Mysticjue—the full manuscript, notes, memos,
research In the bathroom, her panty hose dry over the tub. Next door, in a
workroom, stacks of overstuffed folders sit on a small desk,- she has finally
been sent, by worried friends, a part-time secretary who has been able to
organize at least the first level of work to be done.
The door to the next room barely wedges open. To get in you must step
over boxes of papers and magazines, cartons of hate letters and fan mail, piles
of urgent requests: Will you serve on our committee? Will you make an
appearance at the meeting? Will you be on our TV show? Can you leave for
Brazil to promote the publication of your book in Portuguese? Letters and
clippings and research browning with age. Memorabilia of an activist with an

odd sense of timing.

Who, after all, sent for her in this troubled decade to start more trouble?
Women's rights? When all of us—her peers and such—were so comfortable
and settled (or drained). She, who hates so much being put upon—did she
have to start a revolution in the midst of a thousand revolutions? When we
found out that our kids hated us, that our air was befouled, nature unbalanced,
our cars unsafe—in the year we had to give up smoking, for God's sake—did

we also have to be liberated?

Destiny is capricious about packaging heroes. She walks like a tipsy pen¬
guin, carrying herself belly forward like a woman in the third month of her
28 Interviews with Betty Friedan

first pregnancy. With her slim arms and legs, her pregnant posture, wearing
her no-bra bra under clinging jerseys, she could be the fertility icon of a pagan
tribe. It is, perhaps, a reflection of a mercurial personality that she never looks
the same twice. At a lectern she is sometimes earth mother, sometimes bitch,
sometimes child. People who admire her find her attractive. To her enemies
she is all the witches from Macbeth.
She loves clothes and shopping, but she has no time, so she usually looks
as if she were interrupted in the middle of dressing. She puts her makeup on
in the taxi, rushing, late, to a fundraising party, and spills it on a startlingly
red jersey dress. Fond as she is of decolletage, she curdled with embarrassment
when a friend, writer Arthur Herzog, told her the dress was totally inappropri¬
ate. "Why the hell didn't you tell me earlier?" Photographers had a field day.
The enfant terrible was born at 4 A M. in Peoria, Illinois, on February 4, 1921.
Her father was a jeweler. Within five years, Betty had a sister, Amy, and a
brother with curly hair.

Betty was a brilliant child who was remote from her siblings and had few
friends. Books were her greatest, and perhaps only, joy. "It wasn't a question
of rejection," her mother says, "but that other children her age recognized her
brilliance and held her in awe." Betty would add that it was also because she
was Jewish, not a glossy thing to be in Peoria then.
"Betty always excelled at everything, but she never felt she did well at
anything," her mother says. "Her father was very proud of her. She used to
come by the store on Saturdays, and her father would take her to lunch with
him and other prominent businessmen. I think he sort of exploited her,
really . .

"I hate the Middle West," Betty says today. Once she left it to go to Smith
College, she returned as infrequently as possible. The only member of the
Goldstein family left in Illinois is brother Harry, and he and Betty are
estranged. Amy, who married a minister, is now divorced and lives in New
York. Mr. Goldstein died in the 'forties after a long illness, and Betty's mother,
widowed three times and still youthful and attractive at seventy-three, has
settled in southern California.

It was at Smith that Betty realized her intellect, there that she became a
radical (everyone did in those late Depression-early War years), there that
she became a determined reporter, and there that she learned she had delicate
 Lyn Tomabene / 1971 29

health. In her freshman year she developed emphysema. Since then, under
stress, she has been subject to asthma attacks.
In 1942 she graduated summa cum laude and went to the University of Cali¬
fornia at Berkeley with a research fellowship in psychology. At Berkeley she
was a student of Gestalt therapy, and then, when her father died and her
asthma became unbearable, a subject of it. Eventually she moved to New York,
shared an apartment in Greenwich Village, and got a job with a now-defunct
radical newspaper. She loved her work and the "newspaper guys who drank
their lunch and then wrote great stories." One of the guys got her a blind date
with a slim young man named Carl Friedan, who was just out of the Army and
a producer of summer stock. They married in 1947 and stayed married
through what, from all reports, must have been a sadomasochistic free-for-all.
Did she fling the typewriters, or did he? Did she start the shouting, or did he?
Was she the monster, or he the beast, and who made life a living hell? Such
questions and answers were the core of their messy, expensive divorce two
years ago. Carl is married now to a beautiful blond model whom he displays
like an Olympic trophy. ("You see what I've got . . . you see? )
"It wasn't all bad," Betty says. "We made three beautiful children. We must
have done something right." The happiest days, she says, were when her chil¬
dren were infants, and they lived in an apartment project in the rambling
residential borough of New York called Queens. They were days of little writ¬
ing, intensive child care, shoestring entertaining and anonymity. After Emily
was born and Carl had established his own advertising-public-relations
agency, the Friedans moved to the suburbs. From that time on, Betty had a
soap-opera role: She was succeeding as a public figure and failing in her private

life.
The house was an eleven-room jewel overlooking the F4udson River in a
town called Grandview which is exactly one and four-fifths miles long. That
is, it is small. The townsfolk still remember that though the Friedans had a full¬
time maid, Betty sold boxwood hedges to make money and Carl installed a
pay phone because, for four dollars a month, it was the cheapest way to have
a second phone in the house. They recall that Betty was a typical career
woman you wouldn't ask to borrow a cup of sugar"—that she wore extreme
clothes, held what she termed an athiest Bar Mitzvah for her son, and was
banned from all car pools because she wanted to send the children to school

in a taxi.
30 Interviews with Betty Friedan

In Grandview, Betty's horror of provincialism turned into an abhorrence of

suburbia she flaunts today. Though she was active in her tiny community, she
stayed remote from it, using as her excuse writing articles that were, as a
former editor of Redbook puts it, "pretty close to things she wound up denounc¬
ing in her book." She felt freakish having a career, worried that she was
neglecting her children, and was lonely because "Carl didn't like me very much
and he didn't come home a lot." In general, she fretted, and she wondered if
other women felt the way she did.
When she went to Smith for her fifteenth reunion, she took with her a
questionnaire. The answers she got led her to believe that her fellow graduates
were as unhappy as she. She tried, unsuccessfully, to sell an article based on
the questionnaire and then continued researching, planning a book. In 1959
she signed a contract with W. W. Norton and Company, getting a $1,000
advance against royalties for a book to be called The Togetherness Woman. At that
point, Betty was the only person on earth who thought the project was any
more than a routine publishing venture.
"It was gut-writing," she says, "a transcending experience." And among
other things, it helped her exorcise the conflicts she felt about her mother,
whom she had always considered castrating and useless, a woman always busy
with a new committee, a new cause. "I knew my mother was unhappy, but I
didn't think of the woman thing until I was writing," she says. She says, fur¬
thermore, that her mother "lived out her fantasies through me," that because
her mother is fastidious and neat, she isn't, and it is because her mother is
"hypocritically" always polite that she is not.
Along with a copy of The Feminine Mystique, Betty sent her mother a note:
"With all the troubles we have had, you gave me the power to break through
the feminine mystique which will not, 1 think, be a problem any longer for
Emily. I hope you accept the book for what it is, an affirmation of the values
of your life and mine."
The book was, at first, the most talked about and least read of its time. To
this date it has sold only 53,000 copies in hard cover. Repetitiously, it told
women that they had been sold down the river by educators, Freud, Margaret
Mead, and the media, and that they should get out of their cozy houses and
do something with themselves. The message was years ahead of its time, but
Betty promoted it relentlessly, and as more women got depressed watching
their World War II babies leave home, more picked up The Feminine Mystique.
 Lyn Tomabene / 1971 31

The paperback, published late in 1964, sold 1,300,000 copies in the first edi¬
tion.
Everybody, including Betty's mother and Betty herself, declares now that
the success of the book dealt the mortal blow to the Friedan marriage. Every¬
body, that is, except Carl who says, "The marriage was over long before 'sixty-
three." The only change it made in their life together he says, is that "our
expenses tripled. It brought her fame rather than fortune and she lived as
though she had the fortune."
So be it. The Feminine Mystique obviously has been absorbed into American
folklore and vocabulary, and women all over the world testify that it changed
their lives. Young women, particularly, encircle Betty as she travels, telling her
how much the book has meant to them. She is, surprisingly, the guru of newly
emerging, nonmilitant, ambitious coeds who, like every generation gone
before, want life to be different from their mothers'.
"You and I are the transitional women," Betty tells me. "For us . . . for most
women raised the way we were ... to make dynamic changes is very hard.
On still another plane trip, for another lecture, she puts her head back and
talks about destiny taking her out of herself, beyond herself. Like a figure in a
Greek drama, she fears the gods are going to get her because she has strayed
so far from her appointed role. She fears in her soul the celebrity she enjoys.
She wonders if she has done the right thing with her life, but she's not sure
she really has had full control over the options.
In the momentum of her book's success, Betty signed a fat-cat contract for
a second book, getting an advance of $10,000 a year for three years. (The
money is long gone and the book long overdue.) The Friedan house was sold,
and the family moved into a cooperative apartment in Manhattan. They also
bought a summer house in a community called Lonelyville on Fire Island
which would make a tasty morsel for an analyst. And it had belonged to a

family named Goldstein.

None of Betty's friends was aware that what was going on beyond her
troubled household was the germination of the Women's Liberation move¬
ment. She never recuits among her friends, which pleases some and hurts
others. Cornered at parties about "the woman thing," she would say, "I don't
want to talk about it," and walk off. And so it appeared out of nowhere to
Friedan-watchers that one day in 1966 an article in a New York newspaper
announced Betty Friedan's National Organization for Women, "a new civil-
32 Interviews with Betty Friedan

rights organization pledged to work actively to bring women into full partici¬
pation in the mainstream of American society NOW, exercising all the privi¬
leges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men."
Betty got her usual reaction. Men laughed. Women shuddered. Militants
called the conservative now the "NAACP," and they didn't mean it kindly.
Lesbian groups said it was for "the four Ms: middle-class, middle-aged, moder¬
ate matrons." None of it deterred Betty. She staged sit-ins, nudged legislators,
ignored the backbiting going in in NOW, and forged on.
Eventually the liberation movement surged forward with a passion only
history will be able to fathom. As it did so—as the bookworm from Peoria
found herself in a position of leadership and prominence beyond her fondest
dreams—the Friedan marriage finally died. Also dead was Betty's term of office
in NOW. She moved—or was pushed—into an honorary position that does
little more than keep her name on the group's stationery. The day she was
divorced, Betty says, "I went to a bar and sat and cried, not because 1 was
alone but for all the wasted years."
Upset and at loose ends, she went to Esalen Institute at Big Sur to partici¬
pate in encounter groups. There, on the Technicolor cliffs above the angry
Pacific, her visions soared, and she began to dream of new life-styles and new
communities to house the brave new world.
The next move toward this brave new world was announced early in 1970
in a speech at the national conference of now. "I . . . propose that we accept
the responsibility of mobilizing the chain reaction we have helped release, for
instant revolution against sexual oppression in this year, 1970. I propose that
on Wednesday, August 26, we call a twenty-four-hour general strike, a resis¬
tance both passive and active, of all women in America against the concrete
conditions of their oppression. . . .

"And when it begins to get dark, instead of cooking dinner or making love,
we will assemble, and we will carry candles symbolic of that flame of the
passionate journey down through history—relit anew in every city—to con¬
verge the visible power of women at city hall—at the political arena where
the larger options of our life are decided. And by the time these twenty-four
hours are ended, our revolution will be a fact."

August 26, 1970, was, Betty says, "one of the happiest days of my life . . .
if not the happiest." The Vomen's Strike for Equality, which she envisioned in
 Lyn Tomabene / 1971 33

an instant and bulldozed into reality, turned the tide of the liberation move¬
ment.
After that day, the fight for women's rights took on dignity. Betty, detached
from the writhings within the movement since the strike, is particularly stay¬
ing aloof from the lesbian elements supported publicly by younger feminists,
such as Kate Millett and Gloria Steinem.
"I have transcended the woman thing," says the Mrs. Friedan who is, if not
exactly a new woman since her divorce, certainly a different one. Among
other things, her visions now have no mundane tethers "What would you say
if I ran against Javits in 1972?" she tossed into a conversation one night. It was
pointed out to her that New York's senior Senator isn't up for reelection in
1972, but she was already off on a new idea.
"She is impossible, but we love her," Betty Rollin says. "She's such a vulnera¬
ble, open, unphony person. She's not careful, and you've got to love somebody
who's not careful."
See Betty Friedan as I did on the last afternoon we worked together. I call
to ask for a convenient time to stop by. "No time is convenient," she snaps.
Then she says, "Oh, hell, wait a minute. Some woman from South America is
coming over at four. You can come, too." Growl. Click.
"Some woman from South America" turns out to be Ana Cuadros, Colom¬
bia's Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the United Nations.
She has come to Betty to ask how to organize a Women's Liberation group in
her country. Also present, wearing a Women-of-the-World-Unite button, is
NOW leader Jacqui Ceballos, who had lived in Colombia many years and is
acting as translator.
Betty has had a few drinks and is very cheerful. She curls on a couch, serves
coffee, crackers, and cheese, and talks, rapid-fire, about the status of women.
As always, her mind is racing so far ahead of her ability to communicate she
never finishes a thought. "Within a year . . . this year . . . there will be a world
meeting of the new feminists. It's a world movement now . . women are not
that different, you know, no matter where they . When I wrote my book, I
thought I was some kind of freak, the way 1 felt, you know, because I wanted
to work and . . . but I learned there were millions . millions . . . each one

thought she was alone and a freak .

"Yes, but how?" the Ambassadress keeps asking. She sits ramrod straight,
holding one of her exquisitely manicured hands to her mouth, a square, dia-
34 Interviews with Betty Friedan

mond-set emerald glittering on her finger. She looks at the slouching, pants-
clad ladies and appears baffled.
"When you get home,” says Betty, "you call a meeting . . . some organiza¬
tion women and some young women . . . good fiery people ... an actress . . .
a writer . . . and . . . You move from here to there . . . You stick your neck
out . . She pauses. She runs her fingers through her hair. She spreads a
cracker with cheese, and starts it to her mouth, sets it down, and says: "Jacqui,
you know what I've been thinking?" Jacqui seems to see an invisible balloon
rising into the air.
"A world strike for women!" Betty says hoarsely. Jacqui jumps in her chair
and claps her hands. Betty says, "Goose pimples . . . goose pimples," then laughs
excitedly. "The meeting, th meeting . . . will be ... a world planning meeting
for a world strike . . " She puts her head back against the couch and shuts her
eyes for a second. Her skin actually takes on a sheen of excitement. "Yes, yes,”
she says, like Molly Bloom in Ulysses. "Yes." Then she dismisses the subject
with two flicks of the back of her hand. She laughs: "And Ana will be our man
at the U.N.," stuffs the cracker in her mouth, and talks on.
Later I ask a NOW member if she has heard about the world strike. She says
she has, and wants to know how I know. I tell her I was there when the idea
struck. She says, "You were watching history being made, you know."
1 knew.
 Should *Jou Accept Alimony?
An Interview mith Betty friedan
Kathleen Brady / 1976

From Harper's Bazaar magazine, (July 1976),

45, 87, 94. Reprinted by permission of
Harper's Bazaar.

Alimony, rooted in the legal philosophy that the divorced, and therefore
non-supported, woman would otherwise become a public charge, is certainly
not something any self-respecting, independent woman would consider but
should she? In an interview with Bazaar, Betty Friedan, founder of Americas
contemporary feminist movement, holds that women are entitled to severance
pay and even a pension at the breakup of a marriage.

"If we lived in complete equality, and women earned as much as men, we

wouldn't need to consider alimony. But such is not the case. At least half the
women have spent key years as housewives while men were advancing in
careers. That’s a reality you can't ignore. The work that a woman has been
doing in the home, especially in the child-rearing years, is certainly of equal
value to work most people do outside the home, and it is equal to her hus¬
band's in terms of their family's fortunes. The more enlightened people in the
Women's Movement recognize that the next big issue is not the abolition of

the family or marriage, but a new approach to both.

"In addition to equal opportunity and education for all working women, we
must come to grips with the economic value of the work that women have

35
36 Interviews with Betty Friedan

been doing in the home. I don't like the word "alimony" because it somehow
connotes taking advantage of sex. Nor do we feminists like the terms "mainte¬
nance," which assumes the woman is like an automobile, or "allowance," which
assumes she's a child. So we've developed the concept of entitlement.
"Entitlement is the equivalent of severance pay for work done at home
during the length of the marriage, and is a fee above and beyond child sup¬
port. Entitlement also includes a pension for old age, since housewives who
haven't developed marketable skills can find themselves destitute. This is not
a question of taking advantage of their sex, but, rather, sheer justice after years
of service to the family.
"In the early days of the Movement, we fell into a trap when we said, "No
alimony!" because housewives who divorced were in terrible straits. We fell
into another trap by accepting no-fault divorce without provision for manda¬
tory economic settlement, distribution of property or entitlement, which left
women in the lurch financially. We did force recognition of the concept of
equality, but now we have to deal with the fact that equality is the ideal, not
yet the reality.
"The Swedes have advanced to what 1 consider the next step after the
Women's Movement. The philosophy behind their 1973 Family Reform Law
admits that equality between the sexes requires a new approach to the man as
well as to the woman and the institution of marriage. They say that when
Greta and Otto marry and both decide to work, then both will contribute an
equal or relatively equal amount to the care of their house. If by their mutual
agreement one stays home to take full responsibility for the house, that spouse
is entitled to some proportion of the other's earnings as his or her due.
"If both work, but she takes prime responsibility for the house, which is
the case in most places in America today, then she is entitled to keep a larger
amount of her pay for her own private use than he keeps, because she is
contributing more labor to their joint life. This does away with the concept
that the wife is automatically a servant simply because she's a woman. They
mutually decide how their house will be cared for,- if she's going to take full
responsibility for the house and not earn money at a job, she is still performing
work which has economic value. That's not paying wages to a housewife, or
giving women a bonus for staying home,- it's just recognizing that there are
many ways of sharing and distributing the work of the home.
"A woman in the 25-40 age bracket is still young enough to start a career
 Kathleen Brady / 1976 37

and be valued in the work force, but in her case, I still believe in the concept
of money as a sort of severance and a retraining. Take the common example
of a woman who puts her husband through school before they get divorced.
She is not only entitled to severance and a pension based on his income and
an equal distribution of whatever property they have, but she also deserves
equivalent training. Today, judges are awarding this in some instances.
"Feminists agree that a young woman who has supported herself is not
entitled to anything extra in the divorce just because she's a woman. But other
women at 25 still deserve entitlement support to establish themselves.
Amounts would vary because some emerge from marriage with no education
and no employable skills.
"Such a woman has a special problem if there are children and she has
custody of them. It's difficult today for any family to support itself on one
income, and since child support isn’t always enforced, she can be in a bad
way. If the mother takes care of the children, then the father certainly has to
provide financially. Similarly—and this is happening more often—if the father
takes the children, and the mother makes a good income, she certainly should
contribute financially. Unfortunately, in too many cases, the mother gives up
custody of the children, not because she wants to, but because she has no
other economic choice. I am for the equal right of the father to have custody,
depending on what's good for the children, the mother and himself. But I
deplore the necessity of too many women to give up the responsibility and
joy of their children because they can't support themselves and the children.
"Even if a woman remarries, her entitlement funds—beyond child sup¬
port—should probably continue, as this money is regarded as severance or
pension pay. If you were laid off from a job at General Electric, youd still be
entitled to severance, even if you later joined Westinghouse.
"Experts say the woman having the most difficult time with all this is the
one who is 40 or over. At this age, years of household service have probably
rendered her unemployable, so her husband should provide her with funds to
support her throughout her lifetime, especially if he's in a comfortable bracket.
"This is not a gold-digger, take-all-you-can-get approach, but merely a way
of being self-protective and recognizing economic reality. This society is years
away from complete equality. In todays economic situation, especially with
inflation, everybody's standard of living is being reduced, so even if the man
isn't resentful to start out with, he's going to try to protect himself as well. It
38 Interviews with Betty Friedan

would be better to work out entitlement in an automatically collectable way,

say deducted from his pay. Or perhaps he could put up a bond to guarantee
his appearance in court if he falls behind on payments as many men do. Other¬
wise you'll have to take up the matter with a lawyer and pay more money in
legal fees than you can collect, and you'll subject yourself to continuing psy¬
chological rage.
"I wish that at the time of my divorce I had simply said that all the property
we owned be sold and put in escrow for the education and support of the kids.
Since I could support myself, I didn't ask for alimony, but 1 didn't realize the
impossibility of collecting child support, no matter what the judge orders, and
the cost of lawyer fees. Now my advice would be that a settlement is infinitely
superior to monthly payment.
"After the confrontations of the last 10 years, the Women's Movement has
a much more complex innovational job to do of restructuring the law and
traditions of marriage. I think a man/woman relationship of real intimacy, a
real mutual support in every sense of the word, infused by love and sexuality,
is the best thing there is. I'm terribly intrigued by recent studies, especially
one of the Common Market countries, which showed that the happiest people
in Western society today are men and women living together, but not married.
Not only does this mean they are much happier than people living alone,- they
are also happier than married couples. I think there is something still very
wrong with marriage as it has been, with the way women and men have
entered into it, with what has kept them together, and the hostilities built into
it. And yet the emotional, human, psychological, sexual, even economic needs
that make people want to live together are very real.
"When marriage can be achieved on a basis of independence within mutual
interdependence, then I think it could be quite beautiful, and based on many
bonds besides child rearing, because that only lasts a few years In the future
we may value intimacy and commitment even more than the excitement of
changing partners. And this would be quite different from being locked by
economic necessity into marriages that do not really produce joy or intimacy
and that contain buried hostilities."
 Once fHore to the Ramparts
Mary Walton / 1981

From Chicago Tribune Magazine, (25 October

1981), 12-14, 16, 18, 20 Reprinted by
permission of Mary Walton.

It is eighteen years since The Feminine Mystique was published and fifteen
years almost to the day since the National Organization of Women was
founded. The women's movement has made enormous strides in opening pre¬
viously closed doors. But women still earn barely more than half as much as
men, and the Equal Rights Amendment appears doomed. Challenges from the
ultraconservative Right threaten to wipe out new gains. Comes now Betty
Friedan at age sixty with a new book, The Second Stage, which suggests the
movement abandon a misguided "feminist mystique" that cost it support and
made it vulnerable to charges of being "antifamily Instead women—and
men—should support more family-oriented issues. She feels sure she is right,
based on her experiences and observations. She herself has reordered her pri¬
orities. The question is: Can the woman who raised consciousness once do it

again? Will anybody listen?

The taped voice is measured, cordial. "This is Betty Friedan. 1 am in Sag

Harbor. . .
Suddenly the tape is interrupted by Betty Friedan herself. "Hello, hello. I'm
here." Now there are two Friedans on the line, the live one impatiently trying
to override her prerecorded self. "Hello, hello.
The caller is paralyzed, wanting to answer but not knowing how to inter¬

rupt. What if the live one hangs up?

39
40 Interviews with Betty Friedan

The tape ends. The real Friedan stays on, but she is too busy to talk. "1
have to make a very weighty decision about slipcovers," she pleads in that

familiar, raspy voice. "And then 1 have to buy some fish.

Could this be the wrong number? Is this the Betty Friedan who wrote The
Feminine Mystique, the revolutionary manifesto of women's liberation, as it was
called back then? Betty Friedan, a founder of the National Organization for
Women (NOW), who led 10,000 women down Fifth Avenue and presented
Pope Paul VI with the cross-like symbol of the women's movement. (What
chutzpah!) The Mother of Us All choosing slipcovers and buying fish?
Ah, well. Women's work is never done. There always was this side to Frie¬
dan, especially in the beginning. In the morning, she was covertly tapping out
The Feminine Mystique like a hidden addiction,- in the afternoon she was Mom,
ferrying the kids around, shopping for Victorian bargains to fill the Victorian

house with, to have a few people over for dinner.

Betty Friedan became one of the new class of Superwomen. I can do it alb.
Write books, lead movements, and still raise children. That sort of thing. But
even as the public persona was crusading in a strident, demagogic, slightly
mad fashion, the private persona was having a rough time. Friedan s marriage
crumbled, she never cooked anymore, and the new apartment was a mess.
All the while, in fact, that Friedan was denouncing the American female's
homebound way of life as a corporate conspiracy to sell more vacuum clean¬
ers, she was cutting her own apron strings, living the very movement she was

organizing.
But for Friedan, and for millions of women who translated liberation into
jobs, things went wrong that still don't seem to be going right. It wasn't sup¬
posed to be this way. To be sure, women have entered the work force in
droves. And some even have clawed their way to the top. But oddly enough,
all the surveys show they still are doing most of the housework and taking
care of the kids. Or they aren't having kids. Or they aren't even getting mar¬
ried. And those fat paychecks still go to the men, who earn on a national
average 41 percent more than women. Fifty-nine crummy cents on the dollar

and still fixing dinner. Meanwhile, the soldiers of the Far Right, the Dark
Forces of Reaction, have slithered out from all their cobwebby little nooks
and crannies and pounced on the fragile gains of the womens movement.
So here was Betty Friedan, who started it all eighteen years ago, and when
 Mary Walton / 1981 41

the friends of her daughter, now grown and a Harvard medical student, came
round, they were something less than grateful.
What I sensed from them," Friedan says, was "a certain sullenness about
feminism. Daughter Emily, twenty-five, recalls a cross-generational female
gathering of women, single and attached, including herself and her famous
mother. The mood was jocular enough, but there was an undercurrent of
resentment. People were talking like victims, not winners. "Look what you did
to us, they chorused to Betty Friedan. You got us into this, and now you're
going to get us out."

The Lone Ranger never had a clearer mandate. At first Friedan did nothing.
Hadn't she been preaching moderation for years, denouncing "female chauvin¬
ists" who hated men, and refusing to support lesbian rights? Unfortunately no
one was paying much attention anymore. Younger feminists regarded her as
irrelevant, even eccentric. A reporter remembering her recent speeches noted
that as she approached the mike, a wave of "collective eye-rolling" would wash
over the audience, a sigh that wondered, "What is she going to say this time
and how long is it going to take?" In 1977, she wasn't even elected one of 88
delegates from New York to a national women's conference.
In 1978, she and a dozen other current and former NOW leaders attempted
to start an alternative organization. It was called Womansurge, an unfortunate
name, and not even appropriate, since it surged nowhere. Although it was
unlike Friedan to acknowledge it, she was down maybe, and even forgotten
by some who didn't know who she was and how she had changed the lives of
countless women. So many would tell her that very thing, hundreds upon
hundreds, that she titled her second book It Changed My Life.
In the last few years, Friedan had become less visible, though never
obscure. She bought a house on Long Island and took up a more literary life
as she worked on a third book on the subject of women outliving men. Her
priorities were changing.
You had to know something was up in 1977 when she wrote a story in the
New York Times about cooking. She described making two dinners with her son
in terms that approached religious experience. Clearly, she was a convert. "1
am considering making soup from scratch next summer. . . she wrote. "I'll
buy a big tureen and some large bowls. And then with bread and salad and
cheese and wine, I could have people over to dinner again. It can't be that
difficult running a blender. 1 used to be very creative with chef's salad and
42 Interviews with Betty Friedan

leftovers. It can't be that hard to make Caesar salad. Or lots of cold cooked

vegetables."
But she couldn't help wondering about the movement. She perceived, as
she would later write quite eloquently, "This uneasy sense of battles won, only
to be fought over again, of battles that should have been won, according to
all the rules, and yet are not, of battles that suddenly one does not really want
to win, and the weariness of battle altogether—how many women feel it?
What does it mean? This nervousness in the women's movement, this sense of
enemies and dangers, ominipresent, unseen, of shadowboxing enemies who
aren't there—are they paranoid phantoms, and if so, why do their enemies
always win? This unarticulated malaise now within the women's move¬
ment—is something wonderful dulling, dwindling, tarnishing from going on
too long, or coming to an end too soon, before it is really finished?"
It was not enough merely to talk about solutions. "Nothing is taken seri¬
ously until it's written as a book." She wrote the book in a year, with an eye
to the June, 1982, expiration of the Equal Rights Amendment.
"I wrote with the feeling of a gun at my head," Friedan says. "I take very
seriously the ERA deadline. It would take a miracle, of course. I wrote this
book with one thought—that maybe it would help bring about that miracle,
and if it doesn't, it will leave us in better shape not to go into another 50-year
sleep if we lose the ERA, so we will be passing on the right questions. We
must have the energy and commitment of the young."
Called The Second Stage, this book is a bold attempt to reshape the move¬
ment's priorities, a call to set aside the anger that has separated the men from
the women and reaffirm the importance of the family.
The book holds that the feminine mystique that bound women to husband
and home has been exchanged for a career-oriented "feminist mystique" that
discounts both the pleasures and demands of childrearing and conjugal home
maintenance. In short, she is talking about the sort of thing that is driving
young couples up the wall these days. Like who quits work to take care of the
baby and for how long. To Friedan's way of thinking, the failure to address
such mundane family issues, combined with an overemphasis on abortion and
lesbian rights, has worked to the detriment of the women's movement, pre¬
venting it from building broad-based support among both men and women
and making it vulnerable to attacks by the Far Right that feminism is "anti¬
family."
 Mary Walton / 1981 43

Among many feminists, this position is going to make her only slightly
more popular than Nancy Reagan. The likely response is suggested by some
of the letters following publication of an excerpt in the New York Times maga¬
zine. One hostile letter writer observed that Friedan "would destroy feminism
in order to save it and beat the Moral Majority by joining it." Another wrote:
"Women who are the victims of rape, violence, and unpaid domestic labor will
take little consolation from idealistic notions of co-parenting and corporate
flexitime."
The Second Stage arrives at a time when women are visibly uncertain about

their roles and abilities. They have made best sellers of two books, The Cindere¬
lla Complex, which holds that women display a deep inner desire to be taken

care of that impedes career-mobility and independence and How to Make Love
to a Man, whose title more or less speaks for itself.

But with the likely defeat of the ERA—or even with its unlikely victory—
the women's movement will lose its unifying goal, notes Boston Globe columnist
Ellen Goodman, who predicts the movement will decentralize and take on
smaller targets. "People are going to have to be extremely inventive in bad
times." Goodman believes that Friedan may be "onto something" in suggesting
issues that are closer to home.
Says Friedan. "It was not easy for me to write The Second Stage because I
know it shakes up some feminists . . . and that it is not going to be agreed to
by all official feminist leaders. At a time when the gains that we have won,
which I take very seriously indeed, are endangered, at a time when we are
facing such reaction from outside, how can we raise questions that are going
to be unsettling and upsetting to some people in the women's movement and
create argument and discussion? But we can’t keep brushing these questions
under the rug because they are keeping us from the large support, the gains
of equality that we deserve."
But it is also a personal statement. Children, she says, "certainly have been
one of the basic satisfactions of my life. A new cycle will begin, the first of
my children will get married next month, and I look forward very eagerly to
being a grandmother, strange as it may seem. I can't wait to see what their
kids will be like, to see them as parents. If I had to choose between giving
birth to books and babies, that would be terrible. They both have been a part

of my life."
She is in Sag Harbor, L.I., as she says this, in a home brimming with furni-
44 Interviews with Betty Friedan

ture from her marriage, mementos from her travels, and gifts from her chil¬
dren. A tear slides down her face. "I think it's kind of lovely that I m going to
spend the next month simultaneously getting ready for the birth of my third
book and the first of my three children's weddings.”
The reality is that this marriage of her son, Jonathan, would take place Oct.
1 1, and the book tour would begin Oct. 12, and somehow the living room
had to be painted and the furniture re-covered before then, not to mention
arrangements for the affair itself, an orthodox Jewish wedding for the bride's
parents. And those glasses and plates.
For the moment, an instant in a radiant late afternoon, it was a wonderful,
peaceful image, the Founding Mother about to become a mother-in-law. The
beginning, as she said, of a new cycle.
The old cycle began sixty years ago in Peoria, where Friedan was born
Betty Naomi Goldstein, the first of FJarry and Miriam Goldstein's three chil¬
dren. FJer father was a well-to-do jeweler who had started out with a collar-
button stand on a Peoria street corner.
FJad Friedan not been Jewish, had Peoria not been anti-Semitic, there
might have been no The Feminine Mysticjue, she says today. Economically the
Goldstein kids were better off than most of their contemporaries. There was
no question that they lived on the right side of the tracks. There were a
housekeeper and a maid. But socially they were outcasts. The adults were
barred from the country club. The children grew up with good elementary
school friends, only to be blackballed from the high school sororities and
fraternities that ran the social life. "Come adolescence, one hit anti-Semitism,"
Friedan says. "I had a very early sense of injustice that 1 think came as much
as anything from the experience of growing up Jewish in Peoria."
Friedan also had been born with an unfortunate nose and a tendency
toward overweight. Equally as bad, she was extremely bright, which wasn't
high on the list of feminine attributes.
Even after Peoria, this matter of looks and intelligence would continue to
plague her. Reporters were always asking just how smart she was—was her IQ
really close to 200?
As for her appearance, Friedan perceived early on she was no Betty Grable.
When she acted, she got parts like the madwoman in Jane Eyre, a role that
demanded "insane, maniacal laughter." FJer boyfriends were real friends. Years
later, she remembers "walking up Main Street in the sunset, and the boy with
 Mary Walton / 198 4 45

whom I started a magazine in high school put his arm around me and said, 'If
you were a boy, you would be my best friend.'" All very well, but not a date
for the prom.
When she and Carl Friedan divorced after twenty-two years, he would
marry a model whose picture he flashed at the slightest provocation. His new
wife (they have since been divorced) was charming and loving and occasion¬
ally shined his shoes, he told Washington Post reporter Myra MacPherson.
"She's not intellectual, thank God.
And when Friedan got into a flap with attractive Gloria Steinem, there were
those who suggested it was as much jealousy as any substantive difference.
Friedan herself was not unaware that what the public generally saw were
"monstrous ugly pictures of me, mouth open, fist clenched. And I would writhe
and wonder. Was that really what it was all about—a mere petty power strug¬
gle among the girls? Gloria is assuredly blonder, younger, prettier than I am—-
though I never thought of myself as quite as ugly as those pictures made me.
But my battles with Gloria in the Women's Political Caucus involved my most
basic sense of what the women's movement was all about."
Friedan's mother had been women's page editor of the Peoria paper when
she married. As the times dictated, she gave up her job, but continued to be
active in community activities. At the same time, Mrs. Goldstein was perpetu¬
ally discontented. "Nothing my father did, nothing he bought her, nothing
we did ever seemed to satisfy her." Friedan wrote: "I didn't want to be like my

mother."
Friedan went east to Smith College, where for the first time it was OK to
be smart. She edited the school newspaper and started a literary magazine,
but aspired to be a psychologist, studying with Kurt Koffka, a noted Gestalt
psychologist, and others. After being graduated summa cum laude, she took a
research fellowship at the University of California in Berkeley. She passed up
the chance for another fellowship to pursue a Ph.D. As she wrote, "We walked
in the Berkeley Hills and a boy said: 'Nothing can come of this, between us.

I'll never win a fellowship like yours.'" Enough said.

She ended up sans fellowship—and boy—in Greenwich Village, sharing an
apartment with other Smith and Vassar girls. With the end of World War II
her friends now began marrying, and she was bumped from her job with a
labor news service by a returning veteran. Carl Friedan, a summer-stock pro-
46 Interviews with Betty Friedan

ducer soon to enter advertising, arrived providentially and moved into her
hot-water flat (the cold water didn't work).
During this period she was active politically. "Not about women, for heav¬
en's sake! If you were a radical in 1949, you were concerned about the
Negroes, and the working class, and World War III, and the House UnAmeri-
can Activities Committee and McCarthy and loyalty oaths, and Communist
splits and schisms, Russia, China, and the U N. But you certainly didn't think

about being a woman, politically."

These were glory years for the American housewife. The men were home
and in charge once more. No more exhausting wartime jobs. She had done
her bit, and the country needed her now to replace its population stock and
buy its goods. In return, the housewife was endowed with all that was female
and good. Friedan took note of titles from the women's magazines: "Let's Stop
Blaming Mom",- "Isn't a Woman's Place in the Home?",- "Women Aren't Men'',-
"What Women Can Learn From Mother Eve",- "Really a Man's World, Politics'',-
and—a killer—"Nearly Half the Women in 'Who's Who' Are Single.”
For her part, Friedan continued at a newspaper job after the birth of her
first child. But when pregnant with her second son, Jonathan, she was fired.
She was both furious and relieved. ("1 had begun to feel so guilty working, and
I really wasn't getting anywhere in that job.") The Friedans had moved to an
amiable apartment cluster in Queens and Betty plunged into domestic life.
When the census taker found her in Rockland County, in a big old Victorian
house, she resolutely wrote "housewife" as her occupation.
The year was 1957, the year of Sputnik. Friedan agreed to do a survey of
her Smith College class, now fifteen years past graduation. She expected to
find them living marvelously contented lives, even though she herself was
having these nagging feelings akin to guilt. ("Eight schizophrenic years of
trying to be a kind of woman 1 wasn't, of too many lonesome, boring, wasted
hours, too many unnecessary arguments, too many days spent with, but not
really seeing, my lovely exciting children, too much cocktail party chit-chat
with the same people, because they were the only people there.'')
What she found instead was widespread discontentment among her edu¬
cated contemporaries, not unlike her own. That discovery was the genesis of
The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, which held "the happy housewife

heroine" was secretly suffering from "The Problem That Has No Name." It
 Mary Walton / 1981 47

sounded like a virulent form of bad breath, but it was really another name for
depression.
Here begins the book that would become the manifesto for the women's
movement: "The Problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds
of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a
yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the
United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. 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?"
Friedan beamed straight into those boxy little houses in the Levittowns of
America as she wrote, "A baked potato is not as big as the world, and vacuum¬
ing the living room floor—with or without makeup—is not work that takes
enough thought or energy to challenge any woman's full capacity. Women
are human beings, not stuffed dolls, not animals."
The Feminine Mystique was an instant best seller. And Friedan, well, she had
gone out and dyed her hair blond the summer she finished the book. Blond or
no, after The Feminine Mystique, she claims to have been treated like a leper in
her suburban community. The kids were even thrown out of the dance class
car pool. There was this, at least: no more invitations to boring dinner parties.
She was in demand, however, on the lecture circuit. And more and more, she
heard people saying something like "What we need is an NAACP for women.
The opportunity would come in 1966.
While Friedan was raising the consciousness of the masses, a Washington
feminist underground in 1964 had lobbied a prohibition against sex discrimi¬
nation into the Civil Rights Act. Their focus then shifted to the Equal Employ¬
ment Opportunity Commission, where they were attempting to have sex

definitions removed from the help wanted ads.

This was the issue of the day. You have to understand what was at stake
here. How could a woman apply for a "help wanted—male ad? It was as
verboten as using a men's room. But that's where the good jobs were. These
early feminists were getting nowhere. Their lack of success produced an
undercurrent of irritation as a national conference of Commissions on the
Status of Women was convened on June 28, 1966, in Washington. Friedan
attended as a writer and observer, but shortly became much more, hosting in
48 Interviews with Betty Friedan

her hotel room a dissatisfied group who felt women needed an activist organi¬
zation.
Unearthed by a NOW historian on that organization's tenth anniversary
are several versions of what happened that night, none of them particularly
flattering to Friedan, who was displaying an unfortunate capacity for acting
out when people didn't agree with her. It is not one of her more marvelous
qualities, and is one of the reasons she acquired a reputation for being conten¬
tious and difficult to deal with.
Everyone—including Friedan in It Changed My Life—remembers there was
friction, stemming from the eagerness of some to start a feminist organization.
Dorothy Haener of the United Automobile Workers would recall "an all-out
shouting match” and Friedan showing one woman to the door, declaring, "You
know, this is my room and my liquor, and you're perfectly free to say anything
you please, but you're not going to use my room and my liquor while you're
doing it."
Another, Nancy Knaak, a University of Wisconsin dean, said she got into
a spat with Friedan when she wondered if they had explored all the alterna¬
tives. "Who invited YOU?" Knaak remembers Friedan saying. When voices
were raised in her defense, according to Knaak, Freidan "thereupon stomped
to the bathroom, entered, slammed its door, and noisily snapped the lock."
Knaak stood her ground, and after about 15 minutes, she says, Friedan reap¬
peared. The meeting ended with a compromise. Those who thought there
could be change without a separatist organization would try to have the con¬
ference pass a resolution calling for enforcement of Title VII—the sex discrim¬
ination section—of the Civil Rights Act.
This effort was ruled out of order, and a temporary NOW was formed on
the spot. Then on Oct. 29, 1966, 300 persons met in Washington to elect
officers and draw up a statement of purpose. Friedan was elected president, a
job she held for four years.
Friedan had certain deficiencies as president. She never learned to chair a
meeting, having little patience for Roberts' Rules of Order, and wasn't particu¬
larly interested in the mundane chores of organizing. But, says Ernesta Ballard,
longtime Philadelphia feminist, she has a "wonderful, exciting quality of mak¬
ing you understand things you couldn't understand and wanting to do some¬
thing about it."

During those early years, NOW took major positions favoring abortion
 Mary Walton t 4 98 i 49

and the ERA and numerous minor ones on things like whether to scale dues
to income and how many NOW chapters you could have in one city. Fortu¬
nately, there were some fun activities, like burning aprons in front of the
White House (no bra was ever publicly burned, insist feminist leaders) and
invading "men only" bars under the stellar blaze of TV lights. (Friedan took
particular delight in de-sexing the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel, which she
had been unceremoniously cast out from years earlier.)
Somehow, though, the movement didn't seem to be making tangible gains.
People still thought it was kind of cute, all those uppity females. So Friedan
in 1970 called for a Woman's Strike for Equality to demonstrate some real
clout. It was a huge success and, in a way, her finest moment. It did not hurt
beforehand that there was a well-publicized fundraiser in the fashionable
Hamptons, where a lesbian writer jumped naked into the pool and Friedan
herself was photographed unaware that her dress had independently broken a
drawstring to reveal her bosom.
It was also her swan song. She did not run for reelection that year, in part
because she needed to earn some money and also because NOW was chang¬
ing. In a sense Friedan didn't leave NOW as much as NOW left her. More
radical feminists were emerging. Lesbians in lavender armbands, out of their
closets and into the streets. Ti-Grace Atkinson (Remember Ti-Grace?) saying,
"My impression is that the prostitute is the only honest woman left in
America." Ti-Grace, who had dug her up? None other than Friedan, who had
misjudged her ladylike looks and upper-crust accent.
Friedan's feud with Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug, whom she accused of
"female chauvinism" also dates from this period.
In the late '70s, under the leadership of Pittsburgh homemaker Ellie Smeal,
NOW and disparate elements of the women's movement united in the fight
for the ERA. But Friedan, who says she is "very supportive" of Smeal, maintains
it was too late by then to repair the damage wrought by earlier sexual politics.
In The Second Stage, she argues that "It is all very well for wiser leaders of the
women's movement today to insist, correctly, that the Equal Rights Amend¬
ment has nothing to do with either abortion or homosexuality that, in fact,
it has nothing to do with sexual behavior at all. The sexual politics that dis¬
torted the sense of priorities of the women's movement during the '70s made
it easy for the so-called Moral Majority to lump ERA with homosexual rights
and abortion into one explosive package of licentious, family-threatening sex.
50 Interviews with Betty Friedan

In her private life, Friedan was caught up in the aftermath of divorce after
more than two decades of marriage. It was not an amiable split, to put it
mildly. Friends could almost hear the breakup coming. Smashed sugar bowls,
wine glasses, and the like. But for a long time Friedan resisted the idea of
divorce. "I was scared of the loneliness," she would write later. "It took me five
years to get the courage to do it."
For his part, Carl Friedan had been little heard from all those years,
although The Feminine Mysticjue was dedicated to him. But after his ex-wife began
publicly to talk about how he had resented her success so much he threw her
notes all over the house, mild-mannered Carl vented his own rage at the way
Friedan had portrayed herself as a victim of The Feminine Mystique—a rage that
came pouring out in an interview with Myra MacPherson.
"I supported The Feminine Mystique," he fumed. "She had time to write it
because she lived in a mansion on the Hudson River, had a full-time maid,
and was completely supported by me. . . . Betty never washed 100 dishes
during twenty years of marriage. . . . She has a great need to be independent
on the surface. What she is actually is a very dependent little girl. And she
keeps fighting that."

The divorce left Friedan rootless. Her two oldest children were in college.
For money she was teaching, speaking, and writing, among other things, a
regular column for McCall's. Though less involved during the '70s in movement
politics, Friedan's pace scarcely slowed.

She traveled widely, to Brazil, Mexico, Italy, England. Wherever she went,
she was recognized and often drafted to speak to women. Once when she
thought she was safe on a mountaintop with a friend, a troop of Girl Scouts
appeared. "Haven't we met?" their leader asked, calling the girls over. "Oh,
God, I think, not here," Friedan wrote. "I wish I had worn a blond wig."
The New York Times unwittingly caught the frantic quality of her life in a
fashion feature on how famous women organize their closets. "Organize my
closet?" replied Friedan. (Instant guilt!) "That's exactly what I have to do today.
It's the next urgent thing. My closet is complete chaos because 1 live com¬
pletely different lives. There's my Hamptons country life. My public lecture
life. My evening life. My messing around life. My traveling life. I spend half
my time looking for things. . . . Plus I have an up-and-down battle about
weight. Thats another wardrobe. . . . You know what's really irritating? Those
 Mary Walton / {98i 51

plastic bags from dry cleaners. You can't see what's in them. I'm going to
organize my closet by blouses, skirts, and dresses."
At sixty, still a woman of great energy, Friedan has had a life in the past
few years filled with metaphors for independence and stability. Three years
ago, she bought her house, a charming white, 200-year-old waterfront cottage
in Sag Harbor, where she has been spending increasing amounts of time. "She
needed autonomy," says longtime friend and magazine editor Natalie Gittel-
son. "The house was an important symbol
"1 find it very satisfying," Friedan says. "It's given some rootedness which I
badly needed. She lives alone, she says, "technically." The house over the
summer has seldom lacked for guests—either children or friends. "My friends
are a very important part of my life."
She has also learned to drive after decades of not doing so. And she has
bought a Cuisinart.
A Cuisinart! It sits boldly on the kitchen counter near the round wooden
table where she entertains friends. "She makes wild, marvelous soups," says
Gittelson "She puts lots of extraordinarily disparate ingredients in a pot and
something wonderful comes out."
Friedan contemplates the future with characteristic enthusiasm. "I am going
to do so many things for myself in the next few years," Friedan says. "Not just
everything writing, lecturing, movement . . . blah, blah, blah." (Her blahs.) "I
want to have more time reading, fun things, frivolous things, and adventurous
things. ... I'm thinking of getting a little boat. . . . I'm thinking next year I
might plant a garden, and 1 want to do some fun travel, like a river raft or
climbing some mountain in Nepal "
And, of course, says Friedan, there's that "One unfinished thing I'd like: I'd
like to live with somebody again and make it work . . But there's this damn
public persona that makes it, 1 don't know, so hard."
At the moment, the public persona is on the road, publicizing her book, as
daughter Emily puts it, "her last maternal duty to the women's movement." As
Emily Friedan perceives it, "The Feminine Mystique was a statement to her
mother, forgiving her mother for being who she was because she was that way
for social reasons. The Second Stage is a challenge to me, me and my brothers,
sort of saying 'I did this for society, now it's up to you.'"
 My Me: Betty friedan
Paula Gribetz Gottlieb / 1982

From Working Woman magazine,

(February 1982), 130, 132.

Nineteen years ago, Betty Friedan, homemaker and mother, wrote The Femi¬
nine Mystique and raised the consciousness of women across America. She wrote
about housewives feeling inadequate because they did not fit the role of cheer¬
ful homemaker. As she explained in her introduction to the tenth-anniversary
edition of the book, "Each of us thought she was a freak ... if she didn't
experience that mysterious orgiastic fulfillment the commercials promised
when waxing floors."
Friedan began her writing career in the 1960s by contributing articles to
several women's magazines but soon realized that these publications perpetu¬
ated the image of the childlike housewife—passive and happy in her world of
kitchen and bedroom. The Feminine Mystique grew out of Friedan's alumnae sur¬
vey of Smith College classmates. Their surprising answers about the role of
women prompted her to write an article, which was turned down by several
magazines. Redbook's rejection letter said "[This is an article which] only the
most neurotic housewife could possibly identify." The book followed these
discouraging experiences.
After The Feminine Mystique, Friedan gravitated toward women who wanted
change. She worked to create the National Organization of Women, a group
dedicated "to take the actions needed to bring women into the mainstream of
American society, now, full equality for women, in fully equal partnership
with men." In 1966, Friedan was elected NOW's first president.

52
 Paula Gribetz Gottlieb / 4 982 53

In 1971 Friedan helped form the National Women's Political Caucus, which
crossed party lines to work on electing women to political office. During the
next ten years, Friedan lectured, wrote magazine articles, worked for the pas¬
sage of the Equal Rights Amendment and spoke at several universities on sex
roles. FHer research at Columbia University's Center for Social Sciences in
New York led her to write The Second Stage.
In The Second Stage (Summit Books), Friedan discusses the problems of the
women's movement, the superwoman phenomenon, the changes in the work¬
place and the need for women to work with men. Some book reviewers accuse
her of writing to an elite minority of women and deny her claim that women
have achieved personhood on the job and are ready not only to relax the
political agenda of feminism but to work together with men for human equal¬
ity. They feel that the radical edge of the movement still is vitally important.
But many women were relieved to hear a founder of the women's movement
say that there was more to life than a career,- that they, too, deserved the
fullness that life has to offer. Fdere are some excerpts from a conversation with
Friedan.

WORKING Woman: What prompted you to write The Second Stage?

Betty FRIEDAN: I have a continuing commitment to the women's movement—
after all, I helped start it—and I felt that without this second stage, The Feminine
Mystigue would be aborted. Women could be stuck halfway through, and there
might be a real reaction against the women's movement in the next generation.
During the past few years I've traveled around the country, talking and lectur¬
ing, and I began to worry when I met women—young and not so young,
especially women in their thirties—with awful conflicts about having children.
They told me they were not going to have children, but I could tell they
weren't very happy about the decision. Childbearing seems to me such a
strong value of life. That worried me. Then this superwoman stuff began to

worry me, too.

So, on the one hand, I was working this out theoretically in my university
lectures and, on the other hand, I was observing younger women who had a
whole new set of problems. I wrote a few articles about it, and I also raised
some of these questions in my teaching and lecturing. I began to have an
increasing uneasiness that something was going wrong. And 1 saw that the
official feminist agenda, the first-stage agenda, was just not where these
women were—they had other needs and problems to deal with.
54 Interviews with Betty Friedan

WW: What is the "feminist mystique" and why is it so dangerous?

BF: A mystique is an image that shortchanges the reality of an idea or denies
part of its totality. The feminine mystique that I wrote about tried to define
women solely in terms of marriage, motherhood, sexual relationship and ser¬
vice of home. It ignored the woman as a person and, therefore, it limited,
truncated women's possibilities. Now there is a danger that feminism, too, is
becoming a mystique. There's a tendency to throw the baby out with the
bathwater and to deny that part of the personhood does indeed come from
traditional sources of women's identity.
When I said there was a danger of a feminist mystique, I meant an agenda so
concentrated on that which has been denied—the ability and need of a
woman to move as a person in her own right—that it denies that there are
other aspects to her life. We had to break through the feminine mystique, but
this is not to deny that those other aspects are also part of the personhood of
woman. What is needed now is an integration of the two.
Just as the feminine mystique was a pseudo-glorification of the housewife
that really denigrated her, so in a certain sense the feminist mystique glorifies
career. It is a pseudo-glorification that makes women a prisoner of that
career—passive to that career and shortchanged by it.

WW: In your new book you call for the woman's movement to embrace the idea of family.
Why is this so important?
BF: We have to embrace our own roots in the family, our responsibilities to
the family and our needs for family. And 1 mean families in all their diversity
and in the realities that they change over time. We must understand that this
is as an important a side of our lives as our careers are.
The Moral Majority, the radical Right, people like Jesse FJelms [Republican
Senator, NC], use the concept of family demagogically, and they play to real
needs of people. I think that people are concerned about families. I don't
believe that young people today have a good enough choice on whether to
start a family or not. The reality that parents have to work outside the home
is not taken into account by society in terms of the family. So we don't have
the necessary restructuring of hours and aids in child care.
It is for the welfare of families that you need things like child care. It's a lie
to wave the flag of family and then to prevent action on new solutions that
real families—especially children—now need.
 Paula Gribetz Gottlieb / 1982 55

But it is our own paralysis and our blind spots that have enabled the Moral
Majority to become so powerful. They don't represent any majority of people
in the United States, but they certainly have taken up the flag for family life
and God, and those are real values for most Americans.
You can't counter real values by not recognizing them, because if you don't
recognize the real needs then you're dealing in obsolete truncated terms your¬
self. After all, there hasn't been a really strong effort on the part of the wom¬
en's movement, on the part of many feminists to embrace the necessities of

families today.
We have created a vacuum that the Moral Majority walked into. You dont
fight the banners of people who say they are for the right to life. 1 say we are
for abortion, but that's like being for mastectomy. We are for the choice to
have children, for affirming the generative roots of women in families. We
want to make it a good choice, good for the children in families as well as for

the life of the woman herself.

WW: You seem very optimistic about the changes in the workplace that you see as inevitable.

Why?
BF As the number of women in the work force approaches 50 percent and as
the majority of women are now working, the reality of work life has to lead
to restructuring work—restructuring jobs as well as restructuring homes. Half
the people in the work force give birth to children, and the other half now
are expected to share the burdens of child rearing. And it's about time.
Furthermore, everything we know about technological development and
the development of work and whats likely to happen in the next stage indi¬

cates that flexitime will evolve naturally.

The first stage of the Industrial Revolution may have required that people
on the assembly line perform robotlike jobs, but things are changing. 1 ve had
interesting discussions with people working for the telephone company who
demanded a whole new approach to the quality of work life. They insisted
that they be given more autonomy in controlling their own work, instead of
punching a time clock. People are insisting on more control over their work

lives, and these issues go beyond just women.

WW: With a greater percentage of women in the work force, child-care structures will

change. What is your vision of the future of parenting in the U S. ?

56 Interviews with Betty Friedan

BF: The reality is that parenting is going to have to be shared between the
mother, the father and the government.
The image of the soulless federal day-care system, of handing your child
over to the state, is horrifying to women because their roots are in family and
the idea of motherhood is so crucial to their identity. But women are facing
up to reality. They can't keep running a home and take care of the children as
their mothers did if they're also going to work outside the home. So what we
need is diverse options for ensuring good care of children, giving mother or
father some option to take parental leaves and reduce their schedules, or some¬
thing like Milton Friedman's concept of the negative income tax or the
voucher system, which the conservatives are suggesting for other purposes.
We should institute a child allowance, which other nations do. Every person
who takes primary responsibility for the care of a child or a dependent adult
would receive a certain allowance paid as income, like a tax rebate. If the
mother and father jointly share the responsibility of the child, then it should
be paid to both. When they both work, then the child allowance is used to
help pay for child care. Child care can be offered for profit or not for profit,
by unions, by community agencies, by the local community using empty
school buildings, or use a federal block grant for it. The single solution that
we used to talk about in the early days is not feasible anymore: 24-hour child
care, free for the children of all income levels, paid for by federal taxes. It was
a dream. What's really important is that there should be a diversity of child
care in the community that parents can control.

WW: Why do working women feel that they have to be superwomen?

BF: 1 call that "female machismo,” and it stems from their mothers and grand¬
mothers. When the man had to define himself solely as the one who could
beat up the other man or who scored bigger in the rat race of success, he had
to hide his own humanness by excessive machismo.
When the woman had to define her whole identity in terms of the house
and the children, it had to be a perfectly run home and there had to be per¬
fectly controlled children. And the superwoman syndrome evolved from these
exaggerated pressures, not from the actual double burden of working in the
office and in the home. In the rat race, men were willing to conform to exces¬
sive demands because that was supposed to be their whole identity. But in
addition to these career standards, women have excessive standards at home
 Paula Gribetz Gottlieb / *982 57

(which don't necessarily have anything to do with the real needs of a healthy
child or a livable home), handed down from those kinds of communities where
the mothers derived their only power, status and control from the home.

WW: How will the increased number of women in the workplace affect men and the nature

of work?
BF: The battle of the first stage was for women to break into a man's world.
But in the second stage we re going to see the value of women s world, only
it's no longer going to be woman's world or man's world—they're both going

to be shared.
There's nothing wrong with ambition for women or with aggression, with
assertiveness, with success. Let us all enjoy whatever of it we can. One of the
reasons for the tendency of men to fall into the machismo trap and to have a
gray and linear identity was because they were defined solely in terms of rat-
race success. If in that competitive world everything rests on success, then
men are passive to that and underneath they are really cowering.
What is liberating for men is to find other aspects of their identity—this is
the other half of the women's movement. They can find their feelings, their
real identity in the family in terms of the emotional relationships and the
nurturing that strengthens anybody, not just the competitive drive.
But then how ironic if the woman would shortchange those parts that have
given her flexibility and sensitivity, even probably longer life, fewer ulcers,
strokes, and heart attacks. How tragic if she would sacrifice those nurtuiing
parts of her personhood and let herself be boxed in by that narrow definition
of career and success that makes her passive and helpless to the demands of

the corporation.

WW: What would you advise a Working Woman reader?

BF: I'd say to her, "Don't exchange one half-life for another." We had to react
against something, break through one mystique, break through a barrier, and
we haven't completely finished that job yet. But it is not a good bargain to put
yourself totally at the mercy of one half of life. Everything we know teaches
us that the self rests on the twin roots of work and love.
Abilities are also needs. You need to use your ability. Aside from the eco¬
nomic needs, there are psychological needs—for status, identity, participation
in the world, some sense of meaning—and the abilities themselves must be

used by women and men.

58 Interviews with Betty Friedan

WW: Could you sum up the message o/The Second Stage?

BF: We must begin to ask new questions and, even though we don't have any
answers, the asking will free the women now feeling in an unquiet way that
they may be shortchanging themselves. It will free women just to see that
there are problems with both the standards they have been accepting at work
and at home. And that they have every right to want the fullness of life in
both places. But in order to put it all together, they must begin to question
the standards and seek new solutions that go beyond the agenda of the first
stage of the women's movement. And these new solutions are going to be
every bit as important to men in the next stage.
 Betty friedan: tier Brave Hem World
Curt Suplee / 1983

From Washington Post, (19 October 1983),

B1, B15. © 1983, The Washington Post.
Reprinted with permission.

Still Betty after all these years. There have been twenty since she published
The Feminine Mystique, seventeen since she founded the National Organization
for Women,- two decades of ceaseless toil, wheedle and harangue, bending the
stubborn American psyche to a new shape. And yet, Betty Friedan is talking
so fast that the back ends of her sentences overrun the front, the syllables
slamming into each other like a pileup on the Beltway. The moment seems so
auspicious, the future so exciting. Ronald Reagan, she says, has "declared war
on women" by weakening the laws against sex discrimination, cutting back on
programs that benefit women and confronting the celebrated "gender gap"
with mere tokenism. And women, she said, will be firing back: In 1984, per¬
haps for the first time in American history, women have—and will probably
use—their vast political power. Six million more votes were cast by women in
the '82 elections than by men. Those extra votes are enough to elect a presi¬
dent, and women are going to make the difference next time." And as for the
gap, "there won't just be a token woman in the cabinet, a token woman on the
Supreme Court. Thirty to forty percent of appointments—that's the kind of
standard we re going to hold a candidate to.
But didn't Friedan forecast a powerful women's vote in the '76 election, too?
She stops abruptly, drops her face into an upraised left hand and shuts her
eyes—a ritual of concentration. Then the rasping, breathy voice starts again,

59
60 Interviews with Betty Friedan

eyes still closed "But the gender gap was only beginning to be visible in '76"
she says. By 1980, "there was a 20 percent voting difference between men and
women—the majority of women did not vote for Reagan." And since then,
she says, eyes opening, face rising, arms flying out, women are showing "a
greater outrage in their political behavior."
She's rolling now. The women's movement will become "the cornerstone
of a new coalition that puts the priorities of life and human welfare above
profits and advantages for a special few." It will include "that part of the busi¬
ness community still committed to free enterprise and the right to make
money but who don't want to self-destruct the planet." And labor, since "labor
itself will only continue to be a power if it organizes the service industries—
which are so largely, uh, manned by women.” A deep, gurgling chuckle.
A female vice-presidential candidate, she says, is a real possibility. "It was
symbolic ten years ago for a woman to throw in her hat like Sissy Farentholdt.
But it's all very serious and very real now''—in part because so many main¬
stream women's groups are sympathetic. "The American Association of Uni¬
versity Women, the Junior League, the YMCA, even the Girl Scouts—all these
organizations that are part of the establishment—they're all feminists! It's not
just a radical outside minority." Finally, the vision looms triumphant. "By 1988,
there will be a serious woman's candidacy for the presidency," and in twenty
years "we will have the Equal Rights Amendment behind us, some form of
child care, remedies for the Social Security inequities, and may well have a
woman president."
These are among the issues she will address in her speech today when the
Women's Research and Education Institute honors her with a twentieth-anni¬
versary luncheon at the Capital FJilton. It is an unaccustomedly public role
for the sybil emeritus of the women's movement, the Peoria-born psychologist
who at sixty-two is long out of the workaday bureaucracy. "1 retain my com¬
mitment," she says, but "in recent years I have played my role primarily as a
thinker. 1 have the vision and the ability to put into words the dreams. But I
never was good at maneuvering." Nor does she have to be, here in this
Georgetown town house where a PR firm is busily shuffling her schedule of
interviews and appearances.
Not that she undervalues her contribution. "The Feminine Mystique," she says
bluntly, "was the beginning of it all. It made people conscious of what millions
of women were feeling/' and "people still stop me on the street and tell me
 Curt Suplee / 4 983 61

where they were when they read it." Then "1 myself took the lead in starting
the movement in 1966 with the creation of NOW. In those days, it scared
women more than men."
In the early '70s, she organized the National Women's Political Causus with
Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug, and—ever concerned with practical plans—
went on to organize the First Women's Bank and Trust. "You can spend just so
long on consciousness-raising," she said at the time, "and then it's like looking
at your navel." But by the mid-'70s, she suddenly found her influence waning.
"1 didn't go along with the sexual politics" championed by Ms. editor Steinem,
Friedan says now, downplaying the bitterness of their rivalry. "It was a genuine
ideological difference."
Critics complained that Friedan was taking too much personal credit for
the movement and exploiting it to her personal advantage. For her part, Frie¬
dan warned in 1972 that feminism was in danger of devolving into mere man-
hating, that radical "female chauvinist boors"—abetted by "the lavender men¬
ace" of lesbian factions—were risking a national backlash. She accused
Steinem of "ripping off the movement for private profit" from the magazine,-
and, in opposition to rising anti-male sentiments, declared in 1973 that Ameri¬
can women were "now strong enough to see men not as breadwinners, not as
sex objects, not as enemies, but as human beings, brothers." It was not the
prevailing view, and Friedan ended up playing Danton to Steinem's Robes¬

pierre.
Friedan wrote in It Changed My Life, her 1976 memoir, that I was no match
for her—not only because of the matter of looks—which somehow paralyzed
me—but because 1 don't know how to manipulate or deal with manipulation
I'm just an ugly little girl who can't deal with the realities of political
power or the accommodations it demands." But by the late '70s, the national
mood had mellowed,- and in 1981 Friedan again became a major voice with
the publication of The Second Stage, her analysis of the future of feminism. "Over
the years," she says now, "basically, I have been right. Where I am now, I feel
very confident, even comfortable, with where the movement is—the large¬

ness, diffuseness and diversity of it."

Indeed, she is positively bullish. "The ERA will happen, in my opinion, in
this decade." She expects that the requisite legislation will clear both houses
of Congress before the election, since "1 don't think even Republicans have
the courage to vote against it” and "the old hysteria about bathrooms and so
62 Interviews with Betty Friedan

forth" has faded. And she anticipates the new federal agenda will include
"maternity leave, child care, flex time" as soon as "we get rid of the current
administration."
She is equally ebullient in the face of apparent retrograde tendencies in the
culture. If the covers of Cosmo and McCall's still hawk a welter of cosmetic tips
and boudoir exhortations, at least the fiction has changed. "The heroines are
different," says Friedan, a twenty-five-year veteran of writing for women's
magazines. If moviegoers still slaver as John Travolta abuses his girlfriend in
Staying Alive, at least today's films offer real parts for women. In the '50s, she
says, the only role for a woman was "a wife or mother waving goodbye. It isn't
much of a part." And on TV "there are women policemen, detectives, taxi
drivers. There are still a few mothers waving goodbye, but the personhood of
woman is with us now." And "I'm very interested in the popularity of movies
like Ordinary People, The Great Santini, and Tootsie," which suggest a new critical
attitude toward traditional masculine roles.
If sales of romance novels—with their atavistic depiction of women as
mate-made masochists in the clutch of Mr. Wrong—have never been higher,
Friedan says simply, "So? It's probably some remnant of the old dream. As life
demands that women take on more and more complex responsibilities," and
their freedom to choose increases, romances may "play to some yearning to
escape from freedom. But an hour of nostalgia is not the reality.” She sees a
steady maturation in fiction written by women: from the novels of the late
'60s and early '70s "wallowing in the victim state—the dreary martyred
mother" into the rage of "The Women's Room" and beyond. "Now," she says,
"we're getting some fine figures." Who? She can't quite think of any. But never
mind: FJer own "going-to-sleep reading" runs to mysteries and science fiction,
especially "the wonderful new breed of women detectives" and s-f writers such
as Ursula K. Le Guin.
And if some men are becoming uncomfortable with the lately modish "sen¬
sitive" persona of the '70s (as personified, say, in Alan Alda) and returning to
a more conventional masculine image, "well, I don't know that I'll buy the idea
that any man who has freed himself from macho has to be a wimp." That, she
says, is the kind of "either/or stuff" she inveighed against in The Second Stage
when warning women against adopting a "superwoman" self-image or a
counter-feminine style of "bark and growl, with no softness, no sweetness." To
do so is merely "reacting so totally against the feminine mystique that it's not
 Curt Suplee / 4983 63

free. It's defined by its opposite." Ditto for male "reactive wimpishness. The
man that emerges from the ashes of macho will not be a passive wimp—he'll
be free."
But the real "cutting edge" of change, she predicts, will take place as social
structures begin to accommodate post-feminist reality. Among them:

• Americans must overcome "the family mystique"—that "image of the family

locked into the past," with its single-family dream home and obsessive "together¬
ness"—without losing sight of the family's enduring value That will mean brain
changes, she says, both for "those who hysterically equate the family with one
single form," as well as "certain kinds of radical feminists who are locked into
rebellion against the family."
• Flexible work hours will be increasingly necessary for two-paycheck households,
as will "new forms and ways of financing housing" and new modes of housing
itself: "Not the conventional idea of a house or apartment, which still in a way is
based on the feminine mystique—a suburban dream house arranged for poppa
the breadwinner and momma the housekeeper, segregated away from the city
where the work was done and political decisions made.” Nowadays "the greatest
increase in our population is people living alone like me." For them, as for working
couples wrestling with new self-definitions and "those in states of singlehood,
some quasi-communal housing is needed that "respects the individual need for
privacy, but also the need for family-type supports—a commonality of sorts." It
would include "shared services" like laundry facilities, gardens, kitchens and din¬
ing rooms for "flexible options of sharing," rather like "Swedish service housing.
• Child-care services must increase. "Talk about child care in this country somehow
implies that it's either/or again. 1 think that children require the nurture of their
own families," and "it's a vital experience for parents." But in 1983, "couples "don't
necessarily have the grandmother down the street—and if they do, shes probably
working." With city and state funding and additional tax credits, Friedan says,
communities "could take advantage of neglected school and church buildings" for
centers "near where people work "

And much more—a dozen thoughts skidding through the gravel of her voice,
smashing into sentence fragments as the momentum builds. Still at full throt¬
tle. after a quarter of a century. "It doesn t stay still, Friedan says. There is
continually a new challenge if you keep going and growing.
 The [mancipation of Betty friedan
Marilyn French / 1983

From Esquire magazine, (December 1983), 510,

512, 514—18. Reprinted by permission of
Esquire

Betty Friedan sees her life almost as a miracle. She is as surprised at what
she wrought as an explorer who set out to map an island and discovers she
has found a continent. Trained as an intellectual, she became a political activ¬
ist,- deeply committed to the warmth, nurturing, and affection of family life,
she became the leader of a movement perceived as antagonistic to those quali¬
ties,- a woman of modest personal goals, she helped to initiate the "second
wave" of a movement immodestly dedicated to changing the world. One can¬
not discuss her without discussing that movement.
Friedan s mother, like so many of our mothers, was unhappy with her life.
She had been forced to give up her job on a newspaper when she married, a
loss she lamented throughout her later life and which shadowed her pleasure
in her family and home. She urged her daughter toward a career in journalism,
but young Betty was fascinated by psychology at Smith and Berkeley and did
work so outstanding that she was offered a graduate fellowship in that
field—an extraordinary event for a woman in the Forties. She was dating a
young physicist who resented her opportunity and threatened to break with
her. She gave up the fellowship in a paroxysm of guilt and confusion, wanting
to pursue her studies, but wanting most of all the love, the home, the children
that were supposed to be everywoman's destiny. Like so many women, she
wanted above all to avoid her mothers misery, her mother's life, and

64
 Marilyn French / 1983 65

attempted to do this by renouncing her mother's values. She would not spend
her life sorrowing over a lost career: she would embrace the man, the home,
the children, and live in a bath of felicity. The physicist broke with her
anyway.
She went into journalism after all, reporting for the labor press. She found
the right man and married him. She was not forced to give up her job until she
became pregnant with her second child: one maternity leave was deemed suf¬
ficient, apparently, and even the newspaper guild refused to support her pro¬
test, despite a contract stipulating the right to pregnancy leave. So far had
things progressed in a generation.
Friedan continued to write, free-lancing mainly for women's magazines.
She was fascinated by women who managed to attain excellence in a disci¬
pline—especially the arts—and to raise children at the same time. This was
her own dream: a whole life, integration of all talents. She immersed herself
in the magazines that were her market, studying them. Over time, she per¬
ceived a pattern. Her editors would cut references to her subjects' careers:
they claimed a woman painting a crib was interesting to their readers, but a
woman painting a picture was not. She had difficulty placing a piece on the
natural childbirth of a famous actress: it was too "gory,'' editors complained.
The reality of women's lives—physical, intellectual, emotional—was cen¬
sored,- what appeared was a fantasy, a picture-book image of happy female
domesticity that pleased advertisers and presumably tranquilized female read¬
ers. Friedan began to analyze the fantasy,- she interviewed housewives about
the reality of their lives,- she thought about the reasons for the promotion of
such a false image. She gave the image a name: the Feminine Mystique.
In 1963 she published a book containing her findings, in which she
described her personal dilemma and gave accounts of those who shared it. It
was an immediate best seller, selling three million copies, and read by millions
more. Friedan received thousands of letters from women grateful to her pri¬
marily for alleviating their sense of isolation. They had believed they alone
felt as they did,- they had thought, and many had been told, they were "sick,"
neurotic because they felt discontent, even desperate, about the vapidity of
their lives. Everywhere, people talked about The Feminine Mystique, the phrase

entered the language.

The women Friedan reached were mainly like herself—middle class with
some education. Most were white, women of the American mainstream, mar-
66 Interviews with Betty Friedan

ried, mothers,- some had prosperous husbands. Inspired and validated by find¬
ing their own truth presented as truth, many of them changed their lives,
returning to school, entering the work force. But professional and single
women, whites and women of color, were also aroused by her book, locating
in the feminine mystique the barrier to their advancement,- it was their image
in men's minds that led men to prevent women from achieving greater effec¬
tiveness and scope in their jobs. If Friedan's reputation rested only on this
book and the response to it, she would be noteworthy. But she went further:
she changed her own life.
Several factors converged at this time. The black civil rights movement had
stimulated important legislation, notably the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the
Civil Rights Act of 1964. Discrimination in employment on grounds of race
was to be declared illegal. When it was proposed that sex be added to those
grounds, the House of Representatives dissolved in laughter. Martha Griffiths,
then in the House, was humiliated and outraged and threatened that if Con¬
gress did not keep "that joke" in the Act, she would force a voice vote on the
floor, exposing those who were against women Margaret Chase Smith leveled
the same threat in the Senate. The word sex remained in the Act, but no one
expected it to change anything.
In 1961 President Kennedy had established a national Commission on the
Status of Women, which fully documented the second-class status of Ameri¬
can women. Its findings, however, resulted only in the establishment of an
advisory council and fifty state commissions: more talk, no action, temporiz¬
ing. The administration's poverty program had no women in decision-making
positions, offered no job training or educational programs to women, had no
plans for day-care centers, although the present "feminization of poverty" was
already perceptible—women and their children constituted 80 percent of the
clientele of urban welfare programs. Even the Equal Employment Opportuni¬
ties Commission (EEOC), the agency supposed to administer Title VII (for¬
bidding discrimination in employment) of the Civil Rights Act, had no women
in decision-making posts except for the presidential appointee, Aileen Her¬
nandez. Indeed, it was discovered that the EEOC was planning to issue a
guideline to Title VII that essentially sanctioned continued discrimination
against women in employment.
The women who wofked in government were outraged but could not act
openly,- espousal of women's rights was grounds for dismissal, for women or
 Marilyn French I 1983 67

men. Women in media were in a similar position, as were academic and profes¬
sional women. These women wrote or talked to Betty Friedan. Promoting her
book took Friedan across the country and to Europe, and everywhere she
spoke to huge audiences of women and listened to their protests. They urged
her to "start an NAACP for women”,• they insisted that Title Vll would never
be enforced for women unless they marched on Washington like the blacks.
Women in labor unions described how the unions sided with management
when women brought complaints, how women were silenced and intimidated
at union meetings.
She was fired by the outrage she encountered wherever she went. She her¬
self was astounded at the depth and scope of the problem she had named, at
its pervasiveness in American society. Her book had thrust her into a central
position, which she accepted with dedication and energy. She went on lectur¬
ing, she traveled continually, lived out of a suitcase, spent her nights in drab
motel rooms. Ironically, this woman who cherishes the warmth and intimacy
of family life had to sacrifice it to a struggle in which she had, accidentally it
seemed, become pivotal. She missed her children,- her marriage was founder¬
ing,- but she worked on with the euphoria of those who suddenly see a passage
to freedom Under pressure from women in all aspects of life, she finally
decided to found a political organization devoted to gaining women's rights,
and in 1966, with a small group of women of different races, she founded
NOW, the National Organization for Women, the first new feminist organiza¬
tion in nearly fifty years. For in 1920, after passage of the Nineteenth Amend¬
ment granting women the vote, the "first wave of organized feminism in
America essentially collapsed. The women were exhausted,- the fight for suf¬
frage had taken seventy years and had drained more than two generations of
women. Some stalwarts continued to fight, among them Alice Paul, who in
1923 succeeded in having the Equal Rights Act introduced in Congress. But
for the most part, women trusted the vote to provide them with a voice. It did
not and could not, in a nation in which both major political parties are con¬
trolled by the same forces, forces intent on maintaining a society stratified by
economic inequality largely determined by sex and race.
Thus, NOW's Statement of Purpose had to declare, once again, that
women are human—an assertion, Friedan says still, that turns the entire cul¬
ture upside down. Her statement proclaims NOW to be dedicated to equality
for women and to political action as a means of achieving it. It declares that
68 Interviews with Betty Friedan

black and low-paid women are particular victims of our society,- that women
are excluded from postgraduate educational institutions and professional asso¬
ciations,- that tokenism is unacceptable. It affirms the continuing importance
to women of childbearing and child rearing, but rejects the middle-class divi¬
sion of labor, which places the economic burden of the family entirely on
men. It locates the arena of its action within the boundaries of American law
and outside alignment with any political party.
NOW grew swiftly and was extremely effective, largely because it was a
mainstream organization. There has been feminist protest at least since the
fifteenth-century writer Christine de Pisan, the first of a series of European
intellectuals to protest laws and attitudes based on the idea that women are
subhuman, property, and exist for men's sake. Women of all classes thronged
to early Christian and, later, early Protestant sects, which offered them at least
moral or spiritual equality with men—the opportunity to die with men before
the lions or at the stake. Poor women who could no longer feed their families
rose up courageously before and during the French Revolution and, in fact,
helped to precipitate it. Women composed a heroic segment of early socialist
movements, drawn by a vision of equality and social justice.
But it has been exceedingly difficult to unify women. Although they consti¬
tute a separate caste, as Simone de Beauvoir has pointed out (caste is conferred
at birth and is unchangeable,- class is conferred at birth, but can be changed),
they are also members of different classes, the classes of their families, to
which they feel they owe primary loyalty. Although females are at the bottom
of every class and although women in general value felicity more than power,
their common cause is obscured by the clashing of classes, races, religious and
ethnic categories, and subcultures. Yet without some unity among women as
a caste, nothing changes for women, whoever rules the roost.
Friedan's creation of a mainstream women's movement was therefore an
extraordinary achievement. It was not performed in a single stroke: after estab¬
lishing NOW, she and other leaders had to struggle daily to enable NOW to
survive and grow, to be heard over the ridicule of the external world, including
the media, and to pierce the silence of women's fear. In those years, Friedan
was catapulted into international prominence,- she became the symbol of the
women's movement. She worked tirelessly, literally day and night: she lob¬
bied, she organized, she raised funds. She drew women from across the coun¬
try into a ferment of activity. If she was often a guest at the White House, she
 Marilyn French / 1983 69

also visited women in labor unions and worked closely with women of color
and tried to enlist them in the organization. Her energy seemed limitless: faith
and joy buoyed her.
The first battle fought by NOW was to pressure, successfully, the commis¬
sioners of the EEOC and the President to rescind the guidelines tolerating
sexual discrimination The immediate consequence of this was the employers,
who had recently been forbidden from dividing job advertisements into cate¬
gories of "colored" and "white," were also prevented from advertising "Help
Wanted—Female" or "Help Wanted—Male.” Once this had been done, NOW
initiated a series of lawsuits against companies that refused to hire women in
jobs traditionally reserved for men—as telephone line workers, railroad work¬
ers, and others. It fought against "protective" legislation decreeing that women
could not lift more than thirty-five pounds. It took up the case of stewardesses
who claimed discrimination because they were forced to leave their jobs if
they married or when they reached thirty-five. The airlines mounted a tough
fight against the EEOC and NOW. So elaborate and expensive was their
defense that Friedan came to recognize the economic motive of institutions in
maintaining sexist discrimination. By letting women go at thirty-five or before,
the airlines saved the costs of pensions and promotions. By keeping women in
low economic status, many companies maintained a reliable low-paid marginal
labor force who could be hired when needed and fired if an industry had to
contract for a time. By hiring young unmarried women, or older women whose
children had grown, industry gained the benefit of energy and experience
without having to provide raises and advancement.
Maintaining a noncentralized structure offering considerable autonomy to
community chapters, NOW in its early years focused action through the
establishment of task forces on the treatment of women in the media and
textbooks, employment, sports, and marriage and divorce laws. Women came
to NOW for help in fighting sex discrimination in their jobs, in establishing
standards for day-care centers, in banning segregated living arrangements on
college campuses, and more. NOW used political pressure picketing, march¬
ing, lobbying, and media events as well as legal action to fight, one by one,
the seemingly unending barriers to women s full citizenship. In 1967, under
Friedan's guidance, NOW voted to work for the passage of the Equal Rights
Amendment, which had languished in committee since 1923, and for access
to legal abortion. These positions led some women to resign from the organi-
70 Interviews with Betty Friedan

zation. But once a woman has arrived at a feminist perspective on her life and
society, there is no retreat from that realization, and these women formed
their own organizations, like the Women's Equity Action League (WEAL),
that worked with NOW on issues of shared concern.
In 1969 Friedan joined with Larry Lader and others who supported legal
abortion to found what was to become NARAL, the National Abortion Rights
Action League. At its inception, the men involved saw it as principally
designed to protect doctors who performed abortions,- they did not consider
abortion a feminist issue and were appalled at the linkage of the two. Friedan
rooted access to legal abortion firmly in the basic human right to control one's
own body and reproduction. On this ground, abortion became a feminist
issue. After the Supreme Court decision of 1973 affirming this right, abortion-
related deaths of women dropped by 600 percent.
NOW had many major achievements in those early years. It conveyed to
the nation at large the fact that discrimination against women exists,- it trans¬
formed ridicule of the women's movement by the media and other institutions
into serious attention,- it was instrumental in the building of a corpus of judg¬
ments and laws requiring equity in education and in hiring and promotion. It
helped to get the ERA passed by the Congress. It also performed two more
amorphous but extremely significant functions.
First, it generated many spin-off groups,- some, like WEAL, dissociated
themselves from NOW because they could not support a particular position
(abortion, in this case), yet continued to work on other projects with NOW.
Some, like NARAL, were formed because a single issue had grown too com¬
plex and demanding to be handled by the parent organization. This was the
case also with the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, started in 1970
by Friedan and K.ay Clarenbach. Although women lawyers invariably worked
for and with NOW pro bono, the many lawsuits NOW was involved with were
still expensive. The Fund was designed to raise and distribute money for such
actions. And in 1971 Friedan, with Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Liz Carpen¬
ter, Clarenbach, and others, founded NWPC, the National Women's Political
Caucus, designed to support candidates for all levels of office and in the judi¬
ciary who support the elimination of racism, sexism, institutional violence,
and poverty. Each of these organizations has been extremely effective, and
remains so.

Second, NOW functioned as a centrist organization, around and against

 Marilyn French / 1983 71

which other groups could align themselves. More-radical women argued that
to work for the assimilation of women into a society that was inherently unjust
and unworthy was an unworthy act,- more-conservative women, fearful of fur¬
ther weakening men's sense of responsibility for their children and the women
who raise them, renounced any claim on "rights" that might, they felt, contrib¬
ute to that process. In the late Sixties various groups tried to take over NOW.
Younger women, radicalized by the Vietnam War and by their treatment by
men within the antiwar movement, founded formal and informal feminist
groups,- many also joined NOW. These women represented a wide spectrum
of opinion and were intellectually sophisticated. Some were socialists of vari¬
ous "sects ", some believed lesbianism to be the only fully feminist position,
and they demanded that NOW affirm this. Since feminists were invariably
attacked as "dykes," they should counter this attack by proclaiming, "We are
all lesbians," much as King Christian X of Denmark vowed to put on the
yellow armband with the Star of David if the Nazis decreed all Danish Jews
must wear them.
Friedan s response to these new elements was both personal and political.
She was shocked by the idea of a public declaration of lesbianism. She writes,
"I am not that far from everywoman" (insofar as everywoman exists), and
reminds the reader that she was born in Peoria, Illinois, a symbolic Middle-
town. But she also felt, with many other NOW leaders, that to take such a
position would be a tactical error: she felt lesbianism as a political stance to
be antimale, and her own position, from the beginning, had been to gain
rights for women without alienating men, but rather seeing them as fellow
victims of a divisive, repressive, dehumanized society. A mainstream person,
she envisioned social change within capitalism, not through violent revolution
or even evolution to a socialist system she considered authoritarian and still

unequal.
For several years, these conflicts seethed within NOW, occupying the ener¬
gies of many women and leaving deep wounds behind especially the strug¬
gle between members of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), a branch of the
Socialist Workers' Party, and the centrists. But the arguments broadened the
thinking and awareness of the entire group and deepened its understanding of
the nature of the barriers to the equality of women In time, NOW reasserted
its original mainstream character,- dissenters formed other spin-off groups or
dropped out of organized feminism (not out of feminism itself) altogether.
72 Interviews with Betty Friedan

The conflict exhausted Friedan, who struggled throughout to prevent

NOW from fragmenting into sects. In 1970, divorced and in need of money,
she stepped down as president of NOW. Aileen Hernandez, one of the origi¬
nal founders, took over. Friedan's last major act in NOW (although she is still
an important member) was to organize the Women's Strike for Equality in
1970. Its centerpiece was to be a march down Fifth Avenue in New York, but
Mayor Lindsay had denied the women a permit. Nevertheless, they assem¬
bled, nearly fifty thousand women who had for the day abandoned their jobs
or their homes to march for equality. When mounted police tried to stop
them, Friedan told the women to join hands across the street: "And so we
marched, in great swinging long lines, from sidewalk to sidewalk, and the
police on their horses got out of the way. And people leaned out of office
windows and waved. . . ." The march, the strike, created tremendous awareness
nationwide of the women's movement and added to its moral force: it was a
huge success.
Friedan returned to writing, teaching, and lecturing,- she has been visiting
professor at a number of universities in the past fourteen years. In 1976 she
published It Changed My Life, an account of the early years of NOW. In 1977
she helped to heal the internal split over lesbianism by supporting the pro¬
posal for sexual preference at the National Women's Conference in Houston:
the hall exploded with cheers and applause.
In 1981 she published The Second Stage, an exhortation to women and men
to see feminism not as a movement antagonistic to traditional female roles and
values, but as a humanizing force in society at large. At present, she is at work
on a book on aging, to be called The Fountain of Age, searching for ways to see
and experience age as a positive part of life. Acute to discrimination, she has
discovered that most research on age has been conducted on men, who pro¬
vide the standard for discussion of the subject, although women in general
live longer than men and more of them face extreme old age alone. But both
men and women are, Friedan believes, denied personhood after sixty.
If Friedan no longer stands as the spokeswoman for "the" feminist move¬
ment, that is partly because there is no single movement, but many, all sharing
the same ultimate goal and a few basic principles, yet differing about means
and methods. Many feminists diagnose the malaise of the entire Western
industrial world as being rooted in sexism. If they are right, the creation of a
 Marilyn French / 1983 73

more humane and just society, which is the goal of feminism, requires change
more fundamental than feminists have previously recognized.
Betty Friedan has remained true to her principles, personal and political.
She has been and remains a bridge between conservative and radical elements
in feminism, and an ardent advocate of harmony and humane values. F3er
affirmation of the family in The Second Stage is a passionate plea for general
awareness of the inclusive nature of feminism: its vision of human wholeness,-
its repudiation of laws and customs that deny men expression of their emo¬
tions, sensitivity, and nurturing qualities and deny women expression of assert¬
ive intellect, action, and a voice in society. Friedan will stand in history as an
initiator of the "second wave' of feminism and as one who has never wavered
in fidelity to its larger vision.
 f) feminist in the Late '8oi
Bettyann Kevles / 1987

From the Los Angeles Time Magazine,

(17 May 1987), 8 Reprinted by permission
of Bettyann Kevles.

The phone hasn't stopped ringing since 9 a m. and Betty Friedan has risen
three times from her bath to answer it. It's past 11 and she's still not ready to
leave her Sea Colony apartment in Santa Monica for a noon lecture at USC.
"Who is it?" she calls from the bedroom.
"USA Today," I answer.
Twenty-four years ago, Friedan wrote a book called The Feminine Mystique. A
classic of feminist literature, it expressed the latent discontent many American
women felt with their position in society and helped trigger the women's
movement worldwide. Three years later, in 1966, she helped found the
National Organization for Women and was its first president. She still has an
uncanny ability for articulating the needs of women of all ages.
Her historical role in advancing women's rights has been likened to
Thomas Paine's in the eighteenth century, when his pamphlet "Common
Sense" energized Yankee discontent on the eve of the American Revolution.
It is not uncommon to hear her compared to earlier feminist leaders Susan B.
Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Friedan's concern these days is for the future of the movement that she
helped launch. "The suffragettes disbanded after winning the vote in 1919,"
she points out—and two generations later, American women were back in the
kitchen, living within the confines of a new mystique: An ideology that

74
 Bettyann Kevles / 1987 75

insisted that a woman belonged at home, enjoying the greater world only
vicariously, through the accomplishments of her husband and children. The
advances of the last two decades have been substantial, but feminists today
have more to do than maintain a holding pattern. To remain viable, Friedan
believes, the women's movement must have a forward momentum. Its next
goal should be a reshaping of both society and the workplace, which she
believes are geared toward a "male model.' In this new world—no longer just
a man's world—women would not be forced to choose between family and
career.
"There are powerful forces in America today, right-wingers and evangelists
who threaten to re-impose earlier roles on women," she tells a packed audito¬
rium of mothers and daughters at the Westlake School for Girls in Bel-Air one
day. These daughters are the people she wants to reach now, members of the
"I'm not a feminist, but I'm going to be an astronaut" generation who listen
incredulously to Friedan s descriptions of life with girdles and curfews. She is
not asking for their gratitude. She is cautioning vigilance.
On this April morning, while she prepares for the day, 1 find myself running
interference with the phone. Friedan emerges draped in a light blue terry-
cloth caftan and grabs the receiver on the counter between the kitchen and
the living room. "They want to know," I explain, "if you have an opinion about

the new short skirts."

Her demeanor changes like quicksilver. The comfortable matron is trans¬
formed, her toga no longer an after-swim cover-up but a cloak of authority.
Standing as tall as her 5 feet, 2 inches allow, Friedan becomes a spokeswoman
for the movement "1 am opposed to short narrow skirts, she pronounces.
"They are undignified and denigrating to anyone over twenty. 1 shall continue
wearing my skirts long and flowing and unhobbling and pretty.
It is hard to imagine Betty Friedan's mental map of Los Angeles. Having
allotted just half an hour to get to USC from Santa Monica, she urges me to
drive faster. She hates to be late and, in fact, seldom is. She has no patience
with SigAlerts, freeway construction or lane changes. When things dont go
her way her temper flares without warning, only to be followed by apologies.
She claims to drive on Long Island, where she summers, but she won't
tackle the freeways in Los Angeles and for a few days I m replacing her regular
driver. ("Do you have a car?" she asked in a deep, raspy voice when I first
befriended her in Massachusetts in 1981. "I need a lift. I don't drive in Cam-
76 Interviews with Betty Friedan

bridge.") She likes to compare herself to author and non-driver Ray Bradbury.
"It's perfectly easy to be a pedestrian in this city," she says, "as long as you
have friends who will pick up and deliver "
She is usually driven to work in a red truck by a young woman she met at
a local NOW meeting. It seems she is short-tempered with her, too, but the
young feminist ignores the outbursts. "She is so busy. She does so much, and
she doesn't even have a secretary," the woman says. Friedan juggles teaching,
lecturing, writing and entertaining, aided only by an answering machine.
Friedan first came to live in California last year, as a fellow at USC's Andrus
Gerontology Center. F^r return this spring with a joint appointment at the
school of journalism and the women's study center has brought her into the
mainstream of university life. She's received a variety of invitations to partici¬
pate in local women's groups. Some, like NOW, are open to anyone. Others,
like the Trusteeship for Women, are by invitation only. The trusteeship, a
semi-professional, semi-social group of accomplished women—including
Marilyn Bergman, an Academy Award-winning songwriter, and Maureen Kin-
del, president of the Los Angeles Board of Public Works—has impressed Frie¬
dan by its ability to implement policy.
She marvels at the contrast between the Los Angeles that New Yorkers
warned her about and the reality. "It was supposed to be plastic, and intellectu¬
ally a wasteland." F4er base at the university may skew her perspective, but
she hasn't found Los Angeles so bleak. Angelenos would make her feel obso¬
lete and socially ostracized, she was told,- instead she has been squired to street
theater and invited to Sunday evening screenings at Norman Lear's. She was
also warned about "the cult of youth." But instead of a youth culture she has
been reveling in cross-generational friendships, enjoying evenings with men
and women in their thirties and forties, sixties and seventies.
"You know 1 left Peoria (where she grew up) for New York because New
York was cheerier. Los Angeles is cheerier than New York. L A. is to New
York as New York is to Peoria." She likes that equation and smiles at the
thought. The smile transforms her, subtracting years.
But the crucial difference, Friedan finds, is one of attitude. Friedan is still
active in East Coast women's networks, and she has a "warm, affectionate
relationship with New York NOW”—but she is finding life in California more
upbeat. "Women here aren't cynical, or burnt out," she says. "There's a political
energy. And they aren(t locked into single-issue thinking."
 Bettyann Kevles / 1987 77

When Betty Friedan first came to USC, she came to write—not about
women but about aging. At the gerontology center, she was working on a
book about "the age mystique. (She turned sixty-six on Feb. 4, and her eighty-
nine-year-old mother lives at Leisure World in Laguna Hills.) At the Grace
Ford Salvatori Journalism Building, where she returned this year as a visiting
distinguished professor in journalism and as a leader in the program for the
Study of Women and Men in Society, ten file boxes of notes for her book sit
untended near her desk. She hasn't found much time to go through them.
Women's issues keep diverting her attention. "Since I've been out here all these
things have been happening and I have to respond to them, she says.
The role of women is her focus at the journalism school. On one recent
afternoon, Friedan's students in her "Women in Media class are waiting as she
arrives with a group of guest speakers. Seated at a table in front of her class,
she rests her chin on her hand as she waits for everyone to settle down. Then
she stands, her fingers toying with the silver rope around her neck. As she
addresses the class, her eyes dart among her students. The words tumble out

swiftly.
"Don't think you ingratiate yourself with me with feminist rhetoric. It won t
work if it's just rhetoric," she warns her students—all of them women—as she
returns a set of papers. "You need concrete examples to make a point or it
won t sell.'' This also sums up her approach to her work at the university. She
is impatient with ideology and hairsplitting and demands practical solutions.
Today she introduces Wallis Annenberg, co-publisher and editor of TV
Guide, Irma Kalish, president of Women in Film,- Fay Kanin, the first woman
president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; Carolyn See,
novelist and book reviewer, and producer Norman Lear. Kanin urges the stu¬
dents to persist, be a pest, not be so thin-skinned or easily discouraged All
right, maybe "pest" is an unfortunate term, Kanin corrects herself, but what¬
ever you call it, women need to be more aggressive.
But that isn't always enough. One of the panelists mentions the "glass ceil¬
ing"_the invisible lid on female advancement into executive positions—and
the others nod. (Later, at a television studio where Friedan is taping an inter¬
view, a woman executive makes the same complaint—that women can rise
only so far, and no farther. Strangers do not hesitate to tell her their woes.
She always listens. She describes it as one of the responsibilities she has

accepted.)
78 Interviews with Betty Friedan

Friedan later turns the discussion to the week's reading assignment, In a

Different Voice, by Carol Gilligan. The book argues that women think differently
from men, that women are more sympathetic and compassionate. Friedan sug¬
gests that violence and brutality thrive on the screen today because of male
dominance of the media, and that a female voice is needed to decry poverty,
disease and the nuclear threat.
Never anti-male, Friedan envisions a future in which everyone will lead
more fulfilling lives. As she sees it, "We are stuck at a midway point where we
have won some new opportunities, and we are living with them from necessity
as well as opportunity, but everything is still based on the male model." She
pounds her fist in her hand to make her point. Why should women, the people
who have the babies, have to follow a career timetable geared to men? "What
is needed is a basic remodeling of American society into one in which women
and men can have equal access to both family and career."
That is part of her message in The Second Stage, which was first published in
1982 and reissued last year with a new afterword. The second stage she
describes is a feminism that takes the woman's movement past demands for
equal opportunity in what has been a man's world, at the same time as it
demands changes in that world. She is asking for a more flexible, compassion¬
ate society that takes into consideration familial as well as work-related
responsibilities.
Without doubt she has moved in a different direction from other feminists.
She opposes sexual politics—which pits men and women against each other—
and single-issue politics—which, by focusing solely on pornography or abor¬
tion, for example, leaves other critical problems unaddressed. She is especially
sympathetic with mainstream working women who, she sees, need new public
policies that will allow them to choose to have a family, with the knowledge
that they will be able to retain their jobs if they opt for children and that
there will be adequate day-care available.
Last spring, she accepted an invitation from the women's center to take
part in a series of lunches with prominent women in the community, which
has since evolved into a monthly Think Tank headed by Friedan. "1 didn't
object to being used because there is a great need for new ideas, new thinking
on feminist subjects," she says. At the first Think Tank, last spring, the issue
of parental leave was raised. As a result of that discussion, Friedan's name
heads the list of a coalition that opposed some traditional allies and filed an
 Bettyann Kevles / 1987 79

amicus curiae brief in the landmark California Federal Savings & Loan Assn,

case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Cali¬
fornia law that guarantees a woman the same job, or its equivalent, after
unpaid maternity leave. Along with groups like the International Ladies Gar¬
ment Workers Union, Planned Parenthood and the California Federation of
Teachers, Friedan insisted on the right of women to be workers and to bear

children.
The issue split the national woman's movement. National NOW and the
American Civil Liberties Union supported Cal Fed. They feared that different
treatment for women harked back to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
protective legislation that discouraged employers from hiring women alto¬
gether. In the court's majority opinion upholding the constitutionality of the
California law, Justice Thurgood Marshall enunciated the right of women as

workers to have both families and job security.

At an April Think Tank meeting, the Baby M case is the topic of the day.
The discussion attracts more than forty women to the lounge of the FJillel
Building on Hoover Street. Besides USC faculty members and Rabbi Laura
Geller, who is host, there are law professors from other universities, a city
commissioner, union representatives, advocates for children s agencies, and
representatives of Hollywood organizations such as Women in Film.
The discussion focuses on the issue of surrogacy, and emotions run high.
Actress Susan Anspach announces that she is collecting signatures for a peti¬
tion supporting Mary Beth Whitehead, the New Jersey woman who agreed to
be artificially inseminated and bear Baby M for a childless couple. Friedan has
herself signed a petition backing Whitehead, but she is sensitive to the com¬
plexities of the issue. The couple also have substantial emotional investments,
she reminds the group, the interests of the natural mother, while paramount
in her mind, are not unalloyed. She is harsh about one participant in the case:
the agency that arranged the deal and may make more money off of it than
Whitehead herself. To everyone's applause, she calls for prohibitions against

"procreative poverty."
On pornography, another issue that has splintered the woman’s movement,

Friedan also retains her own vision. She brandishes a flier from a New York
conference featuring Gloria Steinem, Susan Brownmiller and Shere Hite. They
support legislation limiting publication of obscene material. Friedan opposes
80 Interviews with Betty Friedan

all censorship and believes that "the real obscenity is the feminization of pov-
,
erty.
It

It is in everyone's interest, she believes, to see that families are well tended.
Women are different from men because women have babies, but the differ¬
ences of sensibility that may stem from unique biological functions are differ¬
ences of degree, not of kind. She is appalled by the rhetoric of the feminist
opposition. "They talk about male civil rights," she repeats, her voice breaking
with outrage. "How can there be male and female civil rights?"
When film maker Dale Bell bought the old Friedan home along the Hudson
River in rural New York, The Feminine Mystique was two years old and already a
classic. The house was a nineteenth-century fantasy with three floors, turrets
and a porch. Bell recalls that a little girl showed him around and stopped on
the third floor to explain: "And this is where my mother wrote The Feminine
Mystique."
When he moved in, the living room walls were bright purple. He repainted
them along with the rest of the house In the study, though, the bookcases
were labeled with words like "health," "education," "divorce"—topics in the
book. He painted around them, historical landmarks to be saved.
The house has passed into other hands, but Bell has never lost touch with
Friedan. He says, "There was a ghost in that house that connects our lives."
Ted and Pat Apstein, her oldest friends in Los Angeles, are connected to
Friedan by another house in that same rural New York county—a stone barn
where Friedan and her husband, Carl, lived before the Hudson River house.
The Apsteins bought the barn from the Friedans thirty years ago. A decade
later, they moved to Los Angeles,- now, they find Betty Friedan remarkably
unchanged since the days their babies toddled together. "More confident, but
otherwise the same," says Ted Apstein.
It was Pat Apstein who found Friedan the Sea Colony sublet and then
loaned her a sofa and table.

"I gave myself half a day to finish the apartment," Friedan says. "I wanted a
nice, interesting coffee table, and a quilt for the bed." The prices on Main
Street in Santa Monica where she had gone to shop were higher than she had
in mind, but she was in a buying mood, so she stopped to try on a sweater.
Her face is familiar to people all over America and so she wasn't surprised
when a woman came over and thanked her for what she has done. In response,
 Bettyann Kevles / 1987 81

Friedan asked her how the sweater looked "Not right for you, the stranger
advised. "What exactly are you looking for?"
“A coffee table," Friedan said.
The woman happened to have just sold her first script and was celebrating
by redecorating. She happened to have a marble-top coffee table and took
Friedan to see it. She was also selling a bentwood rocker, an antique mirror

and a quilt.
So Friedan sits on the borrowed sofa, her books in front of her on the
marble-top coffee table. There are photographs of her family, but she guards
their privacy. When Carolyn See one day reflected, "My mother would rather
have had a prostitute for a daughter than a writer," Friedan added: "So would
my children rather have had one for a mother.
Divorced in 1969 and never remarried, she hasn't stopped enjoying the
company of men—maybe more now than as a young woman. In It Changed My
Life, a 1976 collection of her writings on the women's movements, she muses
about a dinner with a new man, about how much fun it was relating to men
in ways she hadn t been able to before she was married or during her marriage.
Perhaps she had been too insecure, or maybe 1 was too anxious to get married
to really relax and enjoy the relationships with men before.
Writer Maurice Zolotow, who met Friedan around 1950 at a meeting of
the Society of Magazine Writers, explains that all of her friends are family.
There are old friends passing through like Bob Hirschfield and Muriel Robin¬
son from New York, who drop in one day at the Sea Colony apartment—she
introduces them as part of "my commune family. After the divorce she rented
a house in Sag Harbor, Long Island, with four other newly single people. They
shared cooking and cleaning and provided surrogate families to one another.
Hirschfield and Robinson met at the commune and married a year later.
"Betty was first among equals," Bob Hirschfield recalls. She had the biggest
bedroom and made most of the decisions." And took her turns with routine
chores. He remembers the night she picked the greens for the community
salad from the garden. "We didn't notice what we were eating until we swal¬

lowed. She had picked a whole salad of mustard.

Zolotow recalls that Friedan in the early '50s was "very energetic, warm,
sexy and well-dressed." She was, and is, very feminine, a quality he does not
find inconsistent with feminism, but which still surprises people when they

meet her.
82 Interviews with Betty Friedan

"Feminists can also dream of long-enduring love and marriage," Friedan

says, sinking into tFie sofa beneath a Picasso hanging of knights and unicorns
that she unrolls wherever she happens to be living. "I have nothing but admira¬
tion, and envy, for people who achieve that in life."
A question about First Lady Nancy Reagan brings back her public pose.
"The reality of the role of the President's wife is we do look to her somehow
as a role model for American women 1 think she should have identified more
with women's rights. In the first year she was only interested in $10,000 ball
gowns. Now she comes into focus as a strong, tigerish wife."
But she does admire their devotion to each other, and calls Nancy-bashing
a red herring. "The issue is Ronald Reagan's competence. There is nothing
wrong with a strong First Lady. In fact," Friedan says, "maybe the President's
wife should have a job title and job description and pay.
"As for Nancy's devotion to her husband, there seems to be a genuine bond
and love between them. That is what is admirable. Everyone loves romance
and the idea of enduring romantic love.''
Rabbi Laura Geller introduces Friedan to a FTillel audience in the Taper
Auditorium. The rabbi, 37, is a contemporary of Friedan's children and is both
her student and mentor.
A decade ago, Geller tells the students, when she was newly ordained as
one of only nine women rabbis in the United States, she discovered that the
Reform rabbis were holding their convention in Arizona, which hadn't ratified
the Equal Rights Amendment. She called Betty Friedan for advice: Should she
boycott or attend the meeting?
Friedan advised her to attend and volunteered to come herself, which she
did, addressing the women rabbis in an informal session. Geller tells the audi¬
ence: "It is pretty clear I would not be a rabbi if there had not been a Betty
Friedan who paved the way for all professional women of her generation.
Now the older woman is sitting at the younger woman's feet as part of a
monthly Torah study group. Friedan was not particularly religious until, a few
years ago, she came to sense "a mystical connection between feminism and
Judaism."

"Growing up as a Jew in Peoria, I knew what it was to be an outsider," she

says. She sees this as having helped form her sensitivity to the underdog's
view of things.

"I would not be the first in the history of the Jews to play the role of a
 Bettyann Kevles / 4 987 83

visionary or prophet," she says, "a female Moses leading women out of the
wilderness. ... I wouldn't be the first in our history to take a sense of injustice
and apply it to the larger, human category."
When anti-ERA forces pressured the Illinois Legislature before a crucial
vote, they called the ERA a "Zionist-communist plot" and showed photos of
mutilated Israeli girls in tanks. On other occasions, at International Women's
Congresses in Mexico City and Nairobi, Friedan faced organized anti-Semi¬
tism.
In March, at a Torah reading at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute, she was asked
to comment on the scriptural lines for the day. These were about Moses break¬
ing the tablets on his descent from Mount Sinai when he saw the Israelites
dancing around a golden calf. The words seemed especially apt to her: "This
is about feminism, the way some feminists have stopped evolving. Humans
always have a tendency to make graven images. That is what threatens the
women's movement. It is dangerous to make a graven image of feminism. That
prevents life from evolving, growing, changing. The answers of the '70s will
not satisfy the questions of the '80s."
She acknowledges the "patriarchal ethic embedded in the Judeo-Christian
tradition" but believes that strong women are also part of that tradition. In
Judaism, Friedan has found spiritual support for her continuing quest for

human liberation.
"Becoming proud of my identity as a woman, I learned to be proud of this
other part of my identity, my Jewishness. That taste for authenticity that I got
with defining myself as a woman gave me a taste for authenticity that brought

me to Judaism."
After the landmark 1970 protest march on Fifth Avenue in New York, an
event that drew more than 50,000 women and signified the coming of age of
the woman's movement as a national phenomenon, she addressed an enor¬
mous crowd in back of the New York Public Library. In that moment of exulta¬
tion she recalled that in "the religion of my ancestors men used to pray each
day thanking God for not being women. And women prayed simply to submit
themselves to the Lord's will. I said, not anymore. I believe women all over
the world will be able to say, 1 thank you Lord for making me a woman."
 Betty friedan Is kill Telliny It Like It Is
Marian Christy / 1990

From The Boston Globe, (14 January 1990), A14.

Reprinted with permission of The Boston Globe

Betty Friedan will be sixty-nine on Feb. 4. She does not disguise her gray
hair or her tell - it-1 ike-it-is attitude. In this conversation in her fortieth floor
West Side apartment, Friedan even suggests that seniority has its advantages.
"I am at a stage where 1 am what I am," she says forcefully. "I am enjoying the
strengths of my older self."
Friedan's 1963 best seller, The Feminine Mystique, presaged the women's liber¬
ation movement. She is working on a new book, The Fountain of Age, about the
good side of aging. It is already being described as "elderly liberation."
An outspoken believer in continuous self-realization, Friedan, a 1942 grad¬
uate of Smith College, was interviewed days before embarking on a four-
month assignment as visiting distinguished professor at the University of
Southern California.
Friedan, a grandmother, was divorced in 1969 from Carl Friedan, an adver¬
tising executive, with v/hom she had three children. She was a "bored house¬
wife" before she wrote The Feminine Mystique, the book that changed her life
and the lives of millions of women forever. In 1966, Friedan founded NOW,
the National Organization for Women, which focused on job discrimination,
and was its first president.
"To be able to feel good about being a woman is something wonderful. I've
accomplished that for other women. It's finally happened to me, too! Think
about it: Freud was not .wrong about what he observed about penis envy. It

84
 Marian Christy / 1990 85

was symbolic that men had a better deal in life. Men were freer to have ven¬
tures and adventures. Now women have been defined as people. Women are
freer today. Women don't want to be like men. There's more and more of a
sense in taking delight in being what they are. Still, there's a lot of unfinished
business. It shouldn't be impossible for women to have it all.
"Actually, thinking about it now, I don't like the phrase 'having it all.'
Nobody applies that phrase to men. The two aspects of life are love and work.
That goes for men and that goes for women.
"I'm fascinated by marriage. What makes it work? Why does it have such a
hold on us? 1 have the sense that, when it works, it’s marvelous. When it
doesn't, it’s misery-making and constricting. I feel a sense of failure about my
marriage 1 was married for twenty years. I look back now and realize that
there were happy times. My marriage had some rich, rewarding textures. To
this day, my children make pilgrimages to all the houses we lived in. I can't
go into these homes without bursting into tears.
“Yes! Yes! I wanted my marriage to work. Ending the marriage was the most
difficult thing 1 ever did. I even went through a period when 1 denied the plan
of ending the marriage Even now, there's still a feeling of loss, of sorrow.
"Not many of my friends are married to the fathers of their children. 1 envy
people whose marriages have evolved rather than dissolved. I also envy my
friends who have made good, strong ties in their second marriages. There's no
point in denying one's need for love, for closeness, for mutual support. How¬
ever you find it—in marriage or outside of marriage—it's vital. Intimacy is one
of the most important things in life. The moments I feel most alive are in
moments of private intimacy and, of course, in large, passionate moments

like in the middle of my revolutions!

"Marriage partners do not necessarily become competitive when the wife
makes more money than the husband. That used to be a fear when man s ego
was defined completely by his bread-winning powers and women married for
status and support. Now, there's less economic measuring in a marriage. But
both partners have to feel good about themselves and have reasonable mea¬
sures of satisfaction and rewards. Only when there is enormous economic
discrepancy can you run into trouble. Or if one partner has a fundamental
lack of confidence and becomes discontented, there can be trouble. As we
move nearer to equality, women are capable of achieving some status and
86 Interviews with Betty Friedan

support for themselves. That takes some of the pressure off men and they can
break out of their machismo aspect.
Tm a good friend. I have a great capacity for friendship. Maybe it's because
I'm not married. Friendship is a basic sustenance of my life. The deepening
bonds with old friends, male and female, is very important to me. The more
pain and joy you share with someone is what forges a friendship and bonds
it.
"I've experienced great support from women and have given great support
to women. But there have been instances when I have been pained by trashing,
by knifing and by manipulation at the hands of other women. I felt an enor¬
mous sense of betrayal. In the guise of the women's movement, one sees terri¬
ble pettiness.
"I also accept the reality of ambition. I am ambitious. I've always felt that
ambition is fine, necessary and should be acknowledged. If, somehow or other,
ambition begins to corrupt your leadership, there's trouble ahead. I've seen
that kind of ambition in the women's movement and in the political arena.
"I admire people who have somehow managed to achieve personal power
in the spirit of service. To succeed, you have to be ambitious and shrewd. But
you also have to have integrity and not let personal ambition corrupt larger
purposes. I'm not interested in power battles and manipulations that happen
when power becomes more important than purpose. Instead of trying to out¬
fox, I generally retreat.
"On the other hand, 1 have no problem with finding the courage to con¬
front real enemies. I take on the battle. I am pained by knifings based on
rivalries and jealousies. That has happened to me sometimes. That happens to
anyone who achieves a large kind of persona. Oh, I'm hot-tempered and very
impatient sometimes. I can have a lot of arguments, even with people I love. I
feel strongly about things. We're in changing times. Everything is shifting.
Arguments on the level of 'change' can be zesty and good. I also know my
fame has earned me both support and envy. Some desire to strike me down.
I've been tested. I've used my life to good purpose.
"I can get defensive. I can get on my high horse. But I understand myself. I
allow myself to feel my pain and my joy. How can you be alive and not feel?
I don't need masks. I know what I know. I feel what I feel. As I get older, I am
becoming more and more my real self.

"Look! I don't hide my gray hair. I like it. It has softened my face. After I
 Marian Christy / 4 990 87

wrote The Feminine Mystique, 1 came across the ad: 'If you have one life to live,
live it as a blonde.' It was a frivolous idea and 1 decided to defend my right to
be frivolous. 1 went to a beauty salon and told them to make me a blonde.
They couldn't. So 1 became a redhead. When I went out into the sunshine,
my hair turned green. Now 1 don t have the inclination to take the gray out
of my hair at all. Why bother with all that now?"
 Playboy Interview: Betty friedan
David Sheff / 1992

From Playboy, (September 1992), 51—54, 56,

58, 60, 62, 149 Reprinted by permission of
Playboy magazine.

Wherever Betty Friedan goes, she gets the kind of attention normally
reserved for movie stars. But the people who approach her are not autograph
seekers. They represent a remarkable array of women of every race, age and
background. They usually apologize for bothering her and explain that they
just want to tell her one thing: "You changed my life."
Few people have affected as many lives—male or female—as Friedan, the
mother of the modern-day women's movement. In 1963 she finished The Femi¬
nine Mystique, a book that "pulled the trigger on history," as Alvin Toffler put
it. Amitai Etzioni, professor of sociology at George Washington University,
called it "one of those rare books we are endowed with only once in several
decades, a volume that launched a major social movement."
The book, which sold millions of copies, gave a name to the alienation and
frustration felt by a generation of women who were supposed to feel fulfilled
doing what women before them had done: taking care of their homes and
families. Friedan struck a nerve and received an overwhelming response,
including hate mail from people who believed that a woman's place was in the
home. Many women saw Friedan as a savior who showed that they were not
alone in their despair. It spurred them to demand more. As a result, life as we
knew it—relationships, sex, families, politics, the workplace—began to
change.

88
 David Sbeff / i 992 89

The Feminine Mystique made Friedan the champion of the fledgling women's
movement that grew up around her and her book. In 1966 she co-founded the
National Organization for Women, was its first president through 1971 and
wrote its mission statement. She led the group's fights for equal opportunities
for women, equal pay for equal work, better child care, better health care and

more.
But the movement that came on so strong in the Sixties and Seventies
seemed to fall out of favor during the Eighties. Headlines announced that
feminism was "the great experiment that failed." Women seemed less attracted
to NOW's agenda, and many of the movement's goals—passage of the Equal
Rights Amendment, for example—faltered as a result of anemic support. Rep¬
resentative Pat Schroeder in Time admitted, "[Younger women] think of femi¬
nists as women who burn bras and don t shave their legs. They think of us as

the Amazons of the Sixties."

Recently, however, the women s movement has moved back into the fray,
emerging as one of the powerful political and cultural forces of this election
year. Fueled by George Bush's move to outlaw abortion and aided by recent
headlines—from Anita Hill and Justice Clarence Thomas to Mike Tyson and
William Kennedy Smith—the movement has a renewed vitality and relevance.
Skeptics need only look back to April, when more people marched in a
pro-choice rally in Washington, D C., than had ever marched for any other

issue in American history.

Noticeably absent at the rally was the women's movement founder, Betty

Friedan, who had not been invited.

The slight was a clue that the current leaders of the women's movement
are struggling among themselves and, moreover, struggling for a new identity.
Friedan represents the movement's history, but she also speaks for a moderate
branch of feminism. She has been attacked for this, most directly in a recent
book about the movement, Susan Faludi's Backlash. In a chapter entitled, Betty
Friedan: Revisionism as a Marketing Tool, Faludi charges that Friedan
betrayed the women's movement. According to Faludi, Friedan believed that
the women's movement was failing because "its leaders had ignored the mater¬
nal call." In fact, Faludi charged that Friedan was "stomping on the movement

she did so much to create and lead "

Such criticism is nothing new to Friedan. She's been facing accusations and
90 Interviews with Betty Friedan

denunciations from all sides since The Feminine Mysticfue was published almost
thirty years ago.
Back then, Friedan was a wife, mother and homemaker, thrilled with mod¬
ern appliances and recipes she clipped from McCall's. She had grown up in
Peoria, Illinois, and moved to New York when she was eighteen. She attended
college at Smith and prepared for a life as a psychologist or journalist. After
graduation she worked as a magazine writer until she was pregnant with the
second of her three children. She then followed the traditional path of most
women at that time, giving up her career and adopting the type of life personi¬
fied by TV moms. She began to understand a quiet frustration felt by huge
numbers of women, a despair she named "the feminine mystique."
The movement launched by the book consumed her life. At first she was
considered a radical, but as time passed, her views mellowed She began to
worry that feminism was forcing some women to exclude family life as a politi¬
cally correct option. Fearing that women who were discouraged from marry¬
ing and having children would abandon the movement, Friedan wrote her
second book, The Second Stage.
In that book, another best seller, Friedan blamed radical elements of the
feminist movement for problems that arose in American families as women
attempted to be superwomen, juggling husbands, children, homes and jobs.
Many women celebrated that Friedan had once again articulated their plight,
though other women, particularly some strident feminists, denounced her. She
had, they said, sold out.

Friedan weathered those attacks just as she weathers the current ones, and
she remains an outspoken and important leader despite her differences with
such notables as Faludi and Gloria Steinem. At seventy-one, Friedan holds
academic posts at New York University and the University of Southern Cali¬
fornia, and continues to write and to speak across the country.
Given the recent resurgence of women's issues, Friedan seemed the perfect
subject for the 30th anniversary of the "Playboy Interview." Contributing Edi¬
tor David Sheff, who recently talked about death and dying with Derek Hum¬
phry for Playboy s August 1992 interview, flew to Los Angeles to face off with
Friedan. Here's his report:

"It took nearly two years of courting Friedan to get her to make time for
this interview. We met on several occasions, each time in Los Angeles, where
she teaches courses at USC in feminist thought and supervises a think tank on
 David Sheff / <992 91

women's issues. To each furnished apartment she rented in L A she brought

the same personal items to create a home away from her primary home in
New York: family photos prints towels emblazoned with scarlet parrots and
loads of books (from Carl Jung to Backlash).
"We met at one of the apartments She gave my hand a quick shake and
then moved to the bar, expertly concocting the strongest, spiciest bloody
mary I have ever had
"At a nearby cafe we talked about political candidates and the men s move¬
ment. She was good humored and easy to talk with until she transformed,
inexplicably, and became cantankerous She is, by nature, candid and argu¬
mentative, and her years as a controversial figure have made her fearless. It s a
potent combination.
1 met with her twice more before she allowed the tape-recorded sessions
to begin. We had several lunches, and I attended the USC course she taught
and took notes during a think-tank session on women's issues at which Friedan
presided She spoke briefly and then said that the forum would start after
everyone introduced themselves. As the women in the room said their names
and what they did for a living, it became clear that this was a group of some
of the most powerful women in Los Angeles—business leaders, judges, teach¬
ers, politicians and activists. When my turn came, I announced my name and
indicated that I was a representative of Playboy magazine.
"There was a collective, audible gasp, some nervous laughs and many looks
of horror. The tension was slightly defused when Friedan announced, Well,
it's not like I'm posing'.''

PLAYBOY: A lot of women didn't like having someone from Playboy in their midst. Do you

feel as if you re consorting with the enemy?

FRIEDAN: First, I don t believe in talking only to the already converted. It is

important to talk to men. Anyway, the magazine has changed since the days
of the Playboy Bunny at the Clubs. I probably wouldn't have been speaking

with you in those days.

PLAYBOY: But the Bunny was basically a waitress at the Playboy Clubs What was so

objectionable about her?

FRIEDAN: The Playboy Bunny dehumanized the image of female sexuality. It

was part of the feminine mystique.

PLAYBOY: We always viewed it with fondness, as a fun image of sexuality.

92 Interviews with Betty Friedan

FriedaN: But the image came at us from everywhere—from Playboy, from the

ads and programs on television. It was the image of a woman solely in terms
of her sexual relation to a man, in this case as a man's sex object and server of
his physical needs. In other cases it was as a man's wife, a mother and house¬
wife. That is why it was objectionable. The Bunny may have been cute and
fluffy, but it denied the personhood of women. That was the feminine mys¬
tique, when women were second-class people, less than human, more akin to
children or bunnies. It denied the whole previous century, when women had
fought for rights, including the right to vote.

PLAYBOY: The Playboy Philosophy simply tried to present sexuality as a part of life to

be celebrated, not denied.

FRIEDAN: But what came with that was a denial of the rest of a woman. When

women are supposed to serve men, sexually and otherwise, they have no other
identity. There is no place for career women or for women who have lives
that are not about pleasing men. Since the culture views women that way,
women necessarily view themselves that way. The Playboy Bunny image of
women's sexuality was an extreme Rorschach for a culture that completely
denied the personhood of women.

PLAYBOY: The Playboy Philosophy bad more to do with the sexual liberation of men

and women than with anything else. It was a reaction to puritanism.

FRIEDAN: But sexual liberation is a misnomer if it denies the personhood of

women. The first wave of so-called sexual liberation in America, where women
were passive sex objects, was not real liberation. For real sexual liberation to
be enjoyed by men and women, neither can be reduced to a passive role.
When a woman is a sex object, it limits a man's enjoyment, too. Maybe some
people still haven't caught on, but the best sex requires a deeper, more pro¬
found knowledge of oneself and the other person. In the Bible, sexual love
was to know. It suggests something deeper. That is why the women's movement
had to happen for sexual liberation to be real.

PLAYBOY: Do you object to the celebration of sexuality in our pictorials?

FRIEDAN: A celebration of women's bodies is all right with me so long as there

is no denial of the personhood of women. I suppose sometimes women are

sex objects—and men afe too, by the way. It's the definition of women just as
sex objects that bothers me. Women can celebrate themselves as sex objects,
 David Sheff / 1992 93

they can celebrate their own sexuality and can enjoy the sexuality of men as
far as I'm concerned. Let's have men centerfolds.

PLAYBOY: Cosmopolitan tried it.

FriedaN: Burt Reynolds? It's a good joke, but 1 think the truth is that women

are less interested in dehumanized sexuality. Sexuality for women tends to be

more about personal bonding. Sexuality divorced from that is not pleasing.
Men, too, seem to be more aware that dehumanized sex is not satisfying as a
total relationship. But Playboy's centerfold is fine. It's holding on to your own
anachronism and it is not pornographic, though many of my sisters would
disagree. It's harmless. 1 was amused to see that a recent graduate of Smith,
my colleague, posed for a pictorial and defended herself by saying that she
could celebrate her sexuality if she wanted to. I agree, even though Playboy
strikes me as an odd mixture of sex—sometimes juvenile—and forward intel¬
lectual thought Alex Haley, who conducted interviews for your magazine,
was my good friend. Christie Hefner is my friend and has been marvelously
supportive of many causes—not only of free speech but the rights of women.
Playboy articles and interviews are always quite brilliant and yet they are next
to all this attention to women as sex objects.

PLAYBOY: Back up. Did you say juvenile?

FRIEDAN: I don't think there is anything wrong with celebrating women's bod¬

ies, but if that's all you're interested in, you're missing an awful lot. That's all 1
mean. 1 definitely don't think feminism needs to be equated with puritanism
and the denial of sexuality. At the same time, I don't approve of anything that
reduces women to sex objects, and I really disapprove of anything that
degrades women or depicts them as the object of violence. The fact is, there
are things far worse than the centerfolds.

PLAYBOY: Last year there was a demonstration in Berkeley by a group of women who were

offended that a man was reading Playboy in a restaurant. Would you have attended?
FRIEDAN: It seems like a waste of time. I am for the liberation of human sexual¬

ity, not the repression of it. Most of all, I am for freedom of speech.

PLAYBOY: Beyond Playboy, how do you see the connection between the women's movement

and sexual liberation?

FRIEDAN: As women moved against sex discrimination in employment, educa¬

tion and public accommodations, as there were marches and class-action suits
94 Interviews with Betty Friedan

that focused on employment, it affected the rest of women's lives. As women

began to use their own names, to have their own careers, to move into fields
that had exclusively been men's before, they earned self-respect. Without self-
respect, what kind of sexuality can anyone have? As women gained self-
respect, their sexuality was vastly enriched. There was more and better sex all
around. When women were enjoying sex more, men were, too.
There were fascinating statistics that began to emerge by the end of the
Seventies. There really was a lot more sex, and both men and women were
enjoying it more. I've traced each decade of the women's movement according
to the early Kinsey studies about sexuality. There was greater sexual enjoy¬
ment as the women's movement progressed.

PLAYBOY: Do you credit that to increased self-respect?

FRIEDAN: When women are not people, when they are full of impotent rage

directed against themselves, sex is not going to be lots of fun—for their part¬
ners or for them. The erotic experiences of many women were twisted by
their self-images. And, of course, men played along with it, mostly because
they didn't know differently. Masochism and self-denigration were considered
normal sexuality for women. Before that, frigidity.
Jack Kennedy talked about political passion. Women experienced political
passion for the first time because of the women's movement. They had the
ability as human beings to shape their own lives and futures. Experiencing
political passion was a prerequisite to experiencing physical passion. Women
had been the objects of passion, but they weren't expected to experience it
themselves.

PLAYBOY: Some have claimed that the women's movement bred discord and increased the

tensions between men and women, and that there was actually less sex, not more.
FRIEDAN: There was less unfulfilling sex, maybe. And you're right: There was a

time when it seemed that the women's movement was about women in a battle
against men. But that's not what the movement was about. It used to be called
the war between the sexes. That had a lot to do with the rage felt by women
who had been put down for their entire lives. When the rage finally came out,
no wonder it was excessive. The rage was taken out on individual men who
were also products of obsolete, polarized, unequal sex roles.

PLAYBOY: Is the war between the sexes over?

 David Sbejj / 1992 95

FriedaN: It needs to be. As women began to find their strength, they directed

their rage in fruitful ways to change their lives. They moved away from pas¬
sive, impotent rage. I think women could then love men for what they are. I
think that men were relieved when things changed, too.

PLAYBOY: Not all oj them. Some men rue the day you wrote The Feminine Mystique.

FriedaN: But many more were relieved because the liberation of women meant

the liberation of men. It was an enormous burden to be a man. There was a

masculine mystique, too.

PLAYBOY: What was it?

FRIEDAN: Men had to be supermen: stoic, responsible meal tickets. Dominance

is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that. When things began to
change, men were released from the enormous pressure.

PLAYBOY: What's behind the current men's movement?

FRIEDAN: I think it's partly a reaction against feminism, partly envy of feminism

and partly a real need of men to evolve and break through the burden of the
masculine mystique, the burden of machismo. It is a burden that comes when
the definition of masculinity is dominance in a society where dominance is
not a survival technique anymore. It requires men to suppress their feelings
and their sensitivities to life.

PLAYBOY: And yet you disapprove oj the men's movement?

FriedaN: First of all, there didn't need to be a men's movement the way there

needed to be a women's movement.

PLAYBOY: Some men obviously disagree.

FRIEDAN: Well, there is no men's movement—except all of history, of course.

PLAYBOY: But the men who flock to men's groups clearly have needs.

FriedaN: Listen, the women's movement was about the personhood of women,

not the impersonation of some idea of what women are supposed to be.

PLAYBOY: And you think that is what the men's movement is about?

FriedaN: Robert Bly's retreats are trying to teach men to be male imperson¬

ators. They are trying to embrace some mystique that is more obsolete than
ever. The idea of putting men back in loincloths and giving them drums to
beat and encouraging them to yell like cavemen is regressive, not progressive.
96 Interviews with Betty Friedan

The good part is that they can also cry and have feelings. But a lot of it seems

phony.

PLAYBOY: You said that the men's movement is partly a reaction against feminism. How?

FRIEDAN: The explicit or implicit message is that the feminist movement has

made wimps of guys.

PLAYBOY: Some men do equate feminism with emasculation.

FRIEDAN: They don't understand feminism, then. The practical result of femi¬

nism is freeing both women and men from the burdens of their roles.

PLAYBOY: Warren Farrell says the women's movement "is not a movement for equality but a

movement for women's maximization of opportunities

Friedan: And as an excuse, they tell men to go out there and reassert their

masculinity. It's aggressive toward women. But the feminist movement has not
made wimps of men. 1 think many pressures affect men that make a definition
of masculinity based on violence—sorry, that was a Freudian slip—based on
dominance almost impossible. If men and women don't face these things
together, nothing will change. Men and women need to find ways to be inti¬
mate and to support one another and join together against the real enemy.

PLAYBOY: You seem to be waving a white flag. But many women seem angrier then ever

toward men.

FRIEDAN: I've never bought the "down with men' idea—the male patriarch, the

male chauvinist pig. There's a little truth in it, but it ignores the larger truth.
The first stage of the women's movement was getting access to the world that
had been, until then, completely dominated by men—the world of employ¬
ment and government. We had to take control of our destiny. It was not a sex
war against men but a question of breaking through polarized, unequal sex
roles. But so much has changed. The people who criticize the women's move¬
ment discount it, but women have made enormous strides.

PLAYBOY: Yet there seems to be more hostility between the sexes now than there has been for

a long time.

FRIEDAN: And we have to be very careful not to fall into the trap of fighting

among ouselves. The real danger now is that the whole society is being
attacked. The rage and frustration that is increasing as a result of the economic
crisis is being manipulated into a scapegoat phenomenon.
 David Sheff / 4 992 97

PLAYBOY: Scapegoating u’hom?

FRIEDAN: Men blame women. Women blame men. Look around. There is an

increase in racism against blacks and Latinos. The blacks and Koreans in L A.
The riots in Los Angeles were a result. I've been warning all year that the rage
and frustration from the economic decline of this country was being manipu¬
lated into racism and polarization of one group against another. Well, it
exploded in L.A. The denial of the American dream to the outright poor and
homeless, as well as to the middle class and blue-collar workers—whose jobs
and security are being squashed—built the rage. The trigger was the Rodney
King verdict. To my dismay, Bush, Quayle and the others try to blame it on
the decline of the family, on single parents and welfare mothers, while they
continue the policies that make the top one percent get richer and everyone
else more insecure It is not going to end with the riots in Los Angeles until
the real problems are addressed. In the meantime, they encourage racism, anti-
Semitism, gay bashing and Japanese bashing. There is an increase in violence
against women and against all minorities. There seems to be an increase in the
number of crimes against anyone weaker in society—minorities, women and
even children It's causing a backlash against all the progress we've made.

PLAYBOY: That's a buzzword of the women's movement now since Susan Faludi named it in

her best seller. E?cplain the backlash.

FRIEDAN: It's the reaction to all the progress we made. Women were being

portrayed as strong and independent. But just as we were making progress in

the culture and that progress was being reflected in the media, there was a
backlash—you can see it on TV and in advertising. They are barometers of
where the culture as a whole is going. Women's roles in movies are appalling.

PLAYBOY: What are some offenders?

FRIEDAN: Pretty Women, The Silence of the Lambs—two of the most successful mov¬

ies of the past year or two.

PLAYBOY: Is your objection to Pretty Woman that a prostitute was portrayed as the ideal

woman?
FRIEDAN: The movie's message was that, in effect, the way for a woman to get

ahead is to find a rich man who will buy her pretty clothes. We were succeed¬
ing in doing away with the Cinderella story, that all a woman needed to be
complete was a Prince Charming. Women were doing it on their own. This
woman was "saved" from prostitution by a man.
98 Interviews with Betty Friedan

Another big thing in TV and movies is portraying women only when they
are in jeopardy. I thought it was absolutely outrageous that Silence of the Lambs
won four Oscars.

PLAYBOY: Vet Jody Foster and the director, Jonathan Demme, insist that it's a feminist movie.

FRIEDAN: I'm not saying that the movie shouldn't have been shown. I'm not

denying the movie was an artistic triumph, but it was about the evisceration,
the skinning alive of women. That is what I find offensive. Not the Playboy
centerfold.

PLAYBOY: But The Silence of the Lambs had a female hero who fought hack against

violence toward women and triumphed.

Friedan: But even she was seen to be manipulated by this evil monster. Instead

of showing women in jeopardy, the new trend is to show women in jeopardy

who then survive the jeopardy.

PLAYBOY: Isn't that an improvement?

Friedan: I tell you, women are tired of seeing themselves as passive sex objects

in jeopardy, whether or not they end up prevailing. Yes, it was a well-done

film, but aesthetic criticism can't be value-free. If I had been voting for the
Academy Awards, I would not have voted for it.

PLAYBOY: At least you must have been happy with Thelma & Louise.

FRIEDAN: 1 loved it. It was a breakthrough movie. I was amused that some of

my men friends were describing the movie as female fascism because of the
violence. They said, "So you want women to be a violent as men?" Come on.
Those women defended themselves—against rape!—and otherwise shot up an
oil truck and made sure to shoot air holes in the truck of the police car so the
offensive state trooper was able to breathe. You do not see air holes in the
truck in GoodFellas or in The Godfather.

PLAYBOY: Were you disturbed by the fatalistic ending—Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon

doing a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid into the Grand Canyon?
Friedan: Maybe that's another Rorschach. It is very hard to see how women

who take back their lives can get away with it. They had to be punished. I
wanted them to be able to go back and live a different kind of life. It was one
example, though, of women who were strong, complex characters. There used
to be more, but they are disappearing.
 David Sbeff / 1992 99

PLAYBOY On television, whom do you count among them?

FRIEDAN: Cagney & Lacey, which is off the air. The only ones left are in Designing

Women, Murphy Brown and Roseanne.

PLAYBOY: Do you view the women in those shows as positive role models?

Friedan They are strong women with personalities and lives of their own.

They are not dependent on men.

PLAYBOY: But they're also pretty wacky. For all her fiery independence, Murphy Brown is

neurotic. She almost went over the edge when she became pregnant.
Friedan It's true. They won't let her enjoy it, will they? But at least she's a

strong, complex woman and she's getting great ratings.

PLAYBOY Dan Quayle doesn't like her He singled her out as a symbol of what's wrong

with American families.

FRIEDAN As a woman at a conference said the day Quayle made that stupid

speech, he used a fictional woman to insult a lot of real women. Some single
women are in that position against their wishes. Some have chosen it. The
fact is, they are doing the best they can. For him to blame them for America's
ills is to scapegoat women who have made alternative choices. It's typical to
sound off about women, to blame the victims. America is in decline, however,
because of people like Quayle and his boss, who have refused to address the
fundamental problems of this country. Murphy Brown is affirming to women.
And no matter what Dan Quayle says, America loves her.

PLAYBOY: Where does Madonna fit in—backlash or in the forefront of the women's move¬

ment?
FRIEDAN I think women identify with Madonna as much for her guts, her

strength, her politics and her business acumen as for her role as a sex object.
Whoever said feminism shouldn't be sexy?

PLAYBOY: What has caused the backlash?

FRIEDAN First of all, it is exacerbated more by the economic crisis than any¬

thing. All the progress women made—in spite of the best efforts of the culture
and media—seemed unstoppable until the economic crisis came along. The
economic crisis begins, and who is blamed? Men blame women. If they weren t
working, there would be enough jobs.
The media have played their part by suggesting en masse that women
100 Interviews with Betty Friedan

should go home again. They have popularized the idea that Ronald Reagan
espoused ten years ago when there was a small turn for the worse in the
economy. He said, essentially, that there would be no unemployment if

women went home again.

PLAYBOY: You're not suggesting that the economic crisis was perpetuated to put women back

in their place, are you?

FRIEDAN: No, but that is the result. The people responsible would rather have

us blaming one another than blaming them. That's the point. And the people
responsible are also the ones most threatened by the empowerment of women.
Women have been the largest group in society that, until recently, was passive
and easily manipulated. Women are not a ten percent minority, they are a
fifty-three percent majority. When women discover their power and assert it
to control their own lives, they're not easily manipulated anymore.

PLAYBOY: But the economic crisis hurts everyone.

FRIEDAN: Here's an example of the way the backlash works. What is the current

hysteria over abortion really about? Why are we still fighting the issue? The
right to abortion is basic and symbolic of all the rights that women have won.
It is a symbol of autonomy and independence.
The authoritarian elements that were threatened by the success of the
women's movement get us to focus on abortion instead of on them, to divert
the rage from those who are really profiting. The rage that men or women
have a right to feel when they have lost their economic security is diverted to
abortion.

PLAYBOY: But the abortion issue doesn't go away because some people believe abortion to be

wrong. Or do you see it as some larger conspiracy?

FRIEDAN: I don't believe in conspiratorial theories of history. I don't even think

the feminine mystique was a conspiracy. There is just a convergence of many

things. But that doesn't mean that the focus on abortion is anything other than
a red herring. The autonomy and independence of women is genuinely threat¬
ening, not to all men but to those who want to exert authoritarian power. Roe
vs. Wade was nineteen years ago. To force the women's movement, year after

year after year, to mobilize to defend the right of women to control their own
bodies—a right that we thought we had won nineteen years ago—is appalling.
We have to fight it, we must, because the right of controlling our reproductive
 David Sheff / 4 992 101

processes is basic to the personhood of women. But defending that right takes
away the passion that we also need to put behind other issues: child care,
equal opportunity, affirmative action.
This nation is decades behind European nations in birth control. Why don't
we have RU 486 here?

PLAYBOY Is it because men want to keep women barefoot and pregnant?

FRIEDAN The men who are running things do. Many people do not want

things to change, so they divert us. We focus on abortion and sexual harass¬
ment and welfare mothers. The welfare mother has been made the Willie
Horton of the 1992 election.

PLAYBOY: The Republicans in particular have been citing welfare moms as an example of the

system's failure.

FRIEDAN The welfare mother is not who people think she is. She is not black,

she's white. She's not a teenager and she doesn't keep having babies and she
doesn't stay on welfare her whole life. She actually has one and a half children
and then she gets off welfare. But the stereotype, the Willie Horton welfare
mother, is black, fourteen or fifteen years old and she keeps on having babies.
They want us to think she is responsible for America's economic crisis, not
the politicians and the people who are profiting. The fact is, you could give
every existing welfare mother a hundred thousand dollars a year or take her
off welfare altogether and it wouldn't solve the economic crisis. Still, other¬
wise intelligent men, instead of discussing the culture of greed and those
excessive corporate salaries and bonuses, talk about the welfare mother.
The fact is, attacking abortion, the welfare mother, people of other races,
gays, is a diversion of energy that should be going toward confronting basic
political and economic problems of this society. Instead, it comes down to
clashes between the races and violence against women.

PLAYBOY: How, specifically, to violence against women?

FRIEDAN: All the groups that have been moving toward equality are pitted

against one another. Men and women are feeling the pressures of the reces¬
sion. Remember, many, many women now carry the burden of supporting or
helping to support the family. Still, men have been defined as having those
roles, and the frustration of men today must be enormous—losing their jobs,
barely getting by. The rage is funneled against the groups that have been
102 Interviews with Betty Friedan

moving toward equality. Men take it out on women and the minorities who
are supposedly taking their jobs because of affirmative action. Or they take it
out on the Japanese for destroying the American economy.

Playboy What should people do?

Friedan They need to be alert to the danger of becoming polarized. Instead

of fighting among ourselves, we must move with a new political urgency to

save our democracy and the freedoms that are under attack. That is what is
really going on. If we don't, we are playing into their hands and inviting
fascism.

PLAYBOY Do you see fascism coming?

FRIEDAN: Remember history. What preceded fascism in Nazi Germany? Eco¬

nomic chaos and the loss of a sense of national power. That caused people to
scapegoat one another. Eventually, citizenship was taken away from the Jews.
Then feminist organizations were outlawed and the rights of women—not
only to abortion but also the right to work in professions or to hold political
office—were taken away. Women were reduced to children, kitchen, church.
Freedom of speech in Germany was suppressed altogether. Racism was taught
in the schools in the name of science. And then there was war and the Fdolo-
caust.
There are many parallels. Art—called degenerate art if it was abstract or
openly erotic or sexual—was suppressed by the Nazis. It all sounds pretty
familiar, doesn't it? Look at what happened inside the National Endowment
for the Arts. The art that Congress wants the NEA to suppress may not be to
my taste and it may shock, but there are dangers to freedom of speech if we
rely on sexual pluralism or anyone's sexual revulsion or shock.

PLAYBOY: Some feminists support recently proposed legislation that will hold pornographers

responsible if crimes are committed by people who were thought to he under the influence of

pornography. Would you suppress pornography?

FriedaN: The New York chapter of the National Organization for Women

came out against that legislation and I'm very proud of them. Women cannot
let the pornography issue be misused. Once you suppress freedom of speech
for any reason, it will come back to haunt you. The Webster decision that
forbids doctors from counseling about abortion is a suppression of freedom of
speech. The same people would eventually have us banning books—Our Bod¬
ies, Ourselves is threatening to them. The Feminine Mystique was banned.
 David Sbejf / 1992 103

PLAYBOY How important were the Clarence Thomas bearings for the women's movement?

FRIEDAN It's the most significant thing that has happened in years. I think that

Anita Hill is an absolute symbol of a paradigm shift in the women's movement,

from being the victim to being empowered.

PLAYBOY Even if it didn't succeed in blocking Thomas' nomination?

FRIEDAN Even if it didn't. Thomas should have been blocked even without the

sexual harassment issue because it was unconscionable that a Supreme Court

nominee would not declare himself on the fundamental right of women to
control their own reproductive processes. Regardless, consciousness-raising
took place in the whole nation when women saw Anita Hill stand up and
when we saw, day after day, the outrageousness of an all-male Senate Judiciary
Committee and a nearly all-male Senate that just didn't get it. Women got it,
and it's not going to go away.

PLAYBOY: But Thomas was confirmed and the majority of Americans, the majority of women,

according to polls, disbelieved Anita Hill.

FRIEDAN I'd like to see those polls in a little more depth. It's not surprising that

women as well as men believed Thomas. We have had centuries of male

authority that has influenced us all. Also, the hearings were conducted in a
way that was set up against her. The Republican Senators savagely tried to
destroy her character, and the Democratic Senators sat there like wimps and
let them do it. A lot of women will not forget that. Wait until the elections. 1
have never seen women as angry. Women who vote! Furthermore, Anita Hill
was not destroyed. She will go down in history as a heroine. As a result of
Anita Hill's actions, women across the country are now emboldened to blow
the whistle on sexual harassment.

PLAYBOY: Has the issue been blown out of proportion, so that relationships in and out of the

workplace are strained?

FRIEDAN I don't think so. The reason the issue became so big is that many

women were being subjected to behavior that was inexcusable. If some people
are nervous about it, then fine. It will mean they will be more conscientious.

PLAYBOY: But many men and women bemoan the fact that even flirting is suspect. Do you

really object to a little healthy flirting?

FRIEDAN: We are talking about harassment, not flirting.

104 Interviews with Betty Friedan

Playboy Are you worried that the attention to sexual harassment is a diversion from eco¬

nomic and political issues?

FRIEDAN I think it is a great step forward that women don't have to dwell in

the victim state, but that issue is, once again, men versus women. The sexual

war is the focus, and we don't focus on jobs, repression or the inner cities.

Our larger agenda right now, it seems to me, is to join with men in
demanding a new politics and culture to replace the culture of greed of the

dozen years of Reagan and Bush.

PLAYBOY: Does that mean you're supporting Clinton for President?

FRIEDAN: 1 think it's essential to defeat Bush. I am not excited about any candi¬

date that has come along, but Bush must be defeated. Still, whether any
emerging leader is even sufficiently understanding of these issues—since they
are all men—I don't know. Whether Clinton or the other Democrats are going
to be as stupid as Dukakis was and give up what is probably their most potent
source of support, 1 don't know.

PLAYBOY: How did Michael Dukakis alienate women?

FRIEDAN: As the 1988 presidential campaign began, there was a big gender

gap. Women favored the Democrats. But Dukakis believed the conventional
Democrats' wisdom, which was to clothe themselves as Republicans and refuse
to be viewed as prisoners to any special-interest groups, including women.
The women I worked with came up with commercials that would appeal to
women. Cher would have done them. F4owever, the Committee to Elect
Dukakis wouldn't let us.

PLAYBOY: Because he thought it was a liability to be associated with women?

FRIEDAN: Exactly, and he was crazy. By the end of the campaign, there was no

gender gap. And the people who ran the Dukakis campaign didn't even under¬
stand that they had thrown it away. 1 hope that Clinton doesn't do it again,
because what used to be dismissed as women's issues are now the main issues
of the campaign.

PLAYBOY: What do you think about Ross Perot?

FRIEDAN: America is yearning for a man on a white horse. The idea that he

doesn't have to subject himself to the democratic process gives me a feeling

of deja vu. Other times it led to Mussolini and Fditler. Perot also seems to
have some of this Bush-Quayle obsession with conventional family values. Fde
 David Sheff / 4 992 105

has said he won't have gays in his cabinet. He has said that we don't have
enough money to address issues such as parental leave and child care. He
appears to want to cut social programs, but cutting social programs is what
got us to the riots in Los Angeles.

PLAYBOY Even as you talk about the new direction the women's movement must take, there

is speculation that it has faltered. Has it?

FRIEDAN So many articles say the women's movement is dead. But because the

right to abortion is threatened, more people marched on Washington last

spring than ever marched for any issue. It is very much alive.

PLAYBOY: Surveys have shown that women, especially younger women, don't identify with

the movement. They may favor reproductive choice, but they don't relate to feminism.

FRIEDAN They may not relate to the word feminism, but the great majority of

women, young and old, completely subscribe to the entire agenda of the wom¬
ens movement, from equal pay to equal access to advanced jobs and profes¬
sions to child care to choice regarding abortion.

PLAYBOY Then why won't they call themselves feminists?

FRIEDAN The trouble with the media, and even some of the women's organiza¬

tions, is that they have too narrow a vision of the women's movement. They
look at it the way it was fifteen years ago and don't recognize how far it has
come. Young women say they're not feminists, but they don't have to be. They
take for granted feminist rights. Yet women, when they see their rights are in
danger, will march and act. Look at what happened in Washington. Women
have power that is greater than anyone acknowledges. In Illinois, a relatively
unknown black woman with very little money was able to defeat a Senator
who was considered undefeatable, who had been in the Senate for twenty-
two years. In Pennsylvania, a woman candidate beat the state's lieutenant gov¬
ernor and is now running against Aden Specter. In California, two women
won their party's nomination for the Senate. There are women who are going
to be elected like that all over this country this fall. I don't think any of the

presidential candidates understands that.

PLAYBOY: But the majority of women don 't consider themselves to be feminists. Representative

Pat Schroeder suggested that it was because of the archaic image of feminists as bra burners,

radical lesbians, men-haters and women who choose not to shave under their arms.
106 Interviews with Betty Friedan

FriedaN: There may be something to that. The media have done eveiything

they can to discredit the movement. They glom on to the extremist voices in
the movement with which many women want to dissociate. More so, the
message in the Reagan-Bush era, served up by the media, was that feminism
itself was a dirty word. The propaganda campaign was effective. It said that
you would not get ahead in your career if you were considered a feminist. It
said that you could not be a reasonable parent if you were a feminist. "Femi¬
nism," like "liberalism," was portrayed as being regressive and unpopular—as
were civil rights, affirmative action, welfare and social programs. Some of the
campaign against us has had to have an effect.

PLAYBOY: Some people thought that successful women were no longer feminine—that they

were taking on the character traits of fiercely competitive men. Do you agree?

FRIEDAN: The depiction of career women as monsters, a la the woman in Fatal

Attraction, is another cause of the backlash. No wonder women have questions

about going for it.

PLAYBOY: In politics, some of the most successful women—Margaret Thatcher and Jeane

Kirkpatrick, to name two—seem as macho as any of their male counterparts.

FRIEDAN: Well, I'm not sure that's true. When you are the first woman in any

field, it's very hard not to follow the male model. There is no other model. It's
only when women approach critical mass that you begin to see them show
characteristics of leadership that really use the qualities associated with
women.

PLAYBOY: What gualities?

FRIEDAN: Maybe it's because women are the people who give birth to children,

but something has enabled them to be more sensitive to the cues of life. They
nurture. The more they can use that in the public sphere, the better.

PLAYBOY: George Gilder has charged that the women's movement is out of touch—it's elitist

and most women don't want it. Is there any truth to that?

FRIEDAN: I'm really losing patience with the attempts to polarize women. The

power and the glory of the women's movement is that it crossed all those
lines. It has affected every woman. When they say that the women's move¬
ment doesn't represent the average woman, they are intentionally dividing us.

PLAYBOY: Do you admit that the women's movement itself, because of all the infighting, is

partly responsible for alienating women?

 David SheJJ / 1992 107

Friedan That's part of the tendency to blame the victim. The organizations

on the cutting edge of the women's movement are still doing a valiant job of
protecting the rights we thought we'd won in the first place. They still fight
for rights, from affirmative action to equal employment opportunities to the
right of choice in the matter of abortion.

PLAYBOY But there's still fighting within the women's movement, isn't there?

Friedan Yes, and the first thing we have to do is redirect our focus. If women

are alienated from the women's movement because it is antagonistic toward

men, I understand that. One of the reasons 1 am doing this interview is that I
think the movement has to become one of women and men. Maybe the wom¬
en's movement has to be superseded by a larger political movement.

PLAYBOY What you're saying is heresy in some radical corners of the women's movement.

Friedan It depends on what you call radical. I think that a radical vision of

society has to go beyond women's rights—not to sacrifice them but to go

beyond them.

PLAYBOY: Have the extreme wings of the women's movement alienated many women?

FRIEDAN I'm tired of all the infighting and blaming. The media play it up, too.

I agree, though, that the women's movement must be for all women.

PLAYBOY: The president of NOW, Patricia Ireland, has admitted she had a lesbian relation¬

ship in addition to her marriage to a man. This has turned off some women. Are you concerned

about that?
Friedan I don't think a woman must be defined in terms of her sexuailty. At

the same time, 1 never objected to sexual preference, and I think that it's a
positive, life-affirming thing that women are able to find and define their sexu¬

ality in diverse ways.

PLAYBOY: Still, many women simply can't relate.

FRIEDAN: Yes, and focusing on any single issue that divides us prevents us from

getting anywhere. I have been pitted against the lesbians in NOW, and the
lesbians have been pitted against me. When we allow that, we are playing into
the hands of those who would diffuse our focus and our power. My biggest
concern is polarizing women against one another. My definition of feminism
includes Patricia Ireland and Gloria Steinem and women staying at home. I
am against polarization of women against women, whether it comes from Dan
108 Interviews with Betty Friedan

Quayle or Susan Faludi or Camille Paglia I'm also not for any rigid, narrow
definition of feminism, A women's movement has to include divergent life¬
styles and it has to continually evolve to meet the needs of women. Women's
rights are going to go down the drain if we alienate one another and fight one

another.

PLAYBOY: Might women drift away from feminism because it criticizes their choice to stay

home with their children?

FRIEDAN: I think that's correct. I worry about the factions in the women s move¬

ment that say there is only one way. Of course women who want families and
careers are alienated from a movement that says you have to choose.

PLAYBOY: You described your stand in The Second Stage,/or which you were written

off as a sellout by the more radical factions of the movement. Susan Faludi said you were as

bad as the men who said that the women's movement was failing because "its leaders had

ignored the maternal call."

FRIEDAN: Women are the people who give birth to children, and that is a

necessary value in society. For the great majority of women, no feminism that
was opposed to family would work. 1 never believed that feminism was
opposed to family. Feminism implied an evolution of the family. Feminism
was not opposed to marriage and motherhood. It wanted women to be able
to define themselves as people and not just as servants to the family. You want
a feminism that includes women who have children and want children because
that's the majority of women. I think Susan Faludi's book is important because
there is a backlash. But she makes me part of it because of this stand.

PLAYBOY: Have you discussed it with Faludi?

FRIEDAN: Yes. And she's told me that she's taking that criticism of me out of

the British edition. [Editor's note: Faludi denies she is making any changes
regarding Friedan.]

PLAYBOY: Faludi also says that your optimistic prediction—that "men will not fear the love

and strength of women, nor need another's weakness to prove their own masculinity —never

came to pass. If she's right, then her view is understandable.

FRIEDAN: It was changing. There was a sharing of the responsibilities between

parents so that each person could fulfill himself or herself as a person.

PLAYBOY: Yet the new, younger leaders of the women's movement don't seem to buy it.
 David Sheff / 1992 109

Friedan Faludi is right that the backlash has undermined much of the progress

we made. But the answer is not to ignore that most women want families. The
women’s movement started with many women who already had children and
didn't want to be defined solely in those terms. On the other hand, having
children was of great value to our lives. It remains one of mine now that 1 see
my children and grandchildren growing.

PLAYBOY: But many women didn't see motherhood as a choice for a liberated woman.

Friedan That's why I wrote The Second Stage. 1 saw my daughter's generation

growing up with ambitions for careers, yet also wanting to marry and have
children. They had real problems putting it all together. They saw it as a
personal problem—that it was their fault—because they had an image of femi¬
nism that didn't include a family. We had to deal with that. Feminism had to
focus on restructuring the society so it would support women who wanted to
have careers and families. We had to work for parental leave and job sharing
and other flexible work arrangements. It meant there were equal responsibili¬
ties for men in the home.

PLAYBOY: What about the women who tried working and who realized it wasn't all that it

was cracked up to be? They wanted to return home.

Friedan: That's a myth of backlash, too.

PLAYBOY: A recent Roper poll says that fifty-three percent of women say they would rather

stay home than work.

FRIEDAN: What those polls show is that the great majority of women want a

different work arrangement when their children are little. It does not show
the majority of women would abjure opportunities for careers. The polls show
that women do not necessarily want to spend their lives in the rat race the
way men do. They want to have a new mix—children and work. They are
leaving corporations and starting their own businesses, not to go home again
but to work in situations that are more flexible. They're saying that women
don't want to choose the mommy track versus the fast track. The best compa¬
nies are discovering that the women they want on the fast track also can be
given flexible work arrangments. It will allow them to keep women who are

assets to the companies.

PLAYBOY: Do you admit that some women want to stay home to raise a family?

Friedan: Some might, but those women want other things that the womens
1 10 Interviews with Betty Friedan

movement brings them. Some women want to have their kids and then go
back to school, and then go to work where they can add a whole new dimen¬
sion to their lives. Other women want to do the opposite. The main thing is
that women want choices.

PLAYBOY: It's been said that children suffered because of the women's movement. Women

gained the opportunity to work and kids were abandoned.

FRIEDAN: That's enormously regressive thinking, though you certainly see that

attitude portrayed in the media.

PLAYBOY: But research indicates that kids are suffering It might not be good for kids to have

both parents working twelve hours a day.

FRIEDAN: Both parents should not be working twelve hours a day. That's where

job sharing comes in. Flexible hours and parental leaves, for both parents.
President Bush vetoed a minimal parental-leave bill. That alone is reason
enough to throw him out of office.

PLAYBOY: Do you agree that kids, in the meantime, are the victims?

FRIEDAN: The argument is that women should go home because kids are being

abandoned by work-obsessed parents. First of all, the reason both parents

work twelve hours a day is an economic issue, not a women's right issue. Both
parents have to work. They need the money. Children suffer because of the
economy. Both parents have to work and there is no support, no child care,
no flexible hours. Children are being victimized, but not because women went
back to work. Research indicates that when women went back to work, by
necessity or choice, there was no bad effect on the children—depending, of
course, on family circumstances and other factors.

PLAYBOY: But some of the research is disturbing. A study showed that drug use is propor¬

tional to the amount of time kids spend without parental supervision. It says that latchkey

kids are prime candidates for drug problems.

Friedan: You have to look at all the variables. Studies 1 can show you prove

that it is positive for children when their mother, like their father, has a fulfill¬
ing career. The children will then have role models of strong women. It gives
girls more confidence.

PLAYBOY: But—

FRIEDAN: [Angrily] Let me finish. The children tend to be more independent,

and they do not suffer any more proneness to drugs or delinquency.

 David Sbeff / 1992 1 1 1

PLAYBOY: Our studies seem to contradict each other.

FRIEDAN: I'm sorry. It is part of the backlash that would have women who have

chosen to lead fulfilling lives blamed for drug abuse. The message is the same:
Stay home. The fact is, kids do better in families where the men and women
balance work, time spent with each other and with the children. They do
better in those circumstances than in traditional households. To imply that
you can solve these problems—drugs, unemployment—by women going
home is backlash.

PLAYBOY: Do you agree with Susan Faludi that the idea of the biological clock is part of

the backlash, too—another way to make women go home, or at least feel guilty about

pursuing their careers7

FRIEDAN: I don't. Again, women want the choice. Many of them want to be

mothers. If they are on a career path that doesn't allow them any flexibility,
so that they have to choose which track they're on, they get angry because
they are in a no-win situation. I think Susan Faludi can be ardent about it
because she is young and she hasn't had to make the decision for herself yet.

PLAYBOY: Some would see that as a comment of the backlash: A feminist can insist on career

over motherhood while she's young, but as soon as her biological clock starts ticking louder,

she'll think differently.

FRIEDAN: Feminism cannot dictate the decision to all women. Women have to

be supported in all the different ways they decide to become fulfilled. That's
what I've believed since the beginning.

PLAYBOY: Was there a formative event that made you a feminist?

FriedaN: There wasn't any one thing. There were many things. It was almost

accidental. But mysteriously, miraculously, all the disparate parts of my life

and the frustrations came together in The Feminine Mystigue. It was a reaction to

the life I was living.

PLAYBOY: What was it like?

FRIEDAN: 1 had been working as a reporter after college. My mother had been

very unhappy. She was unfulfilled. To marry my father, she gave up a job at a
newspaper and was never satisfied after that. It was as if she had given up, and
I lived with that discontent, not understanding it. She dreamed of me having
a better life. She never had been able to go to college and she dreamed of me

going.
112 Interviews with Betty Friedan

I did go and I pursued a career. I gave up my ambitions and then my job in

order to become a suburban housewife. Soon, my life was PTA meetings and
dinners and housecleaning and having coffee with my neighbors. Housewives
were supposedly living this dream life, but, of course, there was something

wrong.

PLAYBOY: How did you come to understand it?

FRIEDAN: I was aware that something was wrong. I described it as the problem

that had no name. I began writing about it, about my experience and the
experiences of the women 1 knew who were suffering. It took five years to
write.

PLAYBOY: Did the response surprise you?

FRIEDAN: At first the response was terrible. No one would publish it. When I

finally found a publisher, they printed only three thousand copies. But as soon
as it was out, women read it. It spoke to them and it had an incredible effect.
More and more were published. Women wrote me about their relief to realize
that they were not alone in feeling this anguish. Not all women. Many were
very threatened. But it changed a lot of lives.

PLAYBOY: Including your own.

Friedan: Yes.

PLAYBOY: What happened?

Friedan: I spoke about the book and heard from women everywhere. 1 contin¬

ued writing and talking about the feminine mystique. Women began to fight
back. It enabled me to go on and help to start the National Organization for
Women, the National Women's Political Caucus and the National Abortion
Rights Action League, the Women's Forum and many other things.

PLAYBOY: And you ve said that that activity was behind your divorce in the late sixties?

FRIEDAN: It was a difficult time, and certainly the women's movement gave me

the strength to do something about it. 1 have some regrets. I was married for
twenty-two years and there were some happy times. In some ways I look at it
as a failure that it ended. Ending it was difficult, but it was more difficult living
with things the way they were. I understand it more in hindsight, of course,
like everything else.

PLAYBOY: How would you characterize your relationship with your peers in the women's

movement? What kind of a relationship do you have with Gloria Steinem?

 David Sheff / 1992 1 13

FRIEDAN: 1 knew Gloria before she was involved in the women's movement. In

fact, 1 remember trying to get her to join with us when we were going to go
into the Plaza Hotel and insist on being served in the men's bar. She wouldn't
have anything to do with it then.

PLAYBOY: You've clashed with her on many issues.

FRIEDAN: We tangled a lot. 1 was really opposed to the radical chic, anti-man

politics she espoused: "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."
There were other things. I didn't like it when she went to the League of
Women Voters to support the ERA and, in her speech, said that all wives are
prostitutes. 1 thought it was politically unwise, and I fought it within NOW
and within the women's movement generally. 1 fought attempts to push the
women's movement out of the mainstream, and that put me in opposition to
Gloria. But now, in my wise maturity, 1 see that all of it contributed. Gloria is
a survivor and a fighter. She contributed a lot. She is a good role model for
women who choose not to marry or have children. She showed that it is
possible to have a good life. 1 don't think that most women want to go that
path, but it’s important to have a model for those who do. She also has made
a real contribution to the women's movement with Ms.

PLAYBOY: Steinem, in her recent book, The Revolution from Within, discusses what she

calls “the real enemy within. '' She feels that women have to look internally to deal with issues

about self-esteem. How do you feel about it?

FRIEDAN: 1 have not read her book, though I have read the reviews. 1 m glad

that it's a best seller and that she's making lots of money on it and that she's
not going to be a bag lady. Furthermore, the fact that it is a best seller is
marvelous proof that the backlash isn't working that well. Women are reading
Steinem and Faludi, and therefore they are still concerned. But 1 worry about
The Revolution from Within if it feeds the idea that the problems women face are

just personal and internal, that psychoanalysis or some version thereof could
solve them. 1 don't think that's true. I would like for women to see now that
they have a new set of problems and that they need political solutions for

those problems.

PLAYBOY: How does it feel to be on the outs with some factions of the women s movement?

First, Susan Faludi says you're part of the backlash, and then you aren't asked to speak at

the pro-choice march on Washington.

1 14 Interviews with Betty Friedan

FriedaN: I’m not going to lie. I'm very hurt when I feel trashed by the leaders

of the organizations that I helped to start. But I'm not going to indulge in the
media's delight at exacerbating the divisions between us. I do admit that I was
really hurt that I wasn't asked to speak at the rally. I seemed as if I were the
only leading American woman that wasn't, you know.

PLAYBOY: Why were you excluded?

FRIEDAN: Someone doing my oral history was told that it was because I always

get quoted by the media and these other women wanted to be quoted, I think
they should be, but it isn't necessary to trash your foremothers. I have a lot of
courage and guts to fight the enemy, but I get really hurt. I hate to admit it.
It's sort of a de-Stalinization of the women's movement—their attempt to
write me out of history, though I don't think that will happen.

PLAYBOY: Do you acknowledge that the younger, more radical voices may better address the

needs of the current women's movement?

FRIEDAN: I think Susan Faludi is very important. 1 tell people to buy her book.

I assign it to my students even though she criticizes me. But everyone knows
that movements that discount their history and don't learn from their mistakes
repeat them. I hope these young people don't make that mistake.

PLAYBOY: What do you think about Camille Paglia?

FRIEDAN: F-Iow can you take her seriously? She is an exhibitionist, and she

takes the most extreme elements of the women's movement and tries to make
the whole movement antisexual, antilife, antijoy. And neither I nor most of
the women I know are that way.

PLAYBOY: How about Naomi Wolf, who, in The Beauty Myth, says that anything—

from advertising on—that makes women self-conscious about their bodies is evil. Do you
agree?

Friedan: It is an important book. I am outraged by the pressures that enable

surgeons or manufacturers of silicone gel or anyone else to profit by inducing

women to mutilate themselves. Silicone breast implants, plastic surgery, exces¬
sive dieting are anathema to me. I object to blue-jeans ads that seem to show
these women who are still children as inviting rape or having just been raped.

PLAYBOY: But you seem to draw lines Wolf doesn't draw: She would strongly criticize
Playboy's Playmates.
 David Sbeff / 4 992 1 15

FRIEDAN: Remember, the fact that 1 have given you this interview does not

mean that 1 endorse the centerfold It's all right to look, but anything that
does not show women as total beings cannot be endorsed. I am trusting that
you communicate these issues to men caught up in the mystique. Look at
women like women can look at men but never forget, for a moment, the
complete, complex personhood of people.

PLAYBOY: How do you see things changing in the future for you personally?

FRIEDAN: No major changes. 1 am still working, no longer on the politics of

the women's movement but on the larger vision. I'm also writing a new book,
The Fountain of Age.

PLAYBOY: What's the fountain of age?

FRIEDAN: 1 see the mystique of aging as similar to the feminine mystique.

Again, it denies the personhood of individuals who get older. It's about view¬
ing age not as a decline from youth but as a unique stage of living. Because
we spent that time fighting the feminine mystique, we gave ourselves a head
start in the battle against the mystique of age. We stopped defining ourselves
vis a vis men—as mothers, wives, sexual objects—and we discovered new joys
in ourselves and in other women, and in men, too. Similarly, when we break
through the mystique of age, there will be new joys in the rest of our lives,
for men and women. That mystique is the next one to fight.

PLAYBOY: Given the history of the women's movement, are you hopeful?

FRIEDAN: The whole modern women's movement has taken place in only the

past twenty-five years, and so much has changed. Women now make up forty
percent of the students in the law schools, sixty percent in the journalism
schools, forty percent of the M.B.A.s. But they are only now beginning to
move in significant numbers into the middle and upper ranks of the profes¬
sions. Women were earning fifty-nine cents for every dollar men earned and
now it's seventy-something. It's getting better, but there is a long way to go.
And do you want to know something? The countries where men's and wom¬
en's earnings are more comparable are the countries that have policies of child
care and parental leave. They are countries that accept the fact that women
will continue to be part of the work force and that women are the people who
give birth to children. And they are countries doing better economically than

we are.
1 16 Interviews with Betty Friedan

PLAYBOY: You've blamed the media Jor much of the backlash, but you just indicated that

sixty percent of journalism students are women. If so many women are becoming journalists,

won't things change?

Friedan: For a course I’m teacFiing, "Women, Men and Media, we monitored

the front pages of the newspapers to see the percentage of time women were
mentioned, photographed or quoted. The number was fifteen percent.
Women are fifty-three percent of the population. That meant that forty-seven
percent of the population occupied eighty-five percent of the space on the
front pages. The same was true in broadcast news. Women were sought for
comment on broadcast news fifteen percent of the time. Even in the study we
did last February, during a time when all kinds of stories of great importance
to women were breaking—the Mike Tyson rape case, silicone gel breast
implants, Anita Hill—the experts sought quotes from men. Well, the media
are still controlled by men. The editors and news directors are men. That's a
symbolic annihilation. Is it a conspiracy against women? No. But it surely is a
blind spot coming from the all-male definition.

PLAYBOY: What will it take before there'll be a woman in the White House?

FRIEDAN: Maybe four more years.

PLAYBOY: Any nominees?

FRIEDAN: Ann Richards. Not only was she elected governor of Texas—Texas!—

but what she's done as governor is a very interesting story and a bellwether.
And Texas is the most macho of states. See, we've come awfully far. That's
why 1 don't understand the media's jumping on this talk about the death of
the women's movement. If you think about it, there are millions now where
there were a few of us at first, millions of women who have the training, the
professional opportunity, millions who have changed their lives, taken control
of their lives. Why do you try to dismiss it? You just try to find all sorts of
ways to whittle it down and dismiss it, when the reality is right in front of
your eyes. It's threatened now and we have our work cut out for us again.
Maybe it's wishful thinking on the part of the people who keep talking about
the death of the women's movement. Well, they have another thing coming.
We're not going anywhere.
 Portrait of a Feminist at an Old Woman
Michele Kort/ 1993

From Los Angeles Times Magazine, (10 October

1993), 11. Reprinted by permission of Michele
Kort.

"I'm an incorrigible bohemian—paper napkins and all that," Betty Friedan

announces, apropos of no particular question. She clears her grandchildrens
toys off the couch in the living room of her cozy, cluttered, clapboard house,
which sits on the edge of Sag Harbor, Long Island.
"I started coming here in 1970, and it was more bohemian then," she con¬
tinues "There were a few rich people, but they didn’t bother us. But now there
are so many rich people!1 It s a pleasantly cool afternoon in Sag Harbor, the
picturesque former whaling village in the Hamptons, where Friedan and about
2,500 other heat-escaping New Yorkers spend the summer.
"And I'm losing my tolerance for stand-up cocktail parties of any sort,- 1
want to sit down," she adds with a certain vehemence. When Friedan speaks in
her hoarse, almost preacherly tone, the italics and exclamation points are
almost visible. "But on the other hand, I've got so many friends out here, and
we're all stuck. It would take too much energy to find a new place and make

new friends."
This is a woman who knows exactly what she thinks about everything. By
knowing herself, and taking her own ideas seriously, Friedan has often identi¬
fied her personal experience as a sign of the times. Her feeling of entrapment
and malaise thirty years ago articulated itself into the revolutionary book The
Feminine Mystique, political frustration twenty-seven years ago led her to found
1 18 Interviews with Betty Friedan

the National Organization for Women, and the dread and denial over her
own aging encouraged her to write her new tome, The Fountain of Age. Friedan
has made a career of recognizing and politicizing her private concerns and
then weaving them into the national discourse.
"Betty's a very self-aware human being," is how her old friend Natalie Git-
telson, author and former New York Times Magazine editor, pegs her "She's
always interesting—particularly on the subject of Betty.”
But she is not always pleasant. Though she claims she's mellowing at age
seventy-two, she still frequently expresses herself in the vernacular of a revolu¬
tionary—anger, outrage, protest and an aggressive stubbornness. She doesn't
care if everyone likes her, as long as they listen to her.
Today, though, Friedan is in an almost giddy good mood. She's about to
launch The Fountain of Age after ten years of research and writing. It's got "big
book" written all over it, and not just because it weighs in at 600-plus pages.
Just as The Feminine Mystique added a new expression to the lexicon—and
launched, she'll tell you with no undue modesty, the second wave of American
feminism—this book reveals another mystique, one that denies the continuing
"generativity," the strengths and creativity, of those on the other side of sixty-
five.
"In the middle of writing it, I felt very bogged down, and 1 romanticized in
my memory that The Feminine Mystique had sung out of me,” Friedan recalls of
the book's long gestation. "And then, about two years ago, I saw that it was
adding up I realized that it's there, and it might even be important"—her
voice drops,- for a moment she sounds almost humble—"in somewhat the same
way as The Feminine Mystique was. Although that's always a bad thing, you know.
If you think you re competing with something like The Feminine Mystique, which
had such an impact, you'd kill yourself. But to my surprise, it's turned out that
way, I think. A man I know who's just about to turn sixty read the book and
said, 'It's changed my whole thinking about everything!' And if men are saying
that. . . . This is obviously music to her ears. She giggles with pleasure.
In the book, Friedan surveys the research, collects anecdotes and uses her
own adventures—like going on an Outward Bound expedition when she was
in her early sixties—to demonstrate her thesis that aging is more opportunity
than problem. It is a book weighted down with information but illuminated
by touching, often confessional, moments. Menopause, she says, is simply a
transition, not necessarily a hormonal nightmare. Mental health doesn't auto-
 Michele Kort / 1993 1 19

matically decline after the 40s. Keep changing, she tells her fellow aging
explorers, keep finding purposes and projects, maintain your automony. Break
the rules.
The Wall Street Journal has called the book "wise and challenging" and Frie-
dan "a brilliant conceptualizer," but the Washington Post wondered if "older
Americans of color might not have added some important perspectives." The
Los Angeles Times surmised that "readers not turned off by her occasional nervous

preening will find much to enlighten and provoke as they join her in the
contemplation of possibilities. But on this day, no reviews have come out yet,
and Friedan's basking in the pre-book-tour glow. If the book catches on, she
could be hailed once again as the catalyst of a movement, this time as a mod¬
ern-day Ponce de Leon who helped usher in an era of upbeat geriatrics.
And she could once again become a leader. It's a position Friedan courts
and, some say, demands. And it's a position she's been too often denied in
recent years. She long ago earned her place in history as the grande dame of
the modern women's movement, or as she herself put it at a Clinton-Gore
rally last fall, "the mother of you all." But as her own feminist philosophy—
concerned more with assuring equal roles for women than with questioning
the patriarchal underpinnings of society—eventually was criticized as rigid
and conservative, her celebrity was eclipsed by younger, more radical and
more glamorous spokeswomen such as Gloria Steinem, Catharine A. MacKin¬
non, Alice Walker, and Susan Faludi. In the past two decades, Friedan has
remained a household name and is a usual suspect when a quote is needed
about an Anita FTill or a parental leave act, but she is no longer a ranking
member of the feminist vanguard. Now Friedan has a new, eager group of the
disenfranchised to champion, and it seems a welcome relief after the sort of
ostracism she has felt. "Betty knows how to move on," says Gittelson. "She did
what she did, and you could say that she passed the torch or the torch was
wrested from her, but whatever happened she didn't fall down in her tracks.

She moved on."

Right now, Friedan is moving with a slight limp. It is the only overt sign of
a health crisis she endured this year,- in fact, for a brief time, she thought her
latest book would be published posthumously.
In April in Los Angeles, where she's spent the past seven winters teaching
a course at USC's business school and running a think tank on women's issues,
she had what she thought was a breath-shortening flare-up of her asthma. It
120 Interviews with Betty Friedan

turned out to be heart failure, caused by an infection on her heart-valve wall.

In early May, she had the valve replaced with an animal's, but, as she loves to
tell the story, "My Jewish heart rejected the pig valve " So she needed a human
one—she even called old friend Donna Shalala, now secretary of Health and
Human Services, to see if she could help track one down. On May 17, she
got her human valve and had her second open-heart surgery in two weeks.
That should have been an excuse to take a long rest, but Friedan had a
book to sell. Just two weeks later, Natalie Gittelson remembers hearing Frie¬
dan ask her daughter, Emily, a pediatrician, if she and her husband, a cardiolo¬
gist, would accompany Friedan to Miami for an American Booksellers Assn,
meeting, Emily agreed. Gittelson asked Emily, "Do you really think she'll be
able to make it?''
"No way!" said the daughter. "I'm just humoring her."
Nonetheless, there was Friedan wheeling onto the stage—she used a chair
because of a disc infection in her back, she insists, not because of the heart
surgery—and delivering a rousing talk about vital aging to a captivated crowd.
She told them, "I want as many people as possible to read this book, so there's
no way I'm going to spend ten years writing it and then not get out of the
hospital and come talk to you." By being there, she proved a thesis of her
book—that age shouldn't limit even the most extraordinary acts.
Today, Friedan looks tan and healthy, having spent the summer "lying fal¬
low" and not slave to a book deadline for the first time in years. Sprawled on
the couch in Sag Harbor in a scoop-necked black sweater and pants, she runs
her hand through her silver hair. "I'm just back to myself," she says, "and the
one good thing that came out of it is that I weigh under 130 for the first time
in forty years!" She's even been out dancing, one of her favorite pastimes. The
surgical scar on her chest looks like a battle wound, and her vivid features—
the substantial, down-curving nose and the droopy, basset-hound eyes—have
softened. Friedan may have seemed prematurely old in her forties, especially
while mediagenic Steinem stayed preternaturally young, but real age sits well
on her.

Not that she went gently into her elder years. In the preface of the book
she writes, "When my friends threw a surprise party on my sixtieth birthday,
1 could have killed them all. Their toasts seemed hostile, insisting as they did
that I publicly acknowledge reaching sixty, pushing me out of life, as it
seemed, out of the race."
 Michele Kort / <993 121

She says she was depressed for weeks, the last place Betty Friedan wanted
to be was out of the race. To combat that depression, she decided to confront
the issue head-on, she took a fellowship at Harvard and immersed herself in
gerontological research. She was soon struck by the discrepancy between the
decrepit, often pathological image of aging presented by many of the "experts"
and the old people whom she began interviewing. She noticed, for example,
that for many women, menopause was not a tragedy.
"1 ran into these women who were putting their lives together in a different
way beyond motherhood," she says. "1 saw how vital they were,- they didn't
even remember menopause. That was one of my first clues to The Fountain of

Age."
Soon she had a book in the works, and her depression turned into activist
anger. In that, she's not unlike other female social critics, who, as they grow
old, suddenly find the subject of age to be a fascinating frontier. In the past
few years, Germaine Greer and Gail Sheehy have tackled menopause and
points beyond, while Helen Gurley Brown, who ironically published Sex and
the Single Girl the year before The Feminine Mysticjue came out, took on sex and

the older woman in The Late Show: A Semiwild but Practical Survival Plan for Women

Over 50.

Friedan's bottom line on aging is similar to her bottom line on feminism—

liberation means having choices. And to make these choices possible, society
must overcome its aversion and fear of aging. Which Friedan herself had to

do before she could write her book.

"I had to write through my own extreme denial and dread," she explains.
"But then at one point, I'm interviewing a woman in Palm Springs who was
clearly my age and in a very short tennis skirt and had red hair. She said, Isn t
it nice,- 1 hear you re writing a book about these poor old people. And I said,
'I'm not writing a book about them. I'm writing a book about us.' "
Among young feminists, Friedan is a shadowy figure,- many consider her
ancient history, almost in the same category as Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth
Cady Stanton. "When I speak to feminists my age, Betty Friedan's name rarely
comes up," says Barbara Findlen, twenty-nine, who is managing editor of Ms.
magazine and working on an anthology of writings of young feminists. When
it does, the overriding sentiment that 1 hear is that her work has become
irrelevant. The impact of The Feminine Mysticjue is unquestionable, she adds,
122 Interviews with Betty Friedan

"but at the same time, when you read it and her other writings now, you see
how limited and divisive her vision is."
But when The Feminine Mystique became a bestseller, suburban housewife Frie¬
dan was hailed as a liberator, and she suddenly became the leader and spokes¬
woman of a brand new movement. And for a while she seemed the perfect
choice. She was a natural polemicist and publicist, someone who could choose
the right issue to pursue and pick the perfect moment to bring it to the public
arena. In 1965, Friedan and other activists started to get increasingly angry
that the sex-discrimination section of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
wasn't being taken seriously. A tearful Equal Employment Opportunity Com¬
mission lawyer took Friedan aside and pleaded with her to "start an NAACP
for women."
At a meeting of state commissioners on the status of women, Friedan
helped form the National Organization for Women. Officially born Oct. 29,
1966, with twenty-eight charter members, NOW's statement of purpose—"to
bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society
now"—was written by its first elected president, Betty Friedan.
President of NOW for four years, she was also instrumental in the founding
of a number of other important feminist organizations—the National Assn,
for Repeal of Abortion Laws, now known as National Abortion Rights Action
League, the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund and the National Wom¬
en's Political Caucus. She took courageous early stands on abortion rights and
the ERA, among other key pieces of the NOW agenda. But as the years went
by, she found her celebrity increasingly eclipsed by younger, and hipper,
women. Friedan essentially led the "mothers" division of the movement, while
Gloria Steinem directed the daughters brigade. The mothers were trying to
escape the misogynistic world of the 1950s,- the daughters were trying to avoid
ever getting into such a repressive rut.
'It was the difference between a glamorous, sexy feminism and a dowdy,
matronly feminism, says writer and former Mother Jones editor Deirdre English,
who points out that the male media acted misogynistically in setting up that
dichotomy. But if Betty Friedan has been the only representative of feminism
out there, she says, "we (baby-boomers) probably wouldn't have become fem¬
inists."

For Friedan s peers—mostly white, middle-class, middle-aged, heterosexual

women like herself—The Feminine Mystique was a conversion experience. It
 Michele Kort / 1993 123

pointed out how everyone from Madison Avenue hucksters to Sigmund Freud
and Margaret Mead had conspired to keep women in that gilded cage of no-
other-option housewifery—and that it was time to break free.
But more radical feminists often preferred Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 The
Second Sex or Kate Millett's 1970 Sexual Politics as their primary text. The Feminine
Mystique did not speak to issues of class in the same way that some radical
feminists tried to says Catharine R. Stimpson, a longtime women's studies
professor and current director of the MacArthur Foundation. "It did not speak
to issues of race, and it did not speak to sexuality."
Indeed, the notion of "sexual politics"—encompassing everything from por¬
nography to date rape to lesbianism—Friedan decried as "diversionary," which
led to huge rifts. Friedan would dig in her heels on the issue and freeze out all
argument. Her brusque, know-it-all, combative style antagonized women in
the movement—and anyone else who may have caught her in a crotchety
moment.
She was "one of the most difficult women in the world to work with," says
Dolores Alexander, formerly executive director of NOW and currently an
anti-pornography activist in New York. Friedan herself admits, without much
contrition, to a "terrible temper," and her friends don't deny her eruptive person¬
ality. "She's always fascinating to me, but even Betty would never call herself
a pussycat,” says Gittelson. "She's strong-willed, she likes things her way. She's
capable of great fury, sometimes over small issues."
While her friends accept her nature as part of the intriguing and often
charming package—and have learned to talk back—she wore out many peo¬
ple in the women's movement and was increasingly cut out of the feminist
community. "Friedan's a good thinker, and shes always had fantastic timing,
but people won't follow her to the end like they will other women in the
movement," says Judith Meuli, who, with fellow longtime NOW activist Toni
Carabillo, has written a history of the modern women's movement called The

Feminist Chronicles: 1953 to 1993.

The Second Stage, Friedan's third book, published in 1981, was the final straw
for many of her critics. Ostensibly devoted to discussing the future of the
women's movement, it was considered revisionist by many feminists. Friedan
seemed to blame feminists for the inability of the movement to make further
strides in areas of concern to mothers and families. In her 1991 bestseller
Backlash, Susan Faludi accused Friedan of "yanking out the stitches in her own
124 Interviews with Betty Friedan

handiwork" by suggesting, among other things, that women reject confronta¬

tional politics—which Friedan had pioneered—in favor of a gentler "Beta"
style and rediscover volunteerism. "(Her) solution puts the burden on women,-
the need for men to change barely figures in Friedan's new plan," wrote Faludi.
"It gave the false impression that NOW had not addresed issues of child
care and homemakers, when in fact we had," says Carabillo of the book. "It
was as if she alone recognized this need. It was not constructive criticism "
"Betty's influence after The Second Stage was minimal," adds Meuli.
Friedan has no apologies for the book or the controversy it generated.
"I think I was right. I'm not blaming anything on feminists at alii" she says,
her voice rising. "What 1 had to say in The Second Stage was not the party line,
which has become 'down with men' and ignores that the real empowerment
of women is economic empowerment that comes from jobs and more self-
respect. I also deplore and find ideologically and politically wrong a feminism
based on sexual warfare, sexual politics. Warfare between women and men. 1
think that denies the complexity of the interdependence of women and men."
Some would argue that this polarization of feminism along anachronistic
battle lines, with so-called "man haters" on one side, echoes the rhetoric of
anti-feminists. But Friedan doesn't flinch. "I do blame the feminists—not femi¬
nists, because I'm a feminist—" she quickly backpedals, "but the so-called femi¬
nist organizations for not having given the priority they should to child care
and parental leave, flexible work structures," she continues. "I'm not for
supressing pornography,- I'm for suppressing guns! Some pornography insults
women . . . but none of it is as dangerous as the guns that kill women and men!
"It's wrong to make me an enemy or betrayer of feminism," she concludes,
responding to the criticism that she has often called "mother bashing." "I'm
trying—or 1 was trying—to take feminism to the next stage."
If open heart surgery couldn't keep Friedan from a book tour, criticism,
even from her "daughters and granddaughters," never kept her away from the
podium, the stage, the TV cameras. She wrote her books and magazine arti¬
cles,- she secured visiting professorships at universities in fields ranging from
women s studies to business management. She turns up everywhere, delivering
rousing speeches for groups as diverse as the Orange County Women's Club
and the Mature Marketing Summit on topics from social psychology to flexi¬
ble work structures to gun control.

In 1987, she came to USC, initially for her gerontology research, and
 Michele Kort / 1993 125

because winters in Santa Monica are better for her asthma. She organizes, at
both USC and NYU, an annual conference on women, men and the media,
an area she has long understood. "She's really contributed to a number of
different schools at USC," says USC business professor and author Warren
Bennis. This year, her Betty Friedan Think Tank tackled such issues as sexual
abuse, the L.A. riots and national health care. She currently teaches a course
in the business school called "Changing Paradigms of Management," which
gives her a chance to promote one of her pet theories that business is shifting
"from a macho style to a maestro style," as Bennis puts it.
"She's a great moderator, and she seemed to be up on all the issues," says
Lisa Miller, who coordinated the think tank last spring. But when asked what
it was like to work with Friedan, Miller pauses, laughs and says politely, "Chal¬
lenging."
Friedan divides her time among her Sag Harbor home, a river-view Man¬
hattan apartment and a Santa Monica condo. She hasn't remarried since her
1969 divorce, but she's had her share of male companionship. She also nur¬
tures a legion of friends from academia, the arts, media and business. For 10
years, Friedan shared a house—a commune, she liked to call it—with some of
these longtime friends who, like her, had been divorced. Although she now
lives alone, the close contacts have remained.
Journalist Richard Reeves and his wife, erstwhile L.A. political candidate
Cathy O'Neill, are Sag Harbor buddies. When Friedan celebrated her sixty-
fifth birthday, lyricist friends Adolph Comden and Betty Green wrote tuneful
tributes. Former Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee might turn up at a Friedan
soiree,- so might well-known sociologist YOlliam Goode. Friedan mentions she
had dinner the other night with an old friend whos a famous sex therapist,
her tycoon husband and Barbara Walters.
About twice a year, Friedan's own far-flung clan—three children, their
spouses and eight grandchildren—rendezvous with her in Sag Harbor. She
obviously revels in her family and sparkles around her grandchildren. She's
the eldest of three children herself and remains close to her brother, Harry, a
retired businessman, but not to her sister. "We're like oil and water," admits
Friedan. Nonetheless, she wrote admiringly in The Fountain of Age of Amy's
decision to switch careers from art to writing in her sixties.
The contacts, the high-powered friends, the peripatetic lifestyle are all a
long way from Peoria, where she was born Betty Naomi Goldstein on Feb. 4,
126 Interviews with Betty Friedan

1921. A Jew, she learned early what it meant to belong to the non-dominant
culture. And if she needed a household example of the "fountain of age," she
had one in her maternal grandfather, who lived to be nearly 100. But it was
Betty's mother, with whom she had an admiring but stormy relationship, who
taught her by example to be a feminist. It was the example of a woman who
did not achieve her full potential.
"1 sometimes think what really motivated me was a gut awareness of my
mother's frustration," says Friedan. "1 wanted women to be able to feel better
about being women than my mother was able to. She had been women's-page
editor of the Peoria newspaper, but when she married my father and started
having kids, she had to stop working. She leaned too much on the children
and her husband, and nothing we did was ever enough."
Her mother may have also helped inspire The Fountain of Age. Miriam, who
died a few years ago at age 90, having survived three husbands, lived an active
retired life at Leisure World in Laguna Hills, until her doctor advised her at
age eighty-seven to step down from directing bridge games. "Too much
stress," Friedan says. Her mother went rapidly downhill after that, and when
her children finally had to put her in a nursing home, she died six weeks later.
Friedan doesn't believe it was just old age. "Better to have the stress and take
the risk," she says, and it's a theme throughout her book.
With her mother's prodding, Friedan went into journalism, eventually mov¬
ing to New York City to work for a news service and then for labor newspa¬
pers. She rented a kitchenless basement apartment on West 86th Street and
met Carl Friedan. Seven months later, they were married.
Carl went into advertising, and the couple eventually moved to suburban
Rockland County. They had three children, Daniel, forty-four, a physicist,-
Jonathan, forty, an engineer, and Emily, thirty-six. Pregnant with Jonathan,
Friedan was fired from her job, and it was almost a relief. She no longer had
to fight her mother's fate,- she could embrace it, listing her occupation as
housewife." In 1957, she began designing what should have been routine
questionnaires for her fifteen-year Smith College reunion,- thinking she might
write a magazine article, she expanded them to examine more deeply the
experiences and feelings of her fellow alumnae. The response from these well-
educated, ostensibly happy housewives had an "Is that all there is?" ring, and
Friedan began considering that there was, as she d dub it in The Feminine A4ys-
tigue, a "problem that had no name." Yet.
 Michele Kort / 1993 127

She started the book in the New York Public Library and finished it on her
dining room table while the kids were at school. "It was like secret drinking
in the morning," she says. Friedan admits there may have been a little "benign
neglect" of the youngsters while she labored away for five years, and the still -
mystiqued ladies of Rockland County ostracized her for things like hiring a
taxi when she was too busy to take her turn carpooling. But "I enjoyed being
a mother," she says, glancing fondly toward the kitchen where Emily, here
with her family on their semi-annual visit, is preparing gazpacho. "And the
proof of the pudding is that all three children are doing well in love and well
in work. And they are wonderful parents themselves. That's the most you can
ask for."
The Feminine Mystique sold more than 60,000 hardcover copies, and more
than 2,320,000 paperbacks are in print. As her career took off, her marriage
ran aground. After the divorce, ending more than twenty tumultuous years,
Carl Friedan blasted his ex in an interview, claiming she "never washed 100
dishes during twenty years of marriage" and that his new wife made chicken
soup and shined his shoes. Friedan laughed and replied, "All I can say is, to
each her own. I'm so mechanically inept, 1 can barely shine my own shoes."
During her recent illness, however, she felt a renewed appreciation for the
bonds of friends and family. In fact, Carl flew out to see her when she was
hospitalized. "I had a feeling of such support," she says. "You wouldn't believe."
This celebration of support and family ties is one of the main themes of
The Fountain of Age. Hardly angry, hardly obsessive, it may prove Friedan's
contention that she is finally mellowing. The fact that she included, in a posi¬
tive way, the ties among aging gays and lesbians seems further proof, and will
certainly amaze those who have never forgotten her strident and anti-lesbian
stance when she was president of NOW.
Ivy Bottini, a former president of the New York chapter of NOW, remem¬
bers the shock she felt when she gave Friedan a lavender armband to wear
during a 1969 march for women's rights on New York's Fifth Avenue. "It was
to show solidarity with our lesbian sisters and their oppression," says Bottini,
now a Los Angeles realtor and lesbian who was once a Long Island housewife.
Many people took the armbands, including Gloria Steinem. But Friedan
looked at hers, threw it down and ground her heel into it.
"My point was, 'How can you have a women's movement and leave a huge
amount of women out?'" says Bottini. "But Friedan just never got that. She
128 Interviews with Betty Friedan

doesn't understand that lesbianism is the bottom line of the womens move¬
ment. If you can't get past the fear of being thought of as a lesbian, whether
you are or not, then you never are really free. She's still talking about equal

rights. Sexual politics is civil rights."

Dolores Alexander thinks Friedan came up with the term "lavender men¬
ace," and Bottini believes Friedan was one of the people who engineered a
"purge" of lesbians from the NOW leadership, urging inactive members to
attend an election meeting and vote out Bottini from the presidency, which
they did. A 1973 Friedan essay in the New York Times Magazine smacked of
downright paranoia,- Friedan even claimed a woman was sent to seduce her
and then blackmail her into silence while unnamed lesbians took over NOW.
Bottini, who despite their differences found Friedan to have a likable, fun
side, laughs when she remembers her encounter with Friedan three years later,
at another march down Fifth Avenue. Pushing through the crowd, Bottini,
who was visiting from L.A., found herself face-to-face with her former neme¬
sis. "Are you back?" Friedan asked. "No," Bottini said. "Good!" Friedan replied.
Although Friedan does not apologize for her actions, she does admit that
she has grown more open-minded. "When I first came to New York, the whole
question of homosexuality made me uneasy," Friedan acknowledges today "I
mean, I'm very square! Very Middle America. I had many friends who were
lesbians, but I didn't know it. And when I did know it, I didn't particularly
want to know it.
"I never wanted to suppress anyone's sexual preferences or wanted people
to be persecuted for them," she adds, "but what I objected to was equating
feminism with lesbianism. After all, 1 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."
Some have neither forgotten nor forgiven Friedan's early stance. But in
1977, at the National Women's Conference in F3ouston, she delivered a mea
culpa of sorts, and received a huge ovation, for seconding the resolution to
protect lesbian rights. "Finally she was sounding like the intelligent woman
she should have been sounding like all along," says Dolores Alexander.
Today, Friedan's voice is calmer, less judgmental. In The Fountain of Age,
some of the most moving testimony, about finding intimacy in old age among
a "family" of friends, came from gay and lesbian friends she interviewed. "I
found them easier to interview, in a weird sort of way. It was much harder to
 Michele Kort / 1993 129

ask a heterosexual couple," she practically whispers, as if Peoria were still lis¬
tening, "about the reality of their sex life.”
Still, when she writes about intimacy in her own life, she can be touching
but coy. She never mentions in this book or others, for example, why she
hasn't remarried.
"Oh God, 1 don't know,'' she says. "1 think 1 would have liked to I say I
would have liked to. I've had such a hectic life through these years. Who
knows, maybe 1 will before the end. 1 think it's better not to live alone, I'll tell
you that, although I'm not lonely. But it would be nice to always have someone
to go to the movies with. To say nothing of sharing the day-to-day intimacies.
"Intimacy is a very . . ." she pauses for a long beat ". . . fascinating thing. I
have a deep sense of the importance of intimacy, I have a deep need for it.
And I have a great sense of how I and others push it away. After all, the fear
of intimacy is probably the fear of really revealing yourself.
"It always has been easier for me to see what's happening out there and
figure it out than it is to live through it and finally do it myself," she says
pensively. "And maybe one of the things that happens in my book,"—she
brings the discussion back to the promotional realm—"is that you become
more and more comfortable with yourself. You don't have to hide anymore.
And that opens up possibilities.
"I'm still in the middle of it, you understand I don't pretend I have all the
answers for myself personally. But I think I know more clearly what the ques¬

tions are.
 Betty friedan: Jhe fountain of
Brian Lamb / 1993

This interview was broadcast on C-SPAN

"Booknotes," 28 November 1993. Reprinted by
permission of C-SPAN.

Brian Lamb: Betty Friedan, where'd you get the name for your book, The Fountain of
Age?
Betty FRIEDAN: That it's not the "Fountain of Youth." Everybody in America is
obsessed with the Fountain of Youth, the old Ponce de Leon. And what I saw,
once I was really going on this track that led me to the book, that what's
wrong—a mystique of age more pernicious, pervasive than the feminine mys¬
tique—is somehow a definition of age only in terms of decline from youth
and not as what it is, a period of human life that most people didn't even used
to have, that should be seen as a new period of human life in its own terms,
hence The Fountain of Age.

LAMB: At what age did you go on Outward Bound?

FRIEDAN: I think it was in my early 60s.

LAMB: Why?
Friedan: Well, I told myself that I was doing it to do research for the book,
because of the kind of people I was looking for—women and men that would
continue to develop and evolve and that didn't fit that deterioration and
decline. And I was already beginning to see that a strong element of that was
adventurousness, a willingness to risk, an ability to risk in ways you couldn't
do when you were younger. And I figured I'd find them on this, but really,
secretly, it was something I'd always yearned to do myself, that wilderness

130
 Brian Lamb / 1993 I31

exploration kind of thing. And in my long married life and then in my hectic
life since my divorce—all this women's movement and lecturing and this—I'd
somehow never done this wilderness stuff, so 1 really wanted to do it myself.
And then, of course, what it became was a metaphor of the whole search for
the fountain of age.

LAMB: Can you remember where it all started—I mean, the Outward Bound thing? Who

went on it?
FR1EDAN: Oh, well, that one, it was their first time when they experimented—

Outward Bound was this rigorous wilderness survival thing that Peace Corps
trainees used to go on. And they decided to do one for people 55 plus—over
55. It was called Going Beyond, and this was the first one like that. And we
met somewhere at some airport in the South and the first thing we did, we
went river rafting on the Chattahoochee River, sort of Tennessee, Georgia—
wherever the movie Deliverance was done. And there was this wild river rafting
and the rapids, and then there was 24 hours alone in the wilderness sites. It
was traipsing through wild territory without a guide—with just a chart, com¬
pass and so on and so forth. And then it was this cliffs and rapelling. I finally
said, "I don't have to prove myself this way." You know, that's why 1 say the
whole thing was a metaphor. And it was quite marvelous.

LAMB: And you didn't tell people your last name when you started this?

FRIEDAN: No, I don't think we told people our ages, and I don't think we told

people our last names nor our professions. It was just, maybe, what city we
came from or something like that, but it was no real identifying thing. So I
wasn't seen through my mask, as it were—my persona, the great feminist,
here. And we became great friends. There was a retired insurance executive
from North Carolina, Earl Arthurson. He was a big, burly man, Dartmouth
class of '38, it turned out, and he was the oldest of our group.
And he was then in his 70s, but he was clearly the leader. 1 mean, there
were men there 55, and he sort of somehow had to really hang back some¬
times and let some of these others take the lead. I'm not a jock so he'd help
me over the fences or cliffs or God knows what. And I had a terrible time
getting my backpack adjusted right and he was always very helpful. Of course,
the feminist stance is to not accept such help but, please, I needed all the help

I could get.

LAMB: And what'd you learn about yourself?

1 32 Interviews with Betty Friedan

FRIEDAN: Well, I was able to do it, and the adventurousness of it was terrific.

It was great fun for me to just be on my own without having to wear my

public mask. And 1 loved it. Then toward the end, when there was some
rappelling thing which 1 really didn't master enough to feel in control of it,
and 1 was going to swing out around this cliff and I was scared to death and
I think rightly, because I didn't feel rightly in control. I hadn't done it enough
to feel in control of it. For the river rafting, they gave us some learning period
and 1 did it. I could do it all right. But this I didn't feel in control of and 1 just
finally said, "Get me out of here." And so then one of the other women, when
she came down she said, "You've given me the courage to do it. I said, Ive
given you the courage to do it?" Here 1 was, I thought, a coward that said,
"No, I'm not doing this." I finally said, "Take me out of here," and they had to
lift me up off the cliff. And she said, "No, if you had the guts to do that and
say, 'This is not for me,' then I could do it."

LAMB: What was the reaction when people found out who you were? And had anybody

figured it out?

FRIEDAN: The women knew, but they kept my cover. But these guys were

amazed.

LAMB: None of the men knew who you were?

Friedan: No. This was 10 years ago—they knew who I was once it was said,

but how could they recognize me? I was in all these sweat pants and this gear,
and I really didn't look like I look on television, not that I look so great.
Anyways, so one of them—Earl—we became great friends. My protector, see.
He always claims—I don't know if he's telling the truth, but I think he really
didn't know who I was—"I wasn't taken by your fame. 1 was taken by your
gusty spirit." But every year he comes to New York and takes me dancing at
the Rainbow Room. He's a wonderful dancer. Then he's one of the people
that really is the fountain of age.
Here he'd been all these years this big-shot in North Carolina, Charlotte,
a big insurance agency, and a pillar of the community and all that. And he
had nursed his wife through 10 years, I think, of lung cancer. After she died,
he took a lot of cruises, traveling. He was lonesome, but he's such a good
dancer, and so he would, in his courtly style, dance with all the ladies that
outnumber the men on these cruises. So he got offered a job as a cruise host,
and he spends most of his time now on these fantastic cruises all over the
 Brian Lamb / 1993 1 33

place, where he's a host. He got me to go on one. Cruises are not for me, but
I went for three days, just to see him in action. And lie's having the time of
his life. It's not your usual occupation for Dartmouth class of '38, or whatever
he was, and the big-shot insurance magnate, but he's having this marvelous,
adventurous last third of his life doing this.

LamB: What year did you write The Feminine Mystique?

FRIEDAN: '63—30 years ago, it was published. 1 wrote it for the five years

earlier than that.

LamB: Over those 30 years, what's happened to that book? Can you still buy it in book¬

stores?
FRIEDAN: Oh, sure. I mean, it's assigned in colleges and in classes. 1 guess it's

considered—it's on these lists of the 10 books through all time that have
shaped history or whatever. And it's assigned in college courses in American
history or sociology or whatnot, so young people are reading it. I'm amazed
they still find it so applicable because we have changed so much since that
book and breaking through the feminine mystique. But what intrigues me is
that women of all ages still stop me, if they run into me in the airport or the
street: "It changed my life." And they tell me where they were when they read
it: "1 was in the hospital having my third child," whatever—"1 was doing this,
I was doing that." It really did have this effect of putting into words what
they'd been groping and yearning for, and it enabled them to take steps to
change their life. And the interesting thing now is that with my book, The
Fountain of Age, men—1 mean, men and some women, too, of course—are hav¬
ing the same sort of emotional reaction that women had to The Feminine Mys¬
tique, of saying, "It's made me think altogether differently about the rest of my

life."

LamB: How many copies did you sell, do you know, up till now, of Mystique?

FRIEDAN: Oh, God. 1 don't know by now. Like millions of copies in about 20

countries. I have no idea how many, but years ago they were saying three
million so it must be a lot more than that now.

LAMB: What were you doing when you wrote that book?

FRIEDAN: Well, I was, technically, a housewife in Rockland County, suburban

New York, with three kids. I had been freelancing for women's magazines after
I'd been fired from a newspaper job for being pregnant with my second child.
1 34 Interviews with Betty Friedan

And what I later called the "feminine mystique" was filling me full of guilt for
working. Even though my husband had been in the theater and was then
starting in advertising, we needed my paycheck, but I'd been feeling so guilty.
Now I'm fired. You couldn't look for a job with your belly out to here, preg¬
nant, then—you know, not in those years—well, not now, too. So I was tech¬
nically a housewife, but I couldn't quite get rid of the itch to do something so
I was free-lancing for magazines, mainly the women's magazines, like secret
drinking in the morning, because none of the other mothers in that suburb
were working then. It was the end of the feminine mystique period.
And after about five years of writing according to this limited image that
was supposed to be the image of the American woman then—solely in terms
of her husband, children, home, nothing else—I got restive about it. And then
there was the happenstance of doing the 15th reunion questionnaire of my
Smith alumni. Since they were saying too much education is making women
frustrated in their role as women—1 had valued my education—I thought 1
was going to disprove that with this questionnaire of Smith '42. And instead
it raised more questions than it answered. And then, when the magazines that
1 wrote for, one after the other, either turned it down or rewrote it to say the
opposite and I took it back, I knew I'd have to write the book The Feminine
Mystique. But I didn't have any sense then—I mean, every chapter I'd finish, I
thought, "Gee, I must be crazy," because it so went against everything that
was accepted as both the conventional and sophisticated truth about women.
But the idea that it would have the impact it did—you know, they say it really
started the consciousness part of the women's movement that led to the mod¬
ern women's movement. In my gut I guess 1 knew it was very important, but I
didn't have the confidence I later acquired. It's such a mystery to me that I was
able to write that book.
The experiences and the skills, my training as a psychologist, a journalist,
the life I lived enabled me to write The Feminine Mysticjue,- but now with The
Fountain of Age 1 had also the training that came from breaking through the
feminine mystique and helping to give the vision of the women's movement.
So I tackled this new problem, which is beyond feminism. It's a different prob¬
lem, but I guess I was able to tackle that as I began to recognize that I was
dealing with another mystique. I wasn't interested in age. Not me. No. I mean,
I had the same dreary view of age as anybody in America, the same absolute
denial. It didn't apply to me. But once I began on this little path—large path—
 Brian Limb / 1993 1 35

that led me to break through an even more pernicious, pervasive mystique,

the mystique of age only as decline from youth, I guess all the 30 years from
writing The Feminine Mystique to the women s movement gave me a way to
more—well, I can t say more quickly, because it took me 10 years to write this
book, but at least to be able to break through this other thing.

LAMB: Connections—you point out Joe Duffey, who was head of the National Endowment

for the Humanities, had some money for this project back in the late Vos.
FRIEDAN: Well, when 1 decided I wanted to do this, I knew I had to immerse

myself in research—in other words, a field that was new to me—to find out
what research had been done on aging, because 1 saw that somehow there was
no image of age except this nursing home-senility-Alzheimer's decline and
deterioration from youth. But what I was seeing first in women and then even
in men, too, is people moving into their 60s, 70s and 80s with vitality and
even growth and development. And there was something wrong here, that
women somehow had an edge on men in this, although the men were dying
younger. So I didn't get enough of a publisher advance to do what I knew
would have to be some years doing the research, so 1 went to see Joe Duffey,
who was then the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Now he's head of the U S. Information Service in this new Cabinet. And 1
said to him, "Look, I'm not a Ph.D.—I've got no Ph D. in sociology or geron¬
tology. I'm not an academic, but I want to do this book," and I called it
"Changing Sex Roles in the Aging Process." That was my title then. "1 want to
do this and I need some help to get the research done and to make my way
through everything that's been done so far, in addition to my own interviews."
So he said, "Well, did you have a Ph D. when you wrote The Feminine Mystique?"
and I said, "No." And he said, "Well, your track record is good enough for
me." And that was really pretty marvelous of Joe, I thought. And then the peer
review—you know peer review? Well, the academics vetoed it, so he got
pretty annoyed at that, but he gave me a chairman's grant and then Columbia
University, the Center for Social Sciences, Jonathan Cole, who was himself a
very quantitative sociologist, but recognized the value of the kind of qualita¬
tive sociology that I guess you could say I do. He took me to McGeorge
Bundy at the Ford Foundation and they gave me the rest of the money that 1
needed. And that was all a great help because it took me a lot longer than 1

thought it was going to.

1 36 Interviews with Betty Friedan

LAMB: Where do you live now?

FRIEDAN: I have an apartment in New York, and 1 feel more rooted. I have a

little old house in Sag Harbor, an old whaling town on the Sound. And that's
where my kids bring my grandkids, and that's where I did most of the writing.
And then four months of the year 1 teach in Los Angeles at the University of
Southern California. And in the fall I'm a visiting professor at New York Uni¬
versity, so four months of the year I live in a different place each time, in

Santa Monica or L.A.

Lamb: You mention in the book several times that you feel better after going through the book

process than you did before—about aging.

FRIEDAN: Well, I wrote myself into a completely new place. It was very liberat¬

ing. It's mysterious in a way, but 1 was absolutely in denial. I mean, I age
please. What was it they say to me, "What's this 1 hear, Betty, that you're
writing a book about age?” And eyes would glaze over, and I d say, Oh, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not me. I mean, you've got it all wrong." Here 1
am, the flaming radical, the cutting edge, but age. Because I had the same
dreary view of it, absolutely denial as anyone else. And I'd say, "No, no, I've
got this far-out hypothesis about women and men and changing sex roles, not
the aging process." And then, when 1 actually started working on the book, 1
took a fellowship at Harvard at the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School
where I taught The Second Stage, a book that 1 just finished. I taught that semi¬
nar, but otherwise 1 could use the resources of the university. 1 figured I'd
immerse myself in whatever research had been done on aging. In that great
university all I could find was medical school, Alzheimer's, nursing home, ethi¬
cal issues—when do you pull the plug? I'd go to these conferences and the
gerontological meetings I was beginning to attend, these paneled halls and
the young Turks in their white coats with research money for aging, and they
would talk about ''them'1 with the same contemptuous compassion that
reminded me of something. It reminded me of the way the male experts on
women used to talk about the "woman problem," all those years ago. And I'd
come out feeling so depressed. That didn't interest me at all, this Alzheimer's,
nursing home.
And then 1 began to interview women and men—that 1 was finding much
more easy than I thought I would—who were clearly very vital in these years
beyond 60 and beyond 70, even beyond 80. 1 remember one I interviewed in
 Brian Limb / 4 993 1 37

Cambridge beyond 90. And they were continuing to grow and develop. So
that would exhilarate me. Then 1 began to feel depression, exhilaration, and a
kind of weird panic. And I thought, "What is wrong with me? What was
wrong with me?" I'd never had that much writing block before. And then 1
realized what was wrong with me. 1 just had my own 60th birthday. And I was
furious when my friends threw me a surprise party on my 60th birthday. And
I felt very hostile to them and they were very hostile to me to have done that,
because I was as much in denial as anyone else.
And then one day I was interviewing in Palm Springs, and there was this
woman—she was clearly older than 1 was. She had flaming red hair, but the
white roots were visible. She had a very short miniskirt—tennis skirt with
crepey legs underneath and she said, "Oh, how nice. 1 hear you're writing a
book about those poor old people." And I said, "No. I'm not writing a book
about them. I'm writing a book about us." And she said, "Oh, not me. I mean,
1 will never be old. Not me.” And I began to do what I had to do to write this
book, which was to break through my own denial. 1 had to be able to say "us"
and in my own reality, which didn't fit any of these images. Then I found, in
the research, all kinds of facts that defied this image of deterioration and
decline that for most people now takes place only at the very end of life—just
before death or well into their 80s. And even if you measure with the test
standardized in youth, the decline is not what the image is—or it's just begun,
a measurement of what evolves.
Youth is not the peak, you know. There are qualities of—we don't even
have words for them in this society—wisdom, qualities that emerge in you if
you're not still just looking at yourself, trying to pretend you're young long
after you're not young really anymore. Even if you have five facelifts, you're
not going to look young. You look like a mummy, without any character,
without any experience. When I wrote The Feminine Mystique, I talked about
problems that had no name. When I began to look into women—and it was
easier for women, but also more and more new kind of men—who are moving
into a different kind of age—they might be called pioneers of a new kind of
age because there are no role models, no maps, no guidance—I see strengths

that have no name.

LAMB: Should people have to retire at 65?

FRIEDAN: There are certain words that absolutely we must protest against.
1 38 Interviews with Betty Friedan

Retire is one. Old is another. Old, static and it's got this whole connotation
of decline, deterioration and state. Older is OK. People growing older, don't
deny the person here. Retire—you retire from society. You go into a retire¬
ment community. You're supposed to be out of the larger community. YfY
should not buy all this. Even forced retirement—losing your job because of
your age—is supposed to be illegal, you know its happening, that people are
being forced out, eased out, downsized out, and not only in their 60s—in
their 50s. And they can't very easily find another job, even if they dye their

hair, try to phony their age.

I protest the idea that you must retire from society at age 60, 65, 70, what¬
ever, when you've got all this ability and experience. You could retire or be
forced out from a job or even be burned out and want to leave, but not retire
from society. Move from one structure, one project—career lines that were
really based on youth—to something else. But we are retiring all these peo¬
ple—this fastest-growing group of people in our whole society—from being
productive members of the society, to be just a drain or a burden or be made
invisible, walled out of sight in a continuing care community, as if their only
identity now is as objects of terminal nursing care, when they don't even need
that until just before their death or, you know, in a very advanced age.
You know, this is a new period of life to be lived, years that people didn't
used to have. Life expectancy at the turn of the century was 45 for men, 46
for women. It's over 75 now. It's nearly 80 for women, over 72 for men. New
years of life. Without road maps, without role models, we will be the pioneers
of a new age. And behind us are the bulge of the baby boomers, getting into
a trauma as they approach their 50th birthdays. A woman was interviewing
me the other day and she said, "Oh, this book has come just in time for me "
And I looked at her. She was a lovely looking young woman. She said, "Just
had my 30th birthday." They, with all their numbers, created the youth cul¬
ture, the songs of the '60s, the Beatles, all that, but they will take this revolu¬
tion, which will be the revolution of the turn of the century, over the top.

LAMB: Do you have a living will7

Friedan: Absolutely. And I'm going to see to it my kids have something that

you can't really put in your living will: never, ever, ever put me in a nursing
home.

Lamb: Why?
 Brian Lamb / <993 1 39

FRIEDAN: That image of deterioration and decline is so awful—it's no wonder

that people deny age in this country. That is a reality in nursing homes. A
high proportion of people in nursing homes are defined as senile. Some of it
is real senility, but to my surprise, only 5 percent of people over 65 have any
kind of senility, including Alzheimer's. But if they don't have it when they
come in, through the absolute dehumanized, infantilized treatment of the
nursing home—the sedation, if you will—they will acquire the signs of senil¬
ity. What we need are not more nursing homes. What we need are more
measures that are not necessarily medical, that will enable people to stay in
their own communities and in their own homes—because you can't deny
death. At the point where such a life is not possible and you really do have a
terminal condition, then we have the hospice movement, which does not
intervene with high-tech machinery to give people an extra week or day or
month of painful life where you can't really function, but enables you to face
death in the midst of your own family and friends as painlessly as possible.
We don't deny death, but death should be in the midst of life.

LamB: You dedicate this book “To the memory of my mother, Miriam, and my father, Harry,

who made a larger life possible for me." What did they do for you?
FRIEDAN: I grew up in Peoria, Illinois. My father was a brilliant man, but he

was an immigrant with no higher education, though he read philosophy every

night after dinner. He sent his youngest brother to Harvard Law School and
was inordinately proud of all my intellectual accomplishments. My mother
grew up in Peoria and went to the local college, Bradley. Then she was the
women's page editor of the newspaper there, but, of course, she had to quit
that when she married my father and started having kids. She couldn't wait
for me to get into junior high school and try out for the paper. I edited the
college paper at Smith. That was one of the most fun things in my life. But
she insisted that I get a good education, and my father said to me on his
deathbed, "Don't come back here." You know, in other words, go beyond. Go
beyond. My father died too young. He was in his early 60s and he had that
premature kind of heart—the male role and the inability to even express the
pain you may be feeling. He endured the anti-Semitism of a Middle West
small town at that time and the pressures of the Depression and all that. My
mother lived till she was 90. It was my mother's frustrations that I think gave
me the psychological motivation for the women's movement. But my mother,
140 Interviews with Betty Friedan

at the age of 70-odd, after burying her third husband, got herself licensed as
a duplicate bridge manager.
She's always been a brilliant card player and she would toodle around. She
lived in Leisure World in Laguna Hills, California. She would toodle around
running the duplicate bridge tournaments into her 80s, with the prodigious
feats of memory that required. And if I was coming out to California and I
knew I'd be on TV, I'd say, "Oh, God, I've got to go see Mother." It terrifies
me to drive in California because I can't stand the freeways, so it's not so easy
to get from LA to Laguna Hills. So I'd call her up and I d say, "Mother, I'm
going to be in LA in two weeks. Can we meet?" "Darling," she would say, Tm
so busy. Why didn't you let me know longer in advance.' I mean, she was no
pathetic old lady being dependent.

LAMB: You've mentioned Leisure World. What do you think oj the Leisure World-type places?

FRIEDAN: 1 spent a lot of time interviewing in those places and there were some

people that seemed to make a good life for themselves there. They were
mainly people that took responsibility for organizing the community. But even
the physical appearance of the place, where it's walled off from the larger
community, where the whole life can be structured around sort of busy, busy
play, clubhouse activities, walled off from the whole continuum of life, genera¬
tions—something about it was like this mystique of age, this denial of the
personhood of age, translated into bricks and stucco. Even the luxurious age
of ghettos, 1 don't think, are the wave of the future if we break through this
pernicious definition of age just as decline. I was very interested to see, a
couple weeks ago, a story on the front page of the New York Times that more
and more people—older people—are coming back from Florida and those
retirement communities in New York—dirty, busy, complex New York, with
all its problems, but where there’s so much life going on and where you can
take the bus, take the subway, walk to things.

LamB: In your dedication, you also talk about Daniel and Jonathan and Emily and Raphael
and Caleb. Is it Natalia?
Friedan: Yeah, Natalia.

LamB: David, Isabelle, Diura, Bricjitta and Benjamin, "whose mother and grandmother I
am."

FRIEDAN: Proud of that, right.

 Brian Lamb / *99 3 141

LAMB: How many of those are your children?

FriedaN: Well, there's my three children, Daniel, Jonathan and Emily. And

then my eight grandchildren—six blood grandchildren and two step-grand¬

daughters. They are actually from Iceland. My oldest son, who's a theoretical
physicist, married the only woman physicist of Iceland, and she had two
daughters from a previous marriage and now they have this wonderful little
baby, my youngest grandchild, Benjamin.

LAMB: Have you ever sat down with your kids and talked about aging?

FRIEDAN: Not as such. I mean, they've all gotten copies of my living will and

when I said to them, "You know, I'm going to leave you the house in Sag
Harbor jointly," they said, "Oh, we've already had a meeting about it and we're
going to"—how they were going to run it, and use it as a joint place to come
with all their kids so they can come together. But the family ties of my chil¬
dren with each other and with their father and with me are very strong. And
1 like that. And in the dedication of my book, The Fountain of Age, as you see,
the first part of it says that, on the wall of my kitchen in Sag Harbor, there's
some Hebrew letters from a song—Hebrew songs from generation to genera¬
tion I don't know, they had had some parties there and someone had tacked
that song on the wall and I love the look of Hebrew letters, anyway.
But in that kitchen is where we all get together and I have this long, long
dining table which will hold now the 14 of us when we're all in residence.
And so from generation to generation. I mean the last chapter of my book,
The Fountain of Age, is generativity, the freedom to risk, age as adventure and
generativity, because 1 think, finally, in what evolves, there is a sense of the
affirmation of your whole life as youve lived it and in the history, and then
some great sense of the meaning of that life and that your life is a part of the
continuum that will live after you, through your children, through your grand¬
children, but also through your human generativity that's not just biological.
For me it's been the women's movement and also the social and political
causes to make the world better that somehow are a part of my morality, and
even this last 10 years' task of breaking through the mystique of age, the
fountain of age and what may come of that. My sense is, even from what's
already happening, that there are implications here for revolutionary social
change. I can't predict what form it will take any more than 1 could have
predicted the women's movement after writing The Feminine Mystique. But I think
142 Interviews with Betty Friedan

it will happen and I'm open to what happens. I'll follow the leads where they

come.

LAMB: In the generativity chapter, you talk to a lot of people that the audience will recog¬

nize—Norman Lear, Jonas Salk, Hugh Hefner and others. I got some sense that maybe when
people get older, they change the way they think about things.
FRIEDAN: Well, it was interesting to me that, for instance—well, take Norman

Lear: he's one of the men I admire most in this society now, who somehow
very successfully and effectively used television in the most non-didactic but
marvelous way—"All in the Family" to open larger social values to this society,
to transcend the polarization and even racism—in the most open way and
then doesn't stop. What did he call it? Act 3?

LAMB: He did get to Act 3, yes.

FRIEDAN: And then he very openly now professes a certain spiritual dimension,

very openly is concerned with saving the environment and with People for
the American Way protecting the liberties of America from censorship that
has been plaguing the television industry. Or even Hugh Hefner—here is
Hugh Hefner, with the whole Playboy thing and the Playboy bunnies and all
that, and in his later years, he liberated himself from the rigid reaction against
the sexual puritanism of his youth. And he'd handed over Playboy to his daugh¬
ter, Christie, who's really quite a wonderful woman. And he's liberated, not to
have to just try to shock, defy the rigidities of his youth. He can move beyond
that. And this is what I see happening to people when they continue to grow
and develop. In ways that all those years of psychoanalysis may or may not
have done, you're liberated from the conflicts and the rigidities that hemmed
you in before.

LAMB: If you live as your mother lived, you've got another 20 years to go.

Friedan: 1 hope. 1 mean, that would be nice. What you read from the last line

of the book—it's really quite true. Somehow in the process of writing this
book I've liberated myself. Somehow 1 have moved from this denial and dread
of age to an affirmation of where I am now, which is a very unknown place. 1
feel that things are changing all around me and 1 am more myself. I am myself,
with all my faults. I've had pains in my past and bad things can happen to me
still. Its all a part of it, but 1 am there finally and I am very interested and
open to changes that are happening. It's not true that you have to love the
way you loved when you were 30 or not love at all.
 Brian Lamb / 4 993 143

It opens you to whatever happens in a way that's different from youth. In

some ways it's the same, but it's different. It's different and it opens you to
new dimensions in your intimacy and your friendship. 1 was invited to go on
an expedition in the rain forest in the Amazon, which has always been a
fantasy of mine, in January, and I'm going to go, if I can assure myself that
there's going to be no mosquitoes, because I cant stand mosquitoes. Its like
I'm open. I'm open. And it's exciting.

LAMB: When you teach at USC—University of Southern California—what do you teach?

FRIEDAN: Well, I lead a complex academic life. I run a project in the School of

Journalism called Women, Men and Media, that's funded by the Freedom
Forum and that monitors in an ongoing way the media—the mass media,
images of women and men. The Feminine Mystique, after all, was a breaking
through of the media image of women, and The Fountain of Age is in another
way women and men. At the Leadership Institute of the School of Business, I
run a think tank which had been up to now new dimensions of feminist
thought. It included activists, policymakers and academics. This year's going
to be on thinking for a new age and risking new ways of loving and living
together and of working and of money and of medical care and health care

and new social and political values.

I also teach a course and lectures in the Leadership Institute of the School
of Business on management and diversity. There are threats to that now and
there are enormous possibilities. With the experience of women, with the
experience of people that are older than the conventional, with racial differ¬
ences, we have begun to embrace and use diversity. The downside is that
there has to be some new grasp of all this and of the importance of it and
maybe even some alternate work structures to come out of it. I also teach in
the professional writing program. I do half of a seminar and my part is writing

from personal truth and social observation

LAMB: How about at New York University? What do you teach there?

FRIEDAN: I teach the Women, Men and Media and the diversity and manage¬

ment.

LAMB: In this last chapter, you mentioned the Dominican nun: She recounted her own
lifelong struggle to name herself. 'I am a lesbian nun. If I had a choice, I would be exactly
who I am.' She told of the long years when she had no close friends at all. What was the

point of that one?

 144 Interviews with Betty Friedan

FRIEDAN: Well, it showed her evolution to an authenticity about herself, do

you see? This is what the research and my own interviews show, that if you
continue to grow and develop through the years—in the new years of life that
are open to you—you become more and more authentically yourself. You shed
the masks and that is enormously liberating. And finally, with all its pains, you
affirm the life that you have lived and you put it all together. And 1 was very
struck by that account of hers—1 found it somewhere—that she had lived so
much of her life denying an essential part of herself according to a mask and
she finally got rid of the mask.

LAMB: Yom wrote about Helen and Richard Dudman.

FRIEDAN: Oh, yes. They were one of my first senses of the pioneering, adven¬

turous possibilities of age. I got to know them when he was the head of the
Washington bureau of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. She had been women s page
editor of the Washington Post and then she had been working for public broad¬
casting. She should have been made manager of the station there in Washing¬
ton when it opened up, but she was passed over for a man. She was real mad
and they decided that he would take early retirement. They had a shack on
an island—well, it was a cabin—in Maine. In the little town near their island
a radio station was for sale, and so they borrowed the money and bought the
radio station. She ran the station. He kept working in Washington till the
station began to be in the black, and then they started a whole new life for
them—then he took early retirement.
But in his favor, he said, "1 m not going to stay on in this town once you've
had the power that being a leading journalist gives you—then you don't have
that any longer and you hang on. Instead I want to make a new life for myself."
I go to see them in Maine. This radio station is a great success. He helped
her. I mean, she was running it. He helped a little in the news division, but he
began to do his own thing with not only building boats, which he had
intended to do. I don't think he's ever going to get that boat finished, but he's
doing north-south editing and teaching journalism in the Third World coun¬
tries from a center in Hanover. And she's about at the point where she's hand¬
ing over the radio station to their daughters, who moved up there, too, with
their kids, so she can go with Richard on some of these Third World adven¬
tures. They are really role models for the fountain of age.

LamB: You found Flora Lewis, who writes a column from time to time for the Mew York
Times, but who used to be their foreign correspondent.
 Brian Lamb / 4 993 145

FRIEDAN: 1 interviewed her about the last year 1 was working on the book. She

had come to speak in LA, and she took the lecture so she could go see her
mother, who was in a nursing home. Flora, after all those years as a foreign
correspondent and a columnist, had made a new use of her experience, lectur¬
ing all over Europe. She's committed to the one-world international thing.
She's a brilliant, brilliant woman and it really interests me when you ask people
like the Dudmans or Flora Lewis, but let's not assume that everybody that I
interviewed was something glamorous like a foreign correspondent.
1 interviewed plenty of women on Social Security who also were making
new lives for themselves. And if you try to get them to put into words the
difference between what they feel about themselves now at 70 something
compared to 50, it's really interesting how their judgments are not so rigid,
black and white, how they've acquired a new ease. They see things whole.
They've got a kind of a comfort and assurance and authority. They know who
they are They don't care so much what other people think. You can see it in
their faces—I really recognize it. 1 recognize it when a woman reaches that
point. Suddenly there's a new serenity and assurance and a radiance in hei

face.
I know one woman and she's a marvelous woman that 1 know in California,
and she just looks so different. I don't know, she's maybe not quite as thin as
she used to be. She's stopped dying her hair and she used to somehow not
project the confidence that she has now and this sort of comfort with herself.
I mean, strengths that have no name—1 don't even know the word for it but

there it is.

LAMB: Several times you mention Marlene Sanders.

FRIEDAN: Well, Marlene Sanders is one of my best friends and we've been

through a lot together. She called me in the middle of the night when she was
the first woman to be made vice president for news of a network. Even when
network people were not supposed to be political, she was one of the large
underground of women in the networks that supported the movement and did
what they could do. Now we run the Women, Men and Media project
together with Nancy Woodhull. Because she's close to me, 1 could observe all
these interesting little things, like when she was widowed. Jerry, her husband,
was a wonderful man. She finally sold the big apartment that they had and
she's in a smaller, but very perfect for her, sunny, airy new space. I like to see
146 Interviews with Betty Friedan

the way she copes. Marlene is a very clear-headed person—much more clear¬
headed than I am, I sometimes feel. And so she's made these changes in her
life in a very good way and I like to see it.

LAMB: Do you have another book you plan to write?

FRIEDAN: At this moment, my dear, I am so relieved to get this done. You know

that for seven years I shipped back and forth across the country 20 boxes of
papers, of notes, of books, because each year I'd go for my Spring-Winter
teaching at the University of Southern California. I was drowning in all that
research, and the fact that 1 finally finished the book is such a liberation. And
I don't know. I don't want to do another heavy book like that. I'm going to do
short stuff. Maybe I'll do a column. Maybe I'll do a program like you. Maybe
I'll do a detective story. Maybe I'll write science fiction or a novel, but no
more heavy books.
 Betty friedan: (low 5he'j (Min?
Waves in The fountain offy?
Alice V. Luddington / 1993

From Geriatrics, (December 1998), 52 (4).

Reprinted with permission from Geriatrics.
Copyright by Advanstar Communications, Inc.
Advanstar Communications, Inc., retains all
rights to this article.

Will her new bestseller launch a liberation movement for older Americans,
as The Feminine Mystique did for women in the 1960s?
Feminist Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mysticjue, marked that books
thirtieth anniversary this fall with the publication of a new work, The Fountain
of Age. In this exclusive interview with Geriatrics, Ms. Friedan, now age seventy-
two, talks about a new movement toward vital aging that aims to liberate older

Americans from the "age mystique."

Q: You begin The Fountain of Age by describing your reluctance at age sixty to confront

your own aging.

A: It took me ten years to write this book. It was the hardest thing I ever did.
The first few years, all the gerontological meetings I went to were unutterably
depressing. All this dreary stuff—Alzheimer's and nursing homes and inconti¬
nence and memory deficit. But then I would go out and interview people who
were vital after fifty, after sixty, after seventy, even after eighty. Men and
women who clearly were continuing to grow and develop. And they exhila¬
rated me. They were much easier to find than I thought they would be. They

147
148 Interviews with Betty Friedan

were all around and in all walks of life. And I wondered if changing the very
way you think about yourself could have an effect on the aging process.

Q: What really convinced you to write this book?

A-. I took a month and looked at every possible major magazine, looking for
images of people who might be age sixty-five or older. Photographs, illustra¬
tions, ads. And I couldn't find any. So I went down to age fifty, and even then
1 couldn't. A few rich, powerful men in the news stories. No images whatsoever
of older women. Even the ads trying to sell women anti-aging creams would
have a young model's face, with maybe one line painted on it.
There were articles about the "problem" of age—these disgusting people
that refuse to die, that are living on in such enormous numbers, the "greedy
geezers" who are spending all the Social Security, and all of that. But there is
never any image of anyone over fifty, over sixty, over seventy doing anything
that anybody wants to do in this society. Loving or playing or winning, work¬
ing or contributing It is striking, this degree of denial. I remember when I was
interviewing in Palm Springs, and a woman with flaming red hair who was
clearly older than 1 said, "Oh, how nice, I hear you're writing a book about
those poor old people " And 1 heard myself say, "No, I'm not writing a book
about them. I'm writing a book about us." And she said, "Oh, no, not me! I'm
never going to be old."

Q: If not the “age mystique," then how do you now view aging?
A: Age is a unique period of human life. Although it's enormously various from
individual to individual, the period of vital health in age is increasing, as is
longevity in general. Life expectancy today is over seventy-two for men and
eighty for women, so one-third to one-half of life may be lived over the age
of fifty.
I found very startling things buried in the research. I was amazed to dis¬
cover that only 5 percent of Americans have Alzheimer's. 1 was amazed to
discover that only 5 percent have senility. I was amazed to discover that men
and women aging in the community did not show major deterioration until
just before death or well into their eighties.
We have to get beyond the age mystique and begin to see age as a new
period of human life. Do you have to love the way you loved when you were
thirty or not love at all? Do you have to work the way you worked when you
were thirty or not work at all? Do you have to meet your human needs the
 Alice V. Luddington / 1993 149

way you met them when you were thirty or be lonely, sick, and passive victims
of age?
A person can continue to grow and develop if one doesn't buy that self-
fulfilling prophecy of deterioration and decline. People continue to grow and
develop, become more and more themselves after fifty, after sixty, after sev¬

enty. They become more whole.

Q; In this process, what do you believe the role of the older person's physician should be?
A. Physicians should look on age in terms of its reality, not the mystique that
makes us want to avert our eyes from it. People over sixty, over seventy, over
eighty, are people, with all the complexity of people. Certain developmental
things can happen to them, but deterioration and decline are not inevitable.
When 1 took some classes in aging at Harvard, the young gerontologists in
their white coats would talk about them. Do we burden them too much by
asking them to take part in the decision of when we turn off the machine?
And the way they talked about them reminded me of many years earlier when
the male experts on women would have a conference on the woman prob¬
lems—them. What do we do about them, these neurotic suburban house¬

wives?
Doctors who treat age itself as disease may not get it. Doctors who main¬
tain that paradigm of medicine only as diagnosis of disease and cure may not
get it. People can live for many years with certain conditions. The "fountain
of age" is some spring of vitality that I found in people who have recovered
from strokes, who have had bypasses, who have serious arthritis. You function.
The point of medical care for the last third of life is to maximize function, not

necessarily to diagnose and cure.

Certain measures, even those non-medical ones that probably have to be
prescribed by a doctor to get paid for by Medicare, can enable people to stay
in their own homes, to live independently, to get out and about in the city,
to keep on driving. These may be more important than pills, of which all too
many are prescribed just to keep older people quiet or get rid of the symp¬

toms.

Q. What if Medicare doesn't pay physicians to spend that much time with older patients?
A: Then we have to get after Medicare, don't we? It may be true of all people,
but it is certainly true of older people, that expensive, high-tech tests to diag-
150 Interviews with Betty Friedan

nose an isolated symptom are not as important as some sense of the person

and how they function.

Q: For women, one indicator of aging is menopause. How have attitudes changed?
A: After I wrote The Feminine Mystic/ue and would be invited to lecture, I would
ask my host to get together for me women who had combined marriage,
motherhood, and some profession beyond the home. There were not many
such women in any town at that time,- the great back-to-work, back-to-school
movement had not yet begun. And the women tended to be older than I,
because my generation was at home bringing up the baby boomers. But they
looked wonderful, these women. They were vital. They looked much more
alive than the suburban housewives that 1 interviewed, who were younger.
And in passing, I happened to mention the menopause. Well, menopause
was not something we ever mentioned out loud at that time. It was considered
the end of your life. It was terrible, unmentionable But one after another,
these women would say, "No, I didn't have menopause. No, I never had that."
Well, of course they had ceased their menstrual cycle, they were no longer
reproductive. But they thought they hadn't had menopause, because it was no
big deal. They had not taken to their beds with depression. If they had hot
flashes, it hadn't debilitated them. And somewhere in my fifties, when I was
all involved selling the women's movement, I didn't have the menopause
myself.

Q: In your book, why do you take such a negative view of estrogen replacement therapy?
A: What is happening today is a new medicalization of menopause. Hormones
are big profit makers, and the degree to which these hormones are being
pushed really alarms me. A whole generation of women is being told to take
these drugs—whether or not there's any real indication—from the time they
miss their last period, maybe for the rest of their lives. It's like giving caterpil¬
lars injections so that they will never get out of the cocoon and turn into
butterflies.

I'm not saying that a woman with a serious problem of incipient osteoporo¬
sis might not be well advised by her doctor to take hormones. But not every¬
body, and not for the normal menopause.

I object to making women be guinea pigs. The returns of the research aren't
in yet. It's only now that the Women's Health Initiative of the NIH is doing
 Alice V. Luddington / 4 993 151

controlled random study. But the research is indubitable that hormone

replacement therapy increases your risk of uterine and breast cancer.

Q: You describe "the nursing home specter. " Why are older people so terrified of nursing
homes?
A: Even at their very best, nursing homes remove a person from the society
of the living. In some nursing homes, the personnel don't even call people by
their own names. It is just assumed they are no longer people. Too often they
are treated as helpless children, sedated or put in restraints to keep them from
being a bother to personnel.
In Ellen Langer's research at Harvard, people on one floor of a nursing
home were told, "Here's the furniture in your room. You'll have a plant, and
the nurse will water it for you every day. We'll show you a movie every
Wednesday night, and the nurse will come and get you." On another floor
they were told, "It is up to you to rearrange your room the way you want. The
nurse will give you a plant, and it is up to you to take care of it. We'll give
you a list of the possible movies, and you can decide whether and when you
want to go." Six weeks later, the ones who continued to make their own deci¬
sions and to water the plants themselves were significantly better in both their
physical symptoms and mental health. They are better, and they moved bet¬
ter, and they were more social. Two or three years later, the ones that watered
the plants and made their own decisions were still alive, and most of the others
were dead. When people give up control over their lives and have no purpose
to their days, it is a dehumanizing experience.

Q: What about planned communities that offer increasing levels of care based on a person s

functional level?
A: I did a lot of interviewing in those manicured age ghettos, and I think they
are the denial of age reified in wood and brick and stone. You wall older
people off in adult play areas, out of sight of the rest of the community. And
they are supposed to keep themselves busy with trivial pursuits. Instead, we
need more services that are geared to helping people keep living in the com¬
munity, either alone or with shared services. It is important to keep living
where you can walk or take a bus to where real activities go on.

Q: Hou? does an older person—as you describe it—"die with life"?

A: You have to face the fact that life will end in death. If you have a terminal
152 Interviews with Betty Friedan

condition, you shouldn't waste your last days being hooked up to machines or
in terrible pain from treatments that are not going to give you significantly
more days of human function.
We are moving to a new morality in which choice is as important at the
end of life as it is at the beginning of life. But choice at the end of life means
more than just living wills and deciding when to turn off the machines. Older
people are wrongly blamed for the enormously expensive portion of health
care resources that are used in futile efforts to resuscitate them or keep them
alive in the very end months of life, beyond the point of human function.
Actually, people don't want to die this way.
The hospice movement is a very important development. People who are
in the face of death can get help to stay in their own homes with their family
and friends around them. The hospice enables you to face death as comfort¬
ably as possible, with as little pain as possible.

Q: How has The Fountain of Age been received?

A: Ten years ago, a book on age might not even have been published, much
less become a best seller. The first printing, which was released in September,
was 250,000 copies, and most of those were sold in the first month. This
response is, 1 think, the surest signal that we are about to undergo a paradigm
shift on the whole approach to aging—from aging in terms of "problem for
society" to life as vital aging. This is comparable to what happened to women
thirty years ago.
 fln Interview with Betty friedan
Kathleen Erickson / 1994

From The Region, (September 1994), 16 (3).

Reprinted by permission of The Federal
Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

Twentieth century history has been driven by great conceptualizers—from

Freud's theories of the subconscious to Henry Ford's assembly line. For the
women's movement, the great post-war conceptualizer has been Betty Friedan,
author of The Feminine Mystique, The Second Stage, and most recently, The Fountain
of Age. It was Friedan’s Feminine Mystique that initiated a fundamental re-thinking
of how women defined themselves, their responsibilities and their choices in
the post-war world. It was Friedan who, in The Second Stage, challenged the
direction of some within the women's movement who have veered toward an
increasingly separatist view of women's issues.
And today it is Friedan who emphasizes economics, not sexual politics, as
the basis for women's continued progress toward equality. The Region met with
Ms. Friedan at her home in Sag Harbor, New York, to talk about women and

economics.

Region: Your writing seems to suggest that achieving gender parity in income is the highest

priority for achieving overall gender equality. Is that what you mean to say?
FRIEDAN: Economic equity is an enormous empowerment of women. Having

jobs that provide income means that women can be a more effective force, a
more equal force, in the political process. Women with income take them¬
selves more seriously and they are taken more seriously.

153
154 Interviews with Betty Friedan

I don't mean to say that income is the only benefit women gain from work¬
ing. Yes, you have to have money to live. But there is something beyond
monetary rewards. It is essential to be a part of the ongoing work of society.
I've interviewed men and women who've burned out on their jobs, or lost jobs,
that have started on new career paths that aren't going to provide the same
level of income or status, but that end up being more satisfying. The concept
of being part of a community is very, very key to longevity and the quality of
one's life. It's a very important theme in The Fountain of Age, where I'm looking
particularly at issues affecting older men and women.
So it's the two together, income and being involved in a meaningful way
in a community that I see as being important. But to address the specific issue
of equity, there's no doubt that income is the bottom line.

REGION: Is that a bottom line on which women have focused?

Friedan: A poll was done a couple of years ago by the Ms. Foundation and

the Center for Policy Alternatives in Washington. The poll asked women—
women who were selected across race and class lines—what are the most
important issues facing women today? Overwhelmingly, the answers that
came back, regardless of the women's race or class, were: getting jobs, keeping
jobs, getting promoted in jobs, and how to put jobs together with family,
relationships, other parts of women's lives. So yes, I'd say women have the
economic bottom line in focus. Having said that, I'd have to acknowledge that
within the women's movement, there are certainly those so-called radical fem¬
inists, who feel the key issue facing women today is oppression by men. And
for these women, progress can be achieved only through a kind of "down with
men, down with marriage, down with motherhood" approach.
I m not politically correct on this point. I abhor political correctness gener¬
ally, but most particularly in connection with feminism. Implicit within femi¬
nism is the need to be responsive to change, responsive to the fundamental
conditions of life. To focus on male oppression is to deny the fundamentals.
While I can understand the legitimate emotional freight, the anger, that
attaches to men's and women's historical roles, 1 don't see this view as getting
us anywhere—and more importantly, I see it as keeping us from dealing with
the real conditions that women need to address. Indeed, 1 see common ground
on which men and women must stand together if real progress is to be made.
Certainly a great deal had to change to allow women to begin to achieve
 Kathleen Erickson / 4 994 155

the measure of financial and emotional independence women have today. But
at this point in time, having raised consciousness regarding women's potential,
having put reproductive freedom solidly in place along with legislation that
makes discrimination and harassment of women in the workplace illegal, we
need to move on.

REGION: From a public policy perspective, what needs to be done to further the objective of

economic parity?

FRIEDAN: Let me emphasize what I just said: What we're talking about is not

just economic parity for women, but more economic choices for men, as well.
And 1 see our needs as being both in public policy and in redefining the
corporate bottom line.
Take for instance the corporate downsizing that is so widespread today. It's
something that's affecting both men and women. It affects men who've been
conditioned to expect the status and security of employment,- it affects women
who've only just made it into lower and middle management jobs, the jobs
most vulnerable to downsizing. There's a risk here that men will begin to see
women as the enemy taking jobs, and that women will see men as taking away
from them the rewards they've worked so hard to achieve.
In fact, public policy should be addressing the root causes of downsizing
and look at all the options, including shorter work weeks. Corporations need
to define work in new ways, need to provide more support for job sharing,
flex hours, and other policies that would offer a broader range of participation

in the work force.

REGION: When you talk about a shorter work week, one of the first obstacles that comes to

mind is remaining competitive in the global market.

FRIEDAN: What we re talking about here is how we define our public policy

objectives, including economic policy. If our public policy objective is to

assure broad participation in the work force, to free up men and women to
work and raise families and to continue to draw on the experience and abilities
of older men and women, as well, then our economic policies need to support

that objective.
How do you do that, if you're a public policy maker? Well, maybe world
leaders attending international economic summits need to spend more time
considering how economic policies can support social objectives. Our eco¬
nomic policies get set at a very high level. What gets considered is the value
i 56 Interviews with Betty Friedan

of the dollar, trade agreements, interest rates. I'm not an economist and I
wouldn't for a moment deny the importance of these larger issues. But more
effort has to be made to integrate these larger, purely economic policies with
social concerns. I don't think anyone fully understands the impact economic
policy has on social outcomes. We tend, at the public policy level, to set our
macro objectives and then clean up the micro impact in the political process.
Social objectives should in some sense drive our economic agenda.

REGION: Are there economists who are attempting to do this?

FRIEDAN: Laura D'Andrea Tyson in the Clinton administration—and Robert

Reich, too, at Labor—seem very sensitive to these concerns. But we need more
people working actively to come up with a new economic paradigm that sup¬
ports both growth and a more humanistic orientation within the workplace.
The costs of not doing this are enormous. There is a great deal of frustration,
that borders on rage, that politicians need to be responsive to. We re going to
pay one way or the other.

REGION: It's clear you've been busy writing. What else have you been up to?

FRIEDAN: One of my objectives over the past several years has been to address

economic issues in the context of people's real lives. I started out with a think
tank on the evolution of feminist thought under the Institute for the Study of
Women and Men at the University of Southern California (USC). That effort
ran into problems because I didn't see eye to eye with people in women's
studies. The think tank found a new home in the Leadership Institute at the
USC business school, where I've taught for the last seven or eight years and
hold the position of distinguished visiting professor. I've also given lectures
there on women's experience in management and on diversity in manage¬
ment—lectures that are now given to all MBA students.
It has been interesting to me that the business school has been much more
open and receptive to these issues than was the more traditional academic
setting. I think the reason for that is the business school recognizes that these
issues are real—to both employers and employees. Business school's constitu¬
encies are looking for solutions to these problems and business schools are
being responsive.

On occasion I convene a retreat for women interested in economic

issues—we met at the Xerox conference center this past January to deal with
new economic thinking that is essential to women. And I'm going to be a
 Kathleen Erickson / 1994 157

Wilson Fellow in Washington this fall, which will be a wonderful opportunity

to focus on women and economics.

REGION: Earlier you mentioned the need to redefine the corporate bottom line . . .

FRIEDAN: 1 mean something rather broader than the "bottom line" in a profit

sense. We need to redefine how corporations are organized and managed.

There's increasing consciousness that a "command and control" style of man¬
agement which one associates with a male model isn't necessarily what works
anymore, especially with small to medium sized companies. There's increasing
evidence that a more flexible management style, where responsibility is dis¬
tributed up and down the line, is what works best. And that kind of manage¬
ment style is one that will allow individual workers more flexibility—men and
women It's also a style 1 think women are inherently well-prepared to imple¬
ment and to be effective at within the corporate setting.

REGION: What's your reaction to anecdotal evidence that women are electing to climb down

the corporate ladder—that after investing a lot in education and training that prepares them
to be full participants in the corporate environment, they opt out?
FRIEDAN: 1 think it’s tremendously important that women continue to be full

participants in the corporate environment, and that they continue to seek the
same responsibilities, opportunities and rewards in that environment that in
the past have only been available to men. F4aving said that, 1 also would have
to say we haven't gained much if we define success narrowly, if we see women
as making progress only if they make it to the top of a corporation.
If women see a better future for themselves, financially, in human terms, or
in terms of doing something that's more fulfilling than what's available within
a corporate structure, they should go for it. And there s evidence thats exactly
what they're doing. I've seen statistics indicating that women are getting Small
Business loans at a rate six times greater than men. That means women are out
there on the cutting edge of the economy. As Ive already said, its not clear
that the male model of success is working very well for men these days. Why
should women tie themselves to a male model of success—much less an out¬
dated model? One of the true measures of achievement for women is that
we're starting to create our own definitions, not just using the old definitions.
And incidentally, there's also anecdotal evidence that suggests men are ques¬
tioning the traditional definition of success, that men are "opting out." Men
 158 Interviews with Betty Friedan

have a lot to gain from not being tied into a 9 to 5, corporate life as their only
option.

REGION: What about women who want to define success solely in terms of their role in the

family. Is that an acceptable model for today's woman within a feminist construct?
FriedaN: Of course it is, as long as it meets the woman's needs as well as the

family's needs. 1 do think women who make that choice are doing so with
some degree of risk Research has indicated that women's standard of living
fell enormously following divorce reform. Our courts, in divorce cases, haven't
always been consistent in recognizing a woman's contribution when she's cho¬
sen to make that contribution within the home. I do think this has been a
transitional issue, it has largely affected an entire generation of women who
did not have independent incomes—but for women who chose not to work
at paying jobs, the issue becomes one of judicial equity. And of course, apart
from divorce, there is always the question of what happens to a woman who
is left a widow where there isn't an estate to meet her ongoing needs? There's
emotional risk, as well. If you put all of your skills and energy into other
people—your children, your husband—and your children grow up and your
husband dies or leaves, you lose the context of community I talked about
earlier.

REGION: Much of what you're saying would suggest that you see income as being the root

of most of our social ills. Do you think income is more significant than race or gender as a
determinant of success?
FRIEDAN: There is no denying that there has been and is still discrimination on

the basis of gender and of race. Furthermore, in a time of economic stress,

there's a danger of women and people of color becoming scapegoats. But 1 do
believe that access to employment and earning is key, once that's in place,
many of the social problems are relieved. There's no question that the black
middle class has benefitted greatly by the civil rights movement. But there is
a large black underclass that still does not have access to jobs. If there's no
clear road to income and status except crime, we should expect social prob¬
lems. You can't solve this problem without addressing the economic issues,
and the same is true with gender.

REGION: Is welfare reform necessary?

Friedan: Don't make the welfare mother the scapegoat for our economic prob-
 Kathleen Erickson / 1994 159

lems. There are a lot of mistaken stereotypes here. The typical welfare mother
is not necessarily black, she doesn't keep having children on welfare, and she
doesn't have all that many children. And eliminating welfare all together
would have an insignificant impact on the economy. As far as the suggestion
that's being widely discussed—two years on welfare and that’s it—that isn't
practical if there aren't jobs at the end of two years. There have to be good
jobs and good child care.

REGION: Is the women's movement still relevant today—politically and in creating the kind

of change you 're supporting?

FRIEDAN: It is certainly still needed. We've come a long way, but we haven't

begun to go far enough. Where 1 think the movement is vulnerable is in what

I've already mentioned: Creating battle lines—between men and women, old
and young, black and white—isn’t going to meet anyone's needs. It is also true
that there is now a whole generation of women who take what's been achieved
for granted. They don't understand the need to keep working to protect what
we have and to achieve more. They think what they have is an irrevocable
entitlement, when in fact civil rights, historically, have been won and lost
before. We could lose ground again.
1 had a call from a woman in Rhode Island. She was a reporter who wanted
to do a story on why the women's movement in Rhode Island had died. By
"died" she meant that no one was going to meetings, marching, chaining them¬
selves to fences anymore. 1 told her, that's not what's needed anymore. We
need to integrate our objectives for jobs into economic policy discussions. We
need to be actively engaged in corporate settings, fighting for the kind of
changes that will make the work place responsive to the changing needs of
women and men. Marches and "events" were a necessary part of the evolution
of the women's movement, but what was needed 75 years ago isn t necessarily

what's needed now.

One of the remarkable changes that has taken place in the womans move¬
ment since The Feminine Adystigue was published is that women using their rights
has been normalized. Important rights were won—on paper—75 years ago,
but the women who used those rights were by and large women who didn't
marry and didn't have children. And they were viewed in a negative way by
society as being spinsters. Before The Feminine Mystique, the great majority of
the few women who were in Who's Who were unmarried.
160 Interviews with Betty Friedan

Looking at my own experiences, as recently as 1958, when I was a graduate

of Smith, the best women's college in America, I knew nothing of feminism, I
knew very little of the battle for women's rights that took place in the last
century and in the first half of this century. I thought of feminists—if I thought
of them at all—as a group of neurotic spinsters suffering from penis envy. I
was, after all, a psychology major, and I'd been very much influenced by Freud.
When I started to examine my own life, my mother's life—that's when 1
began to question the limits of women's lives and the way we were defined.
And it was shocking to find how much that had been forgotten, how it had
atrophied because it had not been carried into the mainstream. We need to
keep those ideals active in the mainstream.

REGION: Where do you go from here?

FRIEDAN: I've spent twenty-five to thirty years focusing on women's issues and

the last ten years on women and men and age. As I said before, I see no
solutions in terms of power blocks. What is needed is a new vision of commu¬
nity, a higher vision of the good of a whole community that transcends polar¬
ization of groups. Groups have been effective in the past in achieving equality.
Now we're in a position where the only way progress can continue is through
a new definition of community. What is positive today—and 1 saw this clearly
in the research I did for The Fountain of Age—is that the narrow focus of material
status, the need to conform, are viewed today as irrelevant issues. People are
looking for meaning in their daily lives. That means that there's a potential
for people to come together to protect the ongoing stream of life in genera¬
tions to come.

REGION: That's a good way to end. Thank you, Ms. Friedan.

 A Conversation with Betty friedan
Denise Watson / 1995

From The Virginian-Pilot, (4 May 1995), El

Reprinted by permission of The Virginian-Pilot.

Betty Friedan had a run in her stockings. Not just a run. A RUN. A mara¬
thon of gnarled, off-black nylon and lycra that gaped and grew, zigged and
zagged until it disappeared into the depths of her black skirt. But she didnt
care. Why should she? The mother of feminism has spent half her life teaching
women to care about things that matter most, and a run in a stocking isn't one

of them.
Friedan moved women beyond the world of hosiery and other social teth¬
ers in the early 1960s when she chronicled the disillusionment of many house¬
wives in her book, The Feminine Mystique. In 1966, Friedan founded the National
Organization for Women and helped organize the National Women's Political
Caucus. In her most recent book, The Fountain of Age, seventy-four-year-old
Friedan tackles aging, and challenges folks to look at those latter years with

acceptance rather than dread.

A visiting distinguished professor of public policy this semester at George
Mason University, Friedan took a few minutes to discuss aging, the future of
feminism and Newt Gingrich as she relaxed in her office on the college

campus.
"There is this war now. This war on the welfare mothers. It's like the canar¬
ies in the coal mines," said Friedan, visibly tired but her gravelly voice still
fresh. "The rage of that angry white male is being manipulated into a polariz-

161
162 Interviews with Betty Friedan

ing thing. . . . It's turning the white men, blacks, immigrants, the women

against each other."

Here are some questions we collected from readers. Following are excerpts

from that conversation.

Do you have any advice for a sixteen-year-old starting off and looking into
the feminist movement? There are many negative things said about feminism.
What does she accept and disregard?
"For a sixteen-year-old, the feminist movement has a lot to offer. Because
now she can take herself seriously as a person, as a full person, and she has to
make decisions about her own life, whereas her mother was supposed to only
think about catching a man. Little girls weren't even asked, 'What do you want
to be when you grow up?' Girls received, 'You're a pretty little girl, you'll be a
mommy just like your mommy."
"We've done that in the women's movement for equality, which is the
major expression of feminism. We've done that to the point where this sixteen-
year-old and her generation can take for granted opportunities their mothers
never even thought of.
"And I know it's been fashionable in recent years to say, Tm not a feminist.
But I think I'm going to go to law school and maybe I'll be a senator, or a
judge, marry a nice guy if I want to, when I want to.' All kinds of choices are
taken for granted now. But 1 think it would be good for her to study the
history of feminism because the rights that are taken for granted now, the
opportunities that are taken for granted now, are in danger with this Contract
on America group. What a war on women and children! And what a backlash
against women! And to be prepared for that, to be able to say rather proudly
and strongly, 'I am a feminist.'
"Let her disregard some of the rhetoric that the media sometimes plays up
beyond its proportion in the movement itself. Feminism does not mean down
with men, down with marriage, down with motherhood, down with sexuality.
Those are some of what I consider distorted voices that have come out of
feminism.
"But the reality of the women's movement for equality is that it's made life
better for men as well as women. The fact that women are able to work now
and earn, she doesn't earn as much as a man, but she earns more than she
would've thought she could ever earn twenty years ago. The man doesn't have
to be the sole breadwinner. It's better for the whole family.
 Denise Watson / i995 163

"But there is a war now. This war on the welfare mothers, it's like the
canaries in the coal mines. The rage of that angry white male is being manipu¬
lated into a polarizing thing. Gingrich and the attack on affirmative action
churn the white men, blacks, immigrants, the women against each other. That
is a diversion from the real economic imbalances leading to the growing frus¬
tration of the middle class men and women. But it's also a diversion to see it
in too narrow gender terms because men are not the enemy here. Only some
men, that are using their power to manipulate this backlash against women,
against people of color."
Looking back at all of your work, is there anything you would have done
differently?
"If someone had written my book when I was twenty years old, who know?
I might've gone into law school and ended up on the Supreme Court. Or 1
might've been an archaeologist and lead great digs, or who knows what? I
might've married later, but I'm glad I had the children 1 had. I think I've made
good use of my life even though 1 didn't have a conventional career, but 1
have helped make the possibilities of life better for the next generation. That's
why the women's movement, I think, is a miracle and a wonderful thing. A
life opening, life-affirming evolution of our democracy of the last twenty,
thirty years. That and the black civil rights movement.
"But 1 think we have to move on now. What I see so needed now is a new
vision. I think we've gone as far as we can go with separate movement—
women's rights, gay rights, black rights. At this point, there has to be con¬
fronting of the dangers of the backlash, of the polarization of groups against
each other, while the rich are getting richer, and the Gingrich people with
their Contract on America are going to destroy sixty years of social progress.
"I've been reading the papers in Washington very carefully and, with the
many comments I've read, I have never seen lobbyists for business, big busi¬
ness, so openly writing the laws. As they are, sitting down with the Newt
Gingrich gang and actually dictating how the laws should be written to get
rid of the regulations that have protected the American people."
How does a woman who feels defeated from hitting the glass ceiling heal
and redeem herself? What actions should she take?
"Well, I know what a lot of women are doing. They're starting their own
businesses. They're leaving the corporate world and, in a certain sense, the
cutting edge of our economy today is entrepreneurial. And more Americans
164 Interviews with Betty Friedan

today work for companies owned or managed by women, than the Fortune
500. But on the other hand, I don't think you give up the battle to break the
glass ceiling. I don't think we can lie back and let Newt Gingrich and his gang
get rid of affirmative action. Because the facts are, 95 percent of the top execu¬
tives in management in every business are white males.''
Who were the most influential people in your life?
"Since I am a product of psychological training, my mother and my father."
One woman says she's read all of your books but now wonders if the rise
in crime and drug use among kids can be linked to women working outside

the home.
"The research shows that's absolutely not true. That in the last forty years,
where for the first time American women worked from choice and not just
from drastic family emergencies, like desertion or alcoholism from a husband,
all kinds of research shows that children of families where woman worked,
were psychologically in better mental health, had more self-confidence, than
children of full-time housewives."
Is your current focus on aging, and getting people to see aging as a positive
instead of a negative aspect of life, more rewarding than your work in women's
issues?
"It's an evolution, that's all. That I was able to write The Feminine Mystique,
that 1 was able to start the women's movement was wonderful. As my grandson
would say, 'Awesome!' And I look back and I'm marveled that I was able to do
that, that I had the nerve.
"It's hard to even realize now how taken for granted that feminine mystique
was. I hit a chord in so many American women and each one thought she was
alone in that suburb, that sexual ghetto where nothing stirred between the
house of 9 to 5, over 3 feet tall, that if she wasn't having an orgasm waxing
the kitchen floor, something was wrong with her. That no matter how much
she wanted those kids, her husband and all that, the appliances, the station
wagon, . . . she might ask herself, 'But who am 1? The world is going on
without me?' And 1 called it the problem that has no name.
"By putting a name to that problem, and by taking women seriously and
their own experience seriously, 1 was able to free women to take their experi¬
ence seriously. And women are still stopping me today and telling me it
changed their life. 1 also see, as much as for women, that books like mine, and
 Denise Watson / 1995 165

whatever meaning that comes out of them, will enable people over fifty to see
their lives in new terms and possibilities.
"And you'll see, when younger people get it in their gut that there is life
beyond youth and not to dread it. That there's a whole ever-changing, eighty-
year life-span, it will enable you to make different decisions and explore differ¬
ent paths all the way along."
 After the Mystique Is Gone
Jennifer Chapin Harris / 1997

First printed in Off Our Backs newsjournal,

(March 1997), v. 27, n. 9. Reprinted by
permission of Off Our Backs

We owe a great deal to Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, the
book which caused so many Americans to question the 1950s idealization of
the "Leave It to Beaver" family. Without her work, most American girls would
probably still grow up thinking they could only become housewives. By par¬
ticipating in founding such political organizations as the National Organiza¬
tion for Women (NOW) and the National Abortion Rights Action League
(NARAL), she pioneered the way for other major feminist victories in this half
of the twentieth century.
Yet her brand of feminism is not universally accepted. In the July/August
1995 issue of Ms., Rita Mae Brown published an article entitled "Reflections of
a Lavender Menace: Remember when the movement tried to keep lesbians in
the closet?" There, Brown wrote, "The second wave of the women's movement
. . . shivered in mortal terror of lesbians. I told the truth about myself at one
of the early National Organization for Women (NOW) meetings in 1967,
which meant that women in Pucci dresses tore their hemlines squeezing one
another to get out the door. A short time thereafter Betty Friedan helped coin
the term ‘Lavender Menace,' although 1 don't know if she wants to take credit
for it. And a short time after that, I was unceremoniously shown the door."
Indeed, when I listened to a lecture she gave in April at my school, St. Mary's
College of Maryland, I got the impression that Friedan prioritizes public opin-

166
 Jennifer Chapin Harris / 1997 167

ion as a means of gaining ground for feminism. Many of my feminist professors

at school, however, played down any possible negativity about Friedan.
In the end, after reading Friedan's work, listening to her lecture, interview¬
ing her, and speaking to other feminist scholars about her, I have a mixed
image—both positive and negative—of her in my mind. 1 do not know how
accurate or fair my idea of Friedan is, so 1 offer readers the transcript of my
interview so that they can decide for themselves.

OOB: How would you say feminism has changed since the publication of The Feminine

Mystique?
Bf When 1 wrote The Feminine Mystique, which was published in 1963, the whole

previous century's battle for women's rights that began in 1848 with Seneca
Falls, the first declaration of women's rights (it's about to be 150 years since
then) had all been buried from the national consciousness and personal con¬
sciousness. We were in the era when there was only one image of woman:
woman defined only in sexual relation to men—men's wife, mother, house¬
wife, sex object, server of physical needs to husband, children, home. This
was absolutely so prevailing that each woman thought there was something
wrong with her. She was a freak, she was alone if, no matter how much she
had wanted to marry that guy and get that house and appliances and all the
things that were supposed to be woman's dream in the era of the idealization
of the suburb after World War II, and no matter how much she had wanted
the husband and two, three children, which were supposed to be the limit of
women's fulfillment, if she had the feeling that something was missing, she
needed to be or do something else, that the world was passing her by, she
thought something was wrong with her. I called it the problem that has no
name and The Feminine Mystique, the book, my book and others that followed
it, broke through that obsolete definition of women that was limiting their
vision of their own possibilities and necessities to move in society as a whole
in the 80 year life span that is now American women's. The personhood of
women—that's what it was all about, and we had to break through that femi¬
nine mystique, to say women are people, no more, no less, to demand our
human and American birthright, equal opportunity to participate in the main¬
stream of society and our own voice in the major decisions of society, and we

did that.
Feminism had become a dirty word in that era of the feminine mystique.
168 Interviews with Betty Friedan

The movement for women's equality has been a very life-affirming, life-open¬
ing [one] and it has transformed the lives and the aspirations of women in this
last quarter century. The Women s Movement for equality is what its all about
and was about as far as I'm concerned. It was also about going beyond the
male model to put the value also on women's experience and not man as the
measure of all things, but it's also a different kind of man.
Women are moving in society. Now women are half the labor force, and
the great majority of women are working outside the home for most of the
years of their lives. They are in every profession. It's gone from 4% or less
than that in law school and medical school to 40%. Women are not just cook¬
ing the church supper anymore, but they are preaching the sermons. They are
defining the rubrics in every profession on the basis of women's experience
and not just men's. That's been an enormous creative thing for our society as
a whole. Once we broke the feminine mystique and the male definitions and
began to take seriously our own experience, there was new thinking in every
field as far as modern feminism is concerned.
As far as I'm concerned, it is the women's movement for equality. It is not
women against men. There were perversions of modern feminism. Women
had suppressed anger (when you're completely dependent you can't express
anger) that they had a right to feel if they were put down as they were. [For
example,] there was the invisible woman in the office, even if she ran it practi¬
cally as a secretary. Nurses had to stand up when the doctors came into the
hospital The girls didn't aspire to be doctors.
Women were put down even on the pedestal at home. There could well be
anger, and there was anger, but the men were also victims of the obsolete
narrow sex roles. Men are dying eight years younger than women in America.
It wasn't women against men as far as I'm concerned. Women had to break
through the male definitions,- women had to demand and get equality. We are
now in the next stage [of] what seems to me to be redefining all of our essen¬
tial values and rubrics of every field on the basis of women's experience as well
as men's. Men are becoming a different kind of men. The next big break¬
through has to be men, because they shouldn't be dying so young. They have
to break through the obsolete machismo definition of masculinity.
Feminism . . . there,are many different voices in feminism. There was, it
seems to me, a perversion of feminism for a while that seemed to define it as
"down with men, down with marriage, down with motherhood." You know,
 Jennifer Chapin Harris / 1997 169

down with everything women had ever done to attract men, the brutes. Down
with everything men had ever done in history, the male chauvinist pigs, the
patriarchs, the brutes. There was a germ of truth in it, but basically it expressed
the anger. But it was, it seems to me, ideologically and politically and actually
fallacious. There wouldn't have been the life-opening, life-changing effect of
the women's movement if that had been really its main message. The thrust
was, for me, equal participation in society. And then that changes everything,
including marriage, including children, motherhood. The other one of the
two very important things the Women's Movement has done has been the
movement for equality in every field and the movement of women into making
the decisions and defining the terms, not just men, and the whole question of
choice—-those have been very important things.

OOB How should modem feminist deal with backlash from "angry white men?"
Bf Well, I don't see that much backlash. I think that if this economy falls, then
you will see backlash. Women are easily scapegoated for men's frustration. If
there is increased violence against women, and I'm not sure there is, it may be
that women are not accepting what they've passively had to accept and be
victims of before They didn't have a word for sex discrimination a few years
ago, much less sexual harassment, so it may be just that women are not accept¬
ing what used to be considered man's right. It's no longer [a] man's right to
beat [his] wife, not only in the United States, but as a result of Beijing and the
whole Women's Movement worldwide, even in UN documents it's no longer
a man's right to beat his wife. But if there is increased violence against women
in the US now, I think it's because frustrations of men are being taken out on
women. It is men, and college educated white men that have suffered nearly
a 20% drop in income in the last six or seven years, not the upper two or ten
percent of the very rich, but 80% have incomes that have stagnated or
declined. The downsizing has hit mainly men and men can no longer count
on that steady progression in [a] life-long career or profession, a job that used
to define men's masculinity. I think that they may be taking this out on
women, and women have often been the scapegoat of mens frustration in

times of economic uncertainty.

OOB How do you see feminist values as different from "traditional family values" when the

Republicans talk about them?

BF: Well, I teach a course and run a symposium series at Mount Vernon [Col-
170 Interviews with Betty Frtedan

lege], where I'm teaching now, on rethinking family values. The values of
nurturing and responsibility and commitment and shared life . . and affirma¬
tion and respect for each person's unique identity, are the family values, it
seems to me, that are alive and well in many diverse forms of family today.
When the right wing, religious right, reactionary Republican element goes on
and on about the lack of "family values," they're using that term as a sort of a
hype for their opposition to women's autonomy, to women's choice, to abor¬
tion, to divorce, to women's control over their own sexuality, to women's
demand for equality. I would also use the term "family values," but I mean the
mutual responsibility for nurturing, for caring, for shared life and commitment.
I think you can find these today in many different forms. Very few Americans
are living that traditional form of family. So that traditional form of family—
mom as the housewife and papa the breadwinner and the two children who
never seem to go beyond five or six [years old]—that is a dying form. Most
people don't [live] that [way] in America now, although they may have for
some years of their lives, or they may have had their childhood in such a
form. But the two paycheck family, the single parent family, the his, hers, and
theirs family—there are all these forms of family. The value is the mutual
responsibility, commitment, the sharing, the nurturing.

OOB: Where do you think feminism will go or should go in the future?

BF: Well, 1 think feminism has opened life for women and therefore for chil¬
dren and men in this country. It has been enormously transformative. We are
just beginning to see the creative aspects of it. The addition of as many as two
women to a state legislature changes the agenda, not just in the direction of
life, of the values of life, of priorities for life, whether it's the well or the sick,
or the young, the old, children, the poor, the environment—these are the
values that women would give priority to, not just the abstractions like balanc¬
ing the budget. We're just beginning to see that in every field, as women come
in and define the terms and not just men. But you're also beginning to see a
new kind of man who also is getting that sensitivity to life as he carries the
baby in the backpack.
 feminism's Patriarch
Robert Selle / 1998

From World and I, (May 1998), 50. Reprinted

by permission of The World and I.

Betty Friedan was brutalized by injustice early in life—but it had nothing

to do with bias against women. In her Peoria, Illinois, high school, Jews were
not welcome in sororities or fraternities, which played a big role at school.
And Betty Goldstein was very much a Jew.
Even though she was brilliant in her academics, shone as a writer poet, and
started a literary magazine, she was socially shunned because of her ethnicity.
To make matters worse, she was afflicted with asthma "and a big complex
about being unattractive," she said in an interview. But by focusing on her
studies and her writing, she got ahead dazzlingly, graduating first in her class
in 1942 from Smith College—where she also edited the college newspaper.
Then she did graduate work, becoming a fellow in psychology at the Univer¬

sity of California at Berkeley.

Once she completed her stay at Berkeley, she moved to Greenwich Village
and married Carl Friedan, a World War II veteran. Her first child was born in
1949. But it was her second child that played a role, even while in the womb,
in her other jarring collision with injustice. "I didn't have so much concern
with women's issues as such," Friedan says, "till as a labor reporter 1 was fired
from my job on a leftist newspaper because I was pregnant." That awakened
her as never before to the second-class status of women in American society.
Following her dismissal, she free-lanced for magazines for years to augment

the family income.

171
172 Interviews with Betty Friedan

For her fifteenth college reunion, she conducted a survey of her Smith
classmates, and it was from this bit of research that her blockbuster 1963
book, The Feminine Mystique, came. It struck a chord in the hearts of millions of
women across the world and helped get the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed. It
also sparked the creating of the National Organization for Women in 1966.
The fight for job and pay equity for women had begun in earnest.
By 1975, however, Friedan felt that NOW had gotten off course and had
become largely irrelevant to basic women's issues. She lambasted the organiza¬
tion she founded for seemingly veering from the problems of mainsteam
women and job equity to instead immersing itself in lesbian politics. The exas¬
perated Friedan—who is now seventy-seven, divorced, the mother of three,
and grandmother of seven—even once jokingly characterized the lesbian fac¬
tion of the women's movement as the "lavender menace." She protested
NOW's direction by forming her own network of moderate feminists.
F4er 1981 book, The Second Stage, presented a withering analysis of what she
saw as the extremes of the feminist movement. It lauded motherhood and
other traditional feminist "whipping boys."
Friedan—who in recent years has been a visiting professor at the University
of Southern California, New York University, George Mason University, and
Florida International University, as well as Distinguished Professor of Social
Evolution at Mount Vernon College—also spoke out boldly at the 1995
Beijing global women's conference, which tended to cold-shoulder conserva¬
tive women's groups and other voices favoring women's traditional roles. She
told fellow delegates that "the language of rage and sexual politics" was disaf-
fecting large numbers of career- and family-oriented women.
"A significant number of the younger women say, 'I am not a feminist at
heart, but I'm going to law school,' Tm going to come of age here,' 'I'm going
to be an astronaut,' or whatever. But feminism has got the image of either anti¬
man, anti-sex victims or the image of super-ambitious, selfish career profes¬
sionals ignoring realities of family life and the progress we've made," she said
at the time. For all her vitriol towards NOW and other radicals, however,
Friedan—who splits her time between Miami Beach,- Sag F-Iarbor, New York,-
and Washington, D.C.—has remained firmly planted within the greater femi¬
nist movement.

But today she discerns a turning point in U.S. and world history that she
feels demands a reevaluation of feminist priorities—and that may presage a
 Robert Selle / 1998 173

convergence of female and male interests. The convergence comes in the form
of job and pay equity for women, and job and pay security for men. The
corporate downsizing phenomenon—in which hundreds of thousands of
workers and middle managers, predominantly males, lost their jobs over the
past decade—has brought the issue poignantly home to men.
Friedan favors a shorter work week of perhaps thirty hours that would at
one stroke widen employment opportunities, strengthen job security, and pro¬
vide more free time for today's highly stressed two-earner and single-parent

families.
"People's priorities—men's and women's alike—should be affirming life,
enhancing life, not greed, she says, declaring that this is the wave of the
future. "We're on the cusp of a paradigm shift: We're the richest, most power¬
ful nation in the world, and nobody is addressing the larger philosophical
question of what values we should have for the future," intones Friedan, who
has never been a religious person but who says she only recently recognized
a dimension of religiousness" in her life.
"The way the women's movement has looked at men is how the Nazis
looked at the Jews: that they had all the power, the money, etc.," she says.
But now "the answer is not women against men. Instead, we have to have
alternatives to downsizing. We need a broader definition of success, both in
personal career terms and corporate terms. In reality, we have to move toward
a new kind of family, a new kind of partnership," she says. "Men have to move
to a new definition of masculinity. 1 think family values are very important,
but we have to reframe them in terms of new economic and demographic
realities. If you haven't been downsized, it might happen to someone you

know."
 friedan lieu fl?enda: fairneis to fllen, loo
Linda Myers / 1998

From the Cornell Chronicle, (3 December 1998).

Reprinted by permission of Linda Myers and
the Cornell Chronicle

Betty Friedan would like to develop a quality of life measure—let's call it

QOL—similar to economic measures like the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
that we've created to plumb our nation's economic health.
A QOL index would not only be used to measure success in individuals,-
Friedan would like to see it applied to companies and communities as well
"It's not impossible to do," said the woman who has made a career of making
the difficult look easy. In the early 1960s, when she was fired from her job as
a news reporter because she was pregnant, she used the free time to write a
book, The Feminine Mystique, that launched a feminist revolution.
She has been going strong ever since. At seventy-seven the founder of the
National Organization for Women has just returned from a whirlwind lecture
tour of Europe, where she discovered a group of young women in Budapest
who had been so inspired by her book that they began a feminist network in
their native Hungary, despite opposition from the then-prevailing Communist
regime. "1 was very moved,'' Friedan said. "We really are living in a global
village."

Friedan, a distinguished visiting professor at Cornell University's School of

Industrial and Labor Relations who will be speaking on the university's Ithaca,
N.Y., campus Dec. 2 and 3, credits the women's movement with playing a
transformative role in American society. "I feel very lucky and almost awed to

174
 Linda Myers / 199 8 175

have been part of it. If we look back—although who has time?—we have to
realize that we have changed the way women look at themselves and the way
society looks at women, and that's been all to the good. Womens lives are no
longer defined solely by marriage and children. These may be important to
them, but they may only be part of the picture. Women now have choices."
It gratifies Friedan to see women working in every profession today and
legislation in place prohibiting gender discrimination in the workplace. So
what's next? Friedan's most-recent book, Beyond Gender: The New Politics of Work
and Family (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1997), points the way to a new
revolution. This time she aims to transform the world by using the feminist
ideals of equality and justice to shape a broad societal and workplace agenda

for men as well as women.

Now the director of "New Paradigm: Women, Men, Work, Family and
Public Policy," a project sponsored by the Cornell ILR School's Institute for
Women and Work, Friedan already has brought together policy-makers and
researchers to talk. The Cornell sponsorship, plus a $1 million Ford Founda¬
tion grant, led her to develop monthly seminars and symposiums in Washing¬

ton, D.C., on critical workplace issues.

"I'm trying to take the dialogue that I've helped shape and change the focus
from women's rights to how jobs are structured for both men and women,"
explained Friedan Although the workplace has changed radically since
women began entering it in large numbers in the 1970s, jobs, career lines,
training and professional advancement are all still based on the model of the
employee with a non-working partner who takes care of lifes details.
That model is out of step with reality, observed Friedan. "No one has
moved to shorten the work week. In fact it's getting longer. That's ridiculous.
We're co-opted by a culture of greed, as if the only measure of worth is how

much someone earns."

New Paradigm's Oct. 28 symposium focused on men, with Friedan pointing
out: "Men who play an active role in parenting live longer," a finding she saw
as an incentive for them to achieve a better balance between work and life.
The program's next symposium, Dec. 10, will look at trends among companies
to contract out, rather than hire new staff, and its impact on working families.
Friedan also co-teaches a course, "The New Paradigm: The Changing Ameri¬
can Workplace and Family Life," with Francine Moccio, director of the ILR
School's Institute for Women and Work and principal investigator for the New
 176 Interviews with Betty Friedan

Paradigm Project. The course gives Cornell students in Washington, D C., an

interdisciplinary look at such issues as the gender gap in wages and such work¬
place trends as privatization and downsizing, and features talks by prac¬
titioners as well as scholars.
Friedan has a strong response to biographer Daniel Horowitz's take on her
life. In Betty Friedan and the Making oj The Feminine Mystique (University of Massa¬
chusetts, 1998), the Smith College professor faulted her for portraying herself
as merely a suburban housewife who discovered feminism while peeling pota¬
toes at the kitchen table. He declared that she wasn't candid about her work
as a reporter for union newspapers.
"He’s got it so wrong it annoys me," she said. She made it clear that her
feminism did not arise from exposure to left-wing ideologists during her
reporting days. "They were every bit as male chauvinist as the rest of the
world." She also turned on its head Horowitz's claim that she exaggerated her
role as a housewife: "I was a suburban housewife. When 1 got fired from my
newspaper job, my husband and I bought a big, old house overlooking the
Hudson. I personally took off five coats of paint by hand and went to auctions
hunting for furniture bargains. I enjoyed it." But she never presented herself as
just a housewife. "That was the gestalt of the times."
While wheeling her first child in his stroller, she canvassed for Democratic
candidates in Rockland County. And before writing her world-changing book,
she wrote for such women's magazines as Redhook and Ladies Home Journal to
help pay the grocery bills. That experience, as much as anything, helped shape
her feminist consciousness. A former psychology student, she sensed a prevail¬
ing dissatisfaction among her female contemporaries that wasn't reflected in
the magazines. "I realized I could use all my experience to challenge the ethos
that I had been part of creating." She was recently named one of the hundred
most important women in the 20th century in a book published under the
Ladies Home Journal's name, and she enjoys the irony of that honor—she is
unlikely to have made the list had she remained just a freelance writer for the
magazine.

The self-described "American revolutionary” has three grown children, all

in established careers, and seven grandchildren—but don't expect her to settle
into grandmotherhood when the New Paradigm project ends in four years.
Maybe 111 write a whodunit," she said, "with a bumptious feminist sleuth"
whose simplistic feminist values are challenged at every turn. "Life," Friedan
said, "is more complex than that."
 The Hew frontier of feminism:
Bustin? the (Ikculine (Tlgstique
Nathan Gardels / 1998

From New Perspectives Quarterly, (Winter 1998),

50 (3). Reprinted with permission of New
Perspectives Quarterly.

NpQ: Over thirty years ago now, the publication o/The Feminine Mystique gave birth
to the movement for women's eguality. The advance of women in the last half of the twentieth
century is without doubt the deepest social transformation of our time. In your view, what
have been the key successes of the women's movement? What have been its failures, shortcom¬

ings and diversions?

BF: More than anything else, The Feminine Mystique brought about a paradigm
shift in consciousness In the United States, there had been more than a 100-
year battle to win the vote for women. But, then, the movement for equality
seemed to abort. Women's energies got diverted to issues like temperance-
how to deal with drunken husbands—and other social-work causes. Women
fighting for themselves as equal persons in society—not just as a mans wife,
mother, sex object, daughter, housewife—reemerged with the publication of

my book in 1963.
Once you broke through the feminine mystique by slamming the door, as
Nora did in Henrik Ibsen's Doll House, and saying, ''1 am above all else a person,
just as you are," could you see the barriers that stood in women's way.
Remember, also, this was the early 1960s, at the height of the civil rights
movement and the beginning of the anti-Vietnam war movement. There was
a feeling in the air that one could take action to change the conditions of

society, to liberate those who were oppressed.

177
 178 Interviews with Betty Friedan

Now, nearly forty years later, the women's movement has succeeded, at
least in the advanced countries, beyond my wildest dreams. The change is
awesome. Women today are getting an equal number of professional degrees.
In 1997, there is only a 26-cent differential in pay between women and men
in mid-level jobs. Though the "glass ceiling" remains at the highest executive
levels, it is only a matter of time before women break through. Women, who
used to vote just like their husbands did, have become a potent force politi¬
cally. In the United States, it was women who elected Bill Clinton as presi¬
dent. The "gender gap" in his election was around 20 percent.
Our daughters' and granddaughters' generation just can’t imagine a time
when women weren't taken seriously, when the political and social agenda
was not defined by women's experience as well as by men's. So, at the end of
the twentieth century in the advanced Western countries, women are in a state
of very-near equality with men. This is a marvelous transformation from the
days when 1 wrote The Feminine Mystique. The success of the women's movement
has certainly been the most life-affirming experience of the twentieth century.

NpQ: What about the failures and diversions of the women's movement?
BF: I don't see any failures. Diversions, yes. The biggest diversion was the
extremist personal sexual politics that drew a literal analogy between the
oppression of women and race or class oppression. That deteriorated into a
marginal politics that said, "down with men, down with marriage, down with
motherhood." The perception this extremist politics created that the women's
movement was just a bunch of lesbians did not help our cause. The media
hyped this extremism, but, since the early 1980s, thankfully, it has faded.
My view then, as now, is that one's sexual preference is a private matter.
The whole point of writing a book like The Feminine Mystique was to break
through the definition of women solely in terms of their sexual relationship to
men, as mother, housewife and servant. It would have been a big mistake to
remystify women once again as sexual beings only and not as free persons in
society.

NpQ: What about the later backlash of the mid-1980s that blamed growing divorce rates
and breakdown of the family on women who "abandoned" the home for work and, in the
conservative critique, asserted'tbeir rights over their obligations to their husbands and children?
The phrase that summed up this critique was "women can't have it all," meaning they can't
have both kids and careers without doing damage to the family.
 Nathan Gardels / 4 998 179

Bf: That is an absolutely stupid phrase. What it really means is that men can
have it all, but women can't. Men can have love, sex, children and jobs, but
women can't.
In fact, the women's movement made it possible for both parents to have
more. Men also used to carry the sole burden of income. That stress made
them fragile emotionally and vulnerable physically. They died too young, on
the average of eight years younger than women. Now women carry half the
burden. So, maybe men won't die so much younger. The point is, motherhood
now comes as a choice. And a chosen motherhood is far better than the old

motherhood as a prison.

NpQ: Let us put the Question another way: Can parents have it all without damaging the
kids? If, together, both parents are working 80 hours a week to keep up the mortgage payments
while the kids are shunted off to child care, is that a good thing? What conditions are

necessary to make the family function?

Bf: Flexible time at work. A shorter workweek. Better, more affordable child
care. Whatever criticism of child care there may be, the fact is that without
child care there can be no equality for women. In short, we need to put the
value of quality of life over material greed and status that seems to dictate all
social relations today. WTen 1 look at American society now I sometimes see
a big, stagnant pond covered by the green scum of materialism, but with small
springs bubbling up from underneath. Those wellsprings of the common
good, of the idea of a life that balances family and work, need to be encour¬
aged. The women's movement, as a force for life, ought to concern itself with

these issues.

NpQ: Alva Myrdal, the late Swedish sociologist, once made the point that women could have
it all, but in succession. Since women lived longer than men, they could have motherhood first,
then a career. Of course, a woman's opportunity in such a society would then depend on the
absence of age discrimination. Is there anything in this idea from your point of view?
BF: As a society, we haven't yet come to terms with the extended life spans
made possible by the creature comforts, nutrition and medical advances of
modern times. Women's average life expectancy today is 80 years. For men it
is seventy-two, and will be longer as they are released from the stressful bur¬
dens of being the sole income provider. People living into their eighties today
are very vital, with few signs of deterioration. Hence, the whole notion that
180 Interviews with Betty Friedan

people ought to retire from active life at age sixty-five or less is entirely obso¬

lete.
Increasingly, as Alva Myrdal foresaw, people are talking more and more of
"my next career" or my "third career." If you start again in your sixties or later,
you don't have to prove yourself. You don't have to support a family anymore
or put the kids through college. So, you tend to do what interests you, not
what you have to do. You revive dreams. I know a retired banker who became
a nurse. I know people who have taken up composing music at seventy. The
longer horizon of life also affects your choices earlier in life. It relieves the
fear of having only one chance to make it and opens up life to more adventures
and choices than was ever before possible in human history.

NpQ: If the women's movement has reached most of its goals, what is next on the agenda?
BF: Busting the masculine mystique. The unfinished business of the women's
movement is changing the role of man. Equality will not have been achieved
until the family is seen as much as a man's concern as a woman's. So far, family
needs and family issues have been defined as the woman's domain. The next
frontier is to make it the man's as well. Children ought to be seen as the equal
responsibility of men and women.

NpQ: How, then, do you see the recent efforts at placing the man, once again, front and
center in the family? In the last two years, we've seen two big marches in Washington—Louis
Farrakhan's Million Man March and, more recently, the Promise Keepers. Both were about
men reaffirming their responsibilities to families.
Bf: It is almost ironic this movement should be interpreted as a backlash
against women. In reality, there has to be a response by men to the fact that
in over 50 percent of families women are earning half the family income. That
means men must assume their share of responsibility. As women are now enti¬
tled to equal opportunity in the workplace, men should be considered equally
responsible for the family.
 A Conversation mith Betty friedan
Barbara Mantz Drake / 1999

From the Peoria Journal Star, (21 February 1999).

Reprinted by permission of Barbara Mantz
Drake and the Peoria Journal Star.

Q. What did you take out of Peoria that's with you today?
A: I think that there is a certain solidity, of rootedness, about America, about
the United States. And second, I think it's in Peoria that 1 learned the power
of community. In Peoria there really was a kind of can-do spirit of community
organizing. If there was a problem, you could organize in the community to
deal with the problem. And I think that I got a sense of that in Peoria even
before 1 got all involved with the labor movement and progressive, left-wing

politics.

Q: When you look back on Peoria now, has your thinking about the community changed?
A Well, it's a good place to have come from and to have left. I think that the
good thing that I got from Peoria was ... a sense of a larger reality than the
sophistication of New York and Los Angeles, which 1 think is a good part of

my effectiveness politically.
What was bad about Peoria, certainly for someone like me probably, was
that anti-Semitism which I experienced there. Peoria was not unique to that,
but it was in that era. And the conformity. There is conformity in a small city
like that. And I don't know about the ability to be truly different, you know.
I got strength from growing up in Peoria, but I had to leave it to use it.

Q; I read about you going hack to Peoria for your twenty-five-year high school reunion just

after writing The Feminine Mystique and feeling like you . . .

181
182 Interviews with Betty Friedan

A Yeah! I think Peoria probably has changed in its attitude about me. If I recall
correctly, that reunion I went back and I brought my husband and kids. It was
right after The Feminine Mystique came out, so I was beginning to get a little
famous, and 1 don't think everybody in Peoria was too happy about that.

Q: How did you know that they weren't happy?

A: I may not remember this right, but I think we were staying with Bobby
Easton and we woke up one morning and someone had draped toilet paper in
the trees. And when we went to the twenty-fifth reunion banquet, and I don't
know what happened—some crack, some innuendo—my husband, who came
from Boston, he was furious. He thought they were being insulting to me.
And he said so loud and clear, "How dare they treat me this way!"
And I think that probably there were some people in Peoria that were just
kind of annoyed, you know, that Betty, a Jewish girl from Peoria, was suddenly
famous. 1 guess I am the most famous person that came out of Peoria. But
some years later, I think they decided it was good for Peoria to have spawned
someone like me. Because after all, the work I've done, my life's work, has
made it much better for the women and girls that come from Peoria, as well
as Los Angeles and New York.

Q; What s your earliest memory from childhood?

A: I loved school. I think my greatest joy was sort of make-up games. This was
the era of Nancy Drew and the detectives, and so being a girl detective and
making up with my friends, and there was this bridge and we'd hide under the
bridge and spy on the smugglers. You know, imaginary things.

Q: Good memories, friends, making up games. Bad memories?

A: I had some bad memories when high school came along. I don't know if it's
true today (but) life at the high school was sort of dominated by sororities
and fraternities. And you know being Jewish ... we didn't get into sororities
or fraternities, and all of my other friends from grade school and high school
were in. I really wasn't meant to be an Emily Dickinson reading poetry on her
break. I did it, but I would have much rather been in a jalopy going down to
Hunt's to have a hamburger with the rest of the kids.
But then, as I got further along in high school I made some new friends
that weren't in the sorority and fraternity crowd, on the basis of shared abili¬
ties and interests. I really blossomed after I left and went to Smith, because I
 Barbara Mantz Drake / 1999 183

was very bright. That was not such a good thing to be for a girl in Peoria, but
it was great at Smith.

Q; Were there other favorite places to go?

A It was just below the hill, down on Farmington Road. 1 remember sledding
the hills at Bradley (Park). And then 1 loved hiking and bicycle riding and
stuff like that, things out in the country. In those days, I loved being in plays
and 1 would get sort of the child actor parts you know in the Peoria Players. I
won a prize in high school, a dramatic honor or something like that, for my
five-minute walk-on as a madwoman in Jane Eyre. 1 would practice this mania¬
cal laugh in the bathroom and would close the door, and my brother and sister
were younger than 1 am,- they would sort of listen outside the door and 1 d

practice this sort of maniacal laugh.

Q To what extent did the anti-Semitism you experienced affect your life and your perception

of justice?
A I think it was so unjust that people should be barred from things or looked
down on or whatever because of their race or their religion or any of that. So,
I had that experience and that certainty sharpened my sensitivity and outrage

of injustice of any sort.

Q: Do you remember feeling injustice because you were a girl when you were growing up, or

limitations on you?
A I really didn't. I'm sure that if I look back on it, 1 can give you ways. For
instance, all my cousins, my boy cousins, knew from early on that they were
going to be lawyers, go to Fdarvard Law School, blah, blah, blah. They did
and 1 should have. I had that kind of ability.

Q: Did you assume when you were growing up that you would have both a career and a

family?
A No. It was like when I graduated from college and I was thinking, what do
I want to do? It was a real blank, because women weren't expected to have
careers and I had no role model of a woman who had a career. And I also did
want to marry and have children, but 1 knew that, I don't know how I knew
this, but 1 absolutely knew that what was wrong with my mother was that she

didn't have a real use for her ability.

Q: Where did the words "feminine mystigue, the title, come from?
 I 84 Interviews with Betty Friedan

A I was having lunch at Yale with Tom Mendenhall (then a Yale University
administrator), who had just accepted an appointment to be president at
Smith. ... I wanted to check out if I was really seeing something that had to
do with women. I thought, "1 wonder if the Yale boys deteriorated like this."
And somehow in discussing what I was finding and talking about, I kind of
groped around and I said mystique of feminine fulfillment, and when he played
it back to me he used the words "feminine mystique '' And I said, "Hey wait a
minute, that's mine!"

Q: What were your expectations for the hook?

A: Something in my gut knew that it was important. Every time it would get
turned down when 1 was trying to sell it to magazines, I would do more inter¬
views. I knew I wasn't just talking about just overeducated Smith women. . . .
I knew that it implied vast social change.

Q: You said that writing The Feminine Mystique was the most important thing you had
ever done. Was it more important than founding the National Organization for Women?
A No, the writing of The Feminine Mystic/ue was what had made the change in
consciousness, which made NOW and the women's movement possible.

Q: When did you know that something extraordinary had happened in the book?
A: I knew finishing it that it implied vast social change and it would be threat¬
ening to some. But I couldn't possibly have predicted the incredible impact it
had. And it really did. And women come up to me, even today, even now all
these years later, nearly forty years later, and they come up to me and they
say, "It changed my life, changed my whole life," and remember where they
were when they read it.

Q: Do the daughters of those women who read your book when it was first published, do
young women in their twenties, say anything to you?

A No, I think young women in their twenties take it all for granted. 1 really
do. I mean, the women in their 20s today, they've grown up with expectations
and with the kind of different consciousness and 1 think they think it's always
been like that. They don't know what women had to break through.

Q Is there danger in that?

A There could be a little. The generations that fought or broke through or

 Barbara Mantz Drake / 1999 185

very consciously experienced a change and had to fight some battles, they
couldn't be pushed back again, but 1 don't know. Now it's only very reaction¬
ary groups that would say a woman's place is in the home, and they wouldn't
even dare to say it quite so bluntly. If we had an economic downturn, there
might be an attempt to turn women back again.

Q The Feminine Mystique was not the first book to reflect on the women's situation. . . .

A It was the first in America with any real impact.

Q: Why, what was different about it?

A You have to read it. 1 think it was the first to really analyze the situation of

women and conceptualize and define the feminine mystique instead of just
accepting it as the conventional wisdom of the time. Now, Simone de Beau¬
voir in The Second Sex, she did a similar thing, but that work was very highly
intellectual and did not somehow lead to action. It analyzed the situation of
women in a very depressing way. 1 remember when I read it, which was some
years before I wrote The Feminine Mystigue, and it made me just want to go to

bed for a week.

Q. You said you wrote The Second Stage to help daughters break through the mystigue

you helped create What were you referring to there?

A I don't know. I haven't read it recently. But The Feminine Mystigue said no to

something, to that way that women were expected to live solely in terms of
husband, children and home. The Second Stage said it isn't enough for a woman
just to sort of look in the mirror and say I am a person, 1 am going to think
about my own life and do something for myself, if society isn't structured for

her to be able to do it.

Q: Is there a feminine mystigue today? I mean like the myth of super woman.

A I get a little irritated by all of that. I don't think, oh poor women, they're
so stressed, they have to be perfect mothers, perfect wives, have these brilliant
careers. As far as I can see, and this is not just from my personal observation,
but from research, women today don't have just one role. They're wives,
they're mothers, they have professions. They're better off. They're not so
highly stressed, for heaven's sake. If there's problems in one sphere, satisfac¬
tion in the other balances it out. That's another kind of a hype, a myth, about,

oh, these poor women are so highly stressed. Nonsense!

186 Interviews with Betty Friedan

Q And how about, I guess the question is, can women have it all?
A I just hate that question. Can men have it all?

Q: That's the next question. Can men have it all?

A I mean, it's just a ridiculous question. Why shouldn't women have it all? I
really just get furious at that question. To imply that women shouldn't have it
all. It's an anti-women question. Women should be able to live the lives they
want to live and have the opportunities to be in professions and careers and
they have to have a choice, and they do now, of whether or not they want
kids.

Q: How do you respond to those who blame you and the women's movement for the decline of

the family?
A- Oh, bull-.

Q: That's how you respond?

A: In the first place, I don't think the family has declined. The family is no
longer an operable term. Because there is an enormous diversity of families.
That's only to be expected with the longer life span that women and men
have today. Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce. . . . Not only are women
participating in the outside world and sharing the earning burden, but you
have men participating much more in the hands-on act of parenting. And
that's just for the good.

Q: Can you talk a little about the genesis of NOW?

A: When it all started, we didn't have a word for sexual discrimination much
less a law against it, because if women aren't people, then the concept of
equality didn't apply to them. So there was an enormous change implied here.
You begin to be aware of the barriers that kept women from participating
equally in the mainstream of society, in the work, in the professions and the
political sphere. Fdistory was ready for us in a way.

Q: Is it true that you wrote the mission statement for NOW on a napkin over lunch?

A: Oh that was just the first sentence. It was in the air, it wasn't original with
me, it was in the air that we needed an NAACP for women. There were people
in Washington and in the labor movement and in the government, women
that had been thinking for much longer than me about women and the need
for real equality and the need to break through and take a larger part in soci-
 Barbara Mantt Drake / i999 187

ety. And they kind of saw that 1 would be useful in that because I was now
quite famous and really looked up to by women for The Feminine Mystique. And
I had no job to lose. This was the end of the McCarthy era, where to organize
for anything was suspect.

Q Bias NOW met your expectations?

A I don't know what you mean by expectations. Basically I think NOW has
been very good, very good. I lecture in other parts of the country, and always
the NOW chapter people come to meet me, and they seem to be doing terrific
work in their communities. I'm pretty proud of it.

Q: You wrote once that it was easier to change society than to change your own personal life.

A Oh, well, that's true. I read somewhere that maybe Freud revolutionized
our approach to sex but I don't know that it helped his own sex life that much.

Q: How much of what was going on in your personal life, in your marriage and those
difficulties affect what you wrote?
A Sometimes it was a little schizophrenic. Here I was Joan of Arc leading the
women out of the wilderness and fighting for equality. In my personal life,
and my marriage, I was pretty much of a. . . . Well, 1 wouldn't say 1 was a
doormat, I wasn't a doormat, but I think I hadn't completely broken through
the feminine mystique.
My own life, (the book) changed my life, too. I mean I got famous. That
was a threat to my husband. I remember when I started being asked to lecture
and I had three kids and Emily was still little. And I had it written into my
lecture contract that if 1 went to give a lecture, I shouldn't be asked again for
at least two weeks, because I didn't want to leave the kids that much and
because my husband was pretty, kind of upset by my going off to lecture.

Q: In The Second Stage you said by the year 2000, "I doubt there will be any need for

the likes of Phyllis Schlafley or Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan for that matter. You said
that the argument for equal rights would be "nostalgic history."
A Well, I was a little over-optimistic. Certainly by the year 2000 1 can say
that the concept of equality for women is accepted in the United States and
the idea that women will have their own voice and that women have to be
taken seriously, not just as wives and mothers, but as people. Thats here, thats
in society now. And even the controversial part, like the right to choose when
1 88 Interviews with Betty Friedan

and whether and how many times they have a child and, therefore, safe, legal
access to abortion, there's even a consensus on that in society now. . . .

Q So where do we go from here?

A For one thing, women are only making 74 cents on the dollar for what men
make, but when you analyze the discrepancy, it all begins in the child-bearing,
child-rearing years. And women are not yet at the top, but thats getting to be

there.
So obviously the next step is a much more focused attention—and priority
attention—to a child-care program in terms of activism, in terms of legislation,
in terms of innovations of child-care programs. It might be public and private,
in other words a combination of corporate, city or state or national. Things
like child-care programs (should) be given some priority in union negotia¬
tions, that sort of thing. That's on an activist policy level.
And then on the consciousness level, there must be a much more conscious
push on parenting not being just the mother's responsibility. Two parents, not
even just necessarily the father and mother, a recognition of diversity of family
shape and structure today. And in all these weeks and years there has been
such a focus on choice, and I think that has been right . . . OK, what about
the choice to bear children? That has to be much more focused on the condi¬
tions that make it possible for a woman to advance in her career and not have
to wait until she's 40 and needs maybe in-vitro fertilization to have a kid. So,
there's more that needs to be done.

Q: Is the women's movement still relevant?

A: 1 think the women's movement is in society now. What had been the
agenda of the radical of the women's movement, a revolutionary agenda,
whatever you want to call it, it's in society now. There is a consensus.
 Behind the feminist fllystique
Michael Shelden / 1999

From the London Daily Telegraph, (9 August

1999). Reprinted with permission of Michael
Shelden.

A new book paints Betty Friedan, the high

priest of feminism, as a boozer and a bully. She
sets the record straight to Michael Shelden.

The mother of the modern feminist movement peeks round the door of her
quaint old house on Long Island, New York, and gives me a suspicious look.
"Yeah, what is it?" Betty Friedan rasps. Though the sun is high overhead, she
seems to have slept late and has come to the door wearing only a black
nightie. I remind her that she agreed to be interviewed. "1 did what?" she says,
with a pained expression, and my heart sinks.
FHaving just put down a new biography that calls her "rude and nasty,
self-serving and imperious,” I have come to her door with, shall we say, low
expectations. But not this low. And then, while I am silently counting the
cost of a wasted journey to this remote part of New York State, her big eyes
light up and she throws open the door. "Oh, of course, now I remember.
I've had a few appointments canceled and I was confused. I thought the
interview was another day. Come in and make yourself at home while I get

dressed."
She saunters to the back of the house, the short nightie swaying from thigh
to thigh, her bare soles smudged with dust from the exposed hardwood floors.
I take a seat in the front room and wait. I see that Friedan has hung on the

189
190 Interviews with Betty Friedan

wall a framed woven cloth embroidered with the words: "A woman's place is
in the world.'' On the other side of the room is a table cluttered with old
newspapers, a mystery novel and a big box of poker chips. There cannot be
many seventy-eight-year-old women who keep a ready supply of poker chips
in the front room,- but this is the author of the landmark work, The Feminine
Mystique, a woman who has spent almost half a century urging members of her
sex to be as independent and unconventional as she is.
At the conclusion of her book, she asks a generation: "Who knows what
women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?'' Yet her own
battle for freedom has been so tumultuous that she has often found herself in
conflict with both sexes. Her enemies have been given fresh—and potent—
ammunition by the recent publication in America of Judith Hennessee's Betty
Friedan: Her Life. The book argues that Friedan failed the feminist movement by
attacking everyone she disagreed with and, worse, that she is too fond of men
and does not even like most women. Hennessee paints a lurid picture of Betty's
twenty-one-year marriage to Carl Friedan, alleging that it was a long ordeal
of black eyes and broken mirrors. She claims that they drank too much, had
bitter quarrels over money and sex, sometimes exchanged blows and that Carl
would tell people at parties: 'Tm the bitch's husband."
Yet, as this supposed Medusa enters the room, I see a peaceful expression
on her large oval face and hear polite apologies for her tardiness. 1 hesitate
before asking what she thinks of the new biography and brace myself for an
explosion. There is a brief silence before Friedan remarks, calmly: "Oh, she
can say what she wants and people can believe what they want. I can't stop
that. If she's right, I thought to myself, what a terrible person 1 am. But she's
wrong." She is? "Sure, even the reviewers have said she's wrong about me.
They were critical of the book, but not of me.''
You mean she's wrong when she says you're unhappy and combative?
"Combative, absolutely, but not unhappy," she says—looking combative, but
happy. "What's wrong with being passionate or angry? People are too namby-
pamby these days. Anger, even righteous anger, may not be chic, but there is
a lot in this world to be angry about. We need more passion. I was impressed
when President Kennedy called for more passion in politics, but now the only
passionate people are on the far Right. One thing 1 can say, though, is that
I've had my share of passion. In politics and in life."
Yes, but your critics say that you're so passionate that you become . . .
 Michael Shelden / 1999 191

"Bitchy?" She 1 aughs loudly and wags her finger at me in mock reproof. "No,
not bitchy, just spirited. That's the proper word. Though, years ago, I did tell
a reporter from Life magazine that I may be bitchy, but I'm never boring. And
then 1 got a letter from an aunt I hadn't heard from for years, who scolded me
for using language that was not ladylike."
She shakes her head and laughs loudly again, amused by the thought that
anyone would expect her to be ladylike. But there is another old-fashioned
term that does seem right for her: bohemian. Colorful and casual in her dress,
scornful of tradition and proudly defiant of polite society, she would be at
home among the suffragettes of an earlier day, whose fight for equal justice
she revived in the early Sixties.
"I'm at odds with the radical feminists because I'm not anti-marriage and
anti-family. 1 always thought it was dangerous to go against the idea of family.
I don't even like the phrase 'women's liberation,' because that idea of being set
free from everything doesn't seem right to me. I like to think of the women's
movement as a fight for equality."
That sort of thinking may seem reasonable, but her spirited defense of it
has not always gone down well with some members of the feminist sisterhood.
In particular, she has often feuded with Gloria Steinem, whom she once
described as a female chauvinist boor. Hennessee quotes a feminist who says,
"We all knew Betty hated Gloria's guts," and notes that Gloria used to remark
that each time she held out a hand to Betty, she was left with "a bloody
stump."
Betty rolls her eyes. "These biographers do like to exaggerate, don't they?
But lots of people have made too much of my feud with Gloria. They can't
seem to understand that every important movement is going to have a certain
amount of fighting over turf. Men do it all the time in politics and nobody
says that they're being cruel or pushy. It's just part of the nature of things. Am
I supposed to be silent when Gloria says things I don't agree with? When she
said marriage was a form of prostitution, I spoke up and criticized her. Her
view had nothing to do with my kind of feminism, and I said so. And you
notice that now you don't hear as much from Gloria or from the radical femi¬
nists. That extreme form of thinking tends to come from women who hate
having to deal with the complexities of juggling a career and a family and so,
almost literally, they want to throw the baby out with the bath water. It’s just
unrealistic to be a feminist who is anti-family."
192 Interviews with Betty Friedan

She puts Germaine Greer in the same camp as Steinem, but insists that she
doesn't have a grudge against her rivals. "We're still fighting for a lot of the
same things. But they do have their problems. Germaine is such an exhibition¬
ist and 1 still get a kick out of hearing Gloria's followers object to make-up
and beauty treatments. I mean, Gloria gets her hair streaked and is obviously
a very good-looking babe who cares about her appearance and who has had
lovers who are very rich men. I don t object to a woman trying to look her
best. I always thought it was good to have a stylish woman like Gloria in the

movement."
From the time that she was a young girl in the midwestern town of Peoria,
Betty wanted to be a wife and a mother. She was close to her father, who was
a prosperous jeweler, and was given a good education. But she couldn t help
noticing that her male relatives were sent to better universities.
"All my male cousins went to Harvard Law School. I went to a womans
college and then did graduate work in California. 1 should have gone to Har¬
vard. I would have become a lawyer and, who knows, maybe I d have a seat in
the Supreme Court now. But 1 wasn't allowed that chance. When 1 was young,
in the Thirties and Forties, a woman was not expected to have a family and a
career. It was always either/or. If you look in Who's Who for those years, you
will find that all the women who made it into the book were either married to
famous men or didn't have a family of their own. I didnt want to settle for

that."
So, at the age of twenty-six, she married a man in the advertising business
and promptly began having babies. By the Fifties, she was a restless housewife
with two sons and a daughter. Her one professional outlet was part-time work
as a freelance writer for women's magazines. Frustrated by the lack of opportu¬
nity and the insipid views of womanhood espoused in the mainstream press,
she began writing the 400-page declaration of independence that she would
eventually call The Feminine Mystique. The book struck a chord with many
women who, like Friedan, were suburban wives and mothers yearning for
greater fulfillment. They were tormented by one great unspoken question and
Betty was outspoken enough to put it into words. "Is this all?" she asked of her
lot in life.
Hennessee's book suggests that Betty might never have been driven to
speak out if her own marriage had not been so troubled. Long since divorced
from Carl, Betty has never remarried and now contends that her relationship
 Michael Sbelden / i999 193

with her husband was not all bad. "Carl says that he wants to sue that Hen-
nessee woman because she makes out that he was always abusing me. But he
was very supportive of my efforts to write The Feminine Mysticjue and drove my
publisher crazy by complaining that not enough copies were being printed to
keep up with demand. We're friends today and still see each other. I spent last
Christmas with him in Florida."
So there's not substance to the claims that the marriage was often painfully
difficult? "I'd say it was stormy. Passionate We fought and maybe we had a
couple of drinks in the evenings and fought some more. Look, I'm not a door¬
mat. We did have our battles, and when I became famous it was sometimes
threatening to Carl. If someone wanted to introduce him as Betty Friedan's
husband, he was not happy and wanted to knock the person down. But it was
not all arguments and fighting. We had a lot of good times. We had good
family holidays and we always had dinner together as a family every night.
We love our kids and they've turned out great."
Indeed, their daughter Emily is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and
a prominent physician in Boston. One son, Jonathan, is a partner in an engi¬
neering firm and Daniel is a renowned university physicist who has won sev¬
eral awards, including the so-called "genius grant” from the MacArthur
Foundation. And Betty is now a proud grandmother. "What can 1 say?" she
asks. "We must have been doing some things right
Her sometimes abrasive and abrupt manner may not please everyone, but
she has emerged with many of the things she once yearned for. She has fame,
loving children, a decent amount of money and an interesting life that she
divides between homes in Washington and Long Island. She still lectures and
is said to have the ear of the Clinton administration when it comes to the
appointment of women to senior positions.
In recent years, she has been treated for heart problems, but she is prepar¬
ing to leave for a fortnight's holiday in Italy and is putting the finishing
touches on a new book. "It's my memoir," she says. "It will set the record
straight. I don't know how people will react, but all the important stuff is in

there, and I tell it the way it is. So we'll see . . ."

One thing she knows for certain: despite the carping of her critics, she has
won her place in history. "I have no complaints about the way I'm treated in
the press or by my adversaries. Walk down the street with me in any big city
194 Interviews with Betty Friedan

and you'll see that I'm constantly stopped by women who want to thank me
for my work." And if I have any doubts about her courage, they are put to rest
when she tells me of a recent dinner invitation from her neighbor Thomas
Harris, the reclusive creator of Hannibal "the cannibal Lecter. Did you
accept? 1 ask with a shudder. "Oh, sure, Tommy's a good cook."
 Index

abortion, 42, 48, 55, 69, 70, 78, 89, 100, 101, Caijney & Lacey, 99
102, 105, 107, 155, 170, 188. See also Roe v. California Federation of Teachers, 79
Wade Carabillo, Toni, 123—24
Abzug, Bella, 49, 61, 70 Carpenter, Liz, 70
affirmative action, 101, 102, 106-07, 163-64 Ceballos, Jacqui Michot, 20, 22, 33-34
age mystique, xvi, 72, 77, 115, 118, 121, 1 BO- censorship, 79—80, 102, 124. See also pornog¬
32, 134, 137, 142, 147-48, 164, 179-80 raphy
Alda, Alan, 62 child care, 24, 35-37, 54, 55-56, 60, 62, 69,
Alexander, Delores, 123, 128 79, 89, 100, 105, 108, 109, 115, 159, 179,
alimony, 35-37, 158 188. See also women: motherhood
American Association of University Women, Civil Rights Act 1964, Title VII, 18, 47, 48,
60 66, 122, 172
Annenberg, Wallis, 77 Clarenbach, Kay, 18, 70
Anspach, Susan, 79 Clinton, President William J., 104, 178
Anthony, Susan B., 74, 121 Cole, Jonathan, 135
Atkinson, Ti-Grace, 11, 49 Columbia University, 53
Augsberg College, Minn., 25-26 Comden, Adolph, 125
conservative right, xv, 39, 40, 42, 71, 75, 162—
backlash, 97, 99, 106, 108-09, 111, 162-63, 63, 170, 178, 190. See also Mora! Majority
169, 178, 180 Cornell University, xvii, 174-75
Bell, Dale, 80 corporate downsizing, 155-57, 169, 173, 176
Bennis, Warren, 125 Cuadros, Ana, 33
Bergman, Marilyn, 76 culture, of greed, 101, 104, 175, 179
Bly, Robert, 95
Bottini, Ivy, 127-28 de Beauvoir, Simone, 68, 123, 185
Bradlee, Ben, 125 Denison University, Ohio, 25
Brown, Helen Gurley, 121 de Pisan, Christine, 68
Brown, Murphy, 99 divorce, 35—37, 158, 170, 178. See also alimony
Brown, Rita Mae, 166-67 Dukakis, Michael, 104
Brownmiller, Susan, 21, 22, 79
Bundy, McGeorge, 135 English, Diedre, 122
Bush, President George H. W., 89, 97, 104, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

106, 108 (EEOC), 18-19, 47, 66, 122

195
196 Index

Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), xii, 1 I, 39, ticity of, 8, 27, 41—42, 50—51, 80, 81, 91,

42, 43, 49, 53, 60, 61,67, 69, 70, 82, 83, 89, 1 17, 189-90,- drinking of, 11, 25, 33, 48, 91,

113, 122 189, 190, fellowship at Berkeley, 14-15, 29,

Erikson, Erik, 14 45, 64, 171, feminists' criticisms of, 20, 22,

Ervin, Senator Sam, 11 48, 53, 61, 89-90, 113-14, 119, 123, 124,

Esalen Institute, 32 166-67, 190-91; feminists' defenses of, 20,

21, 22, 33, 48, 123,- finances of, 8, 22-23,
27, 31, 50,- freelance writing, in women's
Faludi, Susan, Backlash, 89—90, 97, 108—09,
magazines, 15—16, 30, 46, 52, 65, 90, 133—
111, 113-14, 119, 123-24
34, 171, 192; grandchildren of, 125, 136,
family: feminism as anti-family, 1 1, 20, 39, 42,
140-41, 176, 193; homes of, 8, 16, 21, 27,
94, 96, 124, 154, 162, 168-69, 172, 178,
29, 31, 41, 43, 45, 46, 50, 51, 74, 80, 81,
191-92,- modern, diversity of, 24, 63, 170,
117, 125-26, 133, 136, 141, 153, 171, 172,
186, 188,- motherhood, 3-6, 37, 54, 56—57,
176, 189,- intellectual abilities of, 4, 7, 1 3,
108-11, 169, 179, 188; mystique of, 62,•
14, 28, 44, 171,-Jewishness/anti-Semitism, 7,
parental leave, 105, 199,- surrogate mother¬
13, 17, 26, 28, 44, 82-83, 120, 126, 139,
hood, 79,- values of, 104, 469-70; welfare
141, 171, 173, 181-83; labor reporter, 15,
mothers, 97, 101, 158—59, 161, 163
28, 29, 45, 46, 65, 111, 126, 133, 171, 181,
Fanin, Fay, 77
love of books, 13, 28; marriage to Carl Frie¬
Farentholdt, Sissy, 60
dan, 7, 15-16, 18, 19, 23, 29-32, 40, 45, 50,
female chauvinist, 49, 61
65, 67, 84, 85, 126-27, 133-34, 171, 176,
feminine mystique, ix-x, 3-6, 11, 16-17, 42,
181-82, 187, 190-93; new economic para¬
46, 47, 62, 65, 74-75, 85, 88, 90, 91, 100,
digm of, 156-60, 173, 175-76, 179,- NOW
112, 115, 123, 126, 130, 134, 137, 150, 164,
167-68, 177, 183-84, 1 87,■ as threatening to president, 19, 32, 48, 52, 74, 89, 122, 127;
personality of, ix-xii, 3, 4, 8, 9, 13, 18—22,
women, 4, 18, 112
feminist mystique, xiv, 39, 42, 46, 54 26-29, 31, 33, 34, 48, 50, 59, 69, 75-77, 81,

feminization, of poverty, 66, 80 88, 91, 117, 1 19, 123, 125, 189-91, 193,■ as

Findlen, Barbara, 121 personification of women's movement, xi,

First Women's Bank and Trust, 61 xiii, 9, 20, 25, 40, 44, 50, 60, 68, 73, 82, 88,

Florida International University, 172 122, 131, 193,- physical appearance of, xi, 7,

Ford Foundation, 135, 175 8, 9, 10, 23, 25-28, 44, 45, 59, 75, 87, 120,

fountain, of age, 72, 84, 1 15, 1 32, 135-38, 161, 171, 189-91, political activism of, 46,•

140-41, 144-45, 147-49, 180 political aspirations of, 24, 33; profanity of,

Freud, Sigmund, 30, 84-85, 123, 160, 187 22; psychoanalysis of, 15, 29; public policy

Friedan, Betty: adolescence of, 13, 14; asthma/ think tank of, 78-79, 125, 143, 156, reaction

health problems, 15, 29, 119—20, 124-25, to radical feminists, xii-xiii, 11, 20, 21, 23,
171, 193; blond hair, 47, 50, 87; books 29, 42-43, 63, 80, 86, 90, 94, 96, 113-14,
about, 176, 190-93; celebrity of, 9, 26, 27, 162, 172; relationship with mother, 13, 30,
31, 88; childhood in Peoria, 7, 13-14, 28, 45, 64, 111, 126, 139-40; research on aging,
44,71,90, 125, 139, 171, 181-83, 192; chil¬ 72, 77, 121, 124, 135-36, 144-45, 147-48;
dren of, 22, 23, 26, 29, 3<J, 43, 44, 46, 50, self-assessment of, 3, 4, 6, 13, 21, 23-24,
51, 84, 120, 125-27, 133, 136, 140-41, 163, 84-87, 117, 129, 130-32, 134, 136, 142,
171, 176, 182, 187, 192-93,- divorce, 7, 22, 190-91; sexuality/male friends, 4, 22, 24,
26, 29, 31,45, 49, 81, 85, 112, 127; domes¬ 25, 44, 57, 81, 82, 125, 129, 131-33,
 Index 197

142-43; sixtieth birthday, xvi, 120, 1 37,- Goodman, Paul and Percival, Communitas, 8, 11
Smith College, 14, 16, 28, 30, 45-46, 52, Graham, Virginia, 17
64, 84, 90, 126, 143, 160, 171-72, 182—83,- Green, Betty, 125
Smith fifteenth reunion questionnaire, x, 16, Greenwald, Harold, 19
30, 46, 126, 143, 172, speaking engage¬ Greenwald, Ruth, 23
ments of, 9-10, 11-12, 25-26, 75, 120, 124, Greer, Germaine, 121, 192
174,-teaching, 72,77, 90, 116, 119, 121, Griffiths, Representative Martha, 66
136, 143, 156, 161, 169-70, 174-76, 193,-
testimony before U S. Senate, 11-12; Haener, Dorothy, 48
Women, Men and the Media, 77, 125, 143, Harper's Magazine, 16,18

145; writer's block of, 19, 24 Harvard University, 136, 149, 183, 192
books by; Beyond Gender The New Politics of "having it all," xiv, 40, 53, 178-79, 185-86. See
Work and Family, 175,- Feminine Mystique. The, also women: superwoman syndrome

3, 7, 16-17, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 30-31, 39, Hefner, Christie, 93, 142
40, 44, 46, 47, 50, 51, 52, 53, 59, 60, 65, 74, Hefner, Hugh, 142
80, 84, 87, 88-89, 90, 95, 102, 111, 117, Helms, Senator Jesse, 54
121, 122, 123, 127, 133-35, 137, 141, 143, Hennessee, Judith, Betty Friedan: Her Life,

147, 150, 153, 159, 161, 164, 166, 167, 172, 190-93

174, 177, 178, 181-82, 184-85, 187, 190, Hernandez, Aileen, 18, 66, 72

192, 193, Fountain of Age, The, 72, 84, 115, Herzog, Arthur, 21, 28

117, 119, 121, 125-28, 130-41, 143, 147, Hill, Anita, 89, 103, 116, 119

153-54, 160, 161, It Chanrjed My Life, 41, 48, Hirschfield, Bob, 81

Hite, Shere, 79
61, 72, 81,- Second Stage, The, xiv, xv, 39, 42,
Horowitz, David, Betty Friedan and the Making of
43, 49, 51, 53, 61,62, 72, 73, 78, 90, 108—
Modem Feminism, 176
09, 123-24, 136, 153, 172, 185, 187
Horton, Willie, 101
hospice movement, 139, 151
Geller, Rabbi Laura, 79, 82
Humphrey, Vice President Hubert, 12
gender gap, 59, 60, 104, 178. See also women:
political power of
Ibsen, Henrik, 177
generativity, xvii, 118, 141 International Ladies Garment Workers Union
George Mason University, 161, 172
(ILGWU), 79
Gilligan, Carol, In a Different Voice, 78 International Women's Congress: in Beijing,
Gingrich, Newt, 161, 163—64 169, 172; in Mexico City, 83; in Nairobi, 83
Girl Scouts, 60 international women's movement, 33-34, 83,
Gittelson, Natalie, 18, 22, 23, 51, 117, 119, 169, 172
120, 123 Ireland, Patricia, 107
glass ceiling, 77, 157, 163—64, 178. See also "it changed my life," 31, 60-61, 66, 80, 88,
women; economic inequality of 118, 133, 164-65, 184, 193
Goldstein, Amy (sister), 28, 125
Goldstein, Harry (brother), 28, 125 Javits, Senator Jacob, 33
Goldstein, Harry (father), 13, 28, 44, 139 Johnson, President Lyndon, 19
Goldstein, Miriam (mother), 13, 28, 44, 64, Junior League, 60
77, 126, 139
Goode, William, 21, 125 Kalish, Irma, 77
Goodman, Ellen, 43 Kamisar, Luci, 20
198 Index

Kempton, Sally, 22 Moral Majority, 43, 49, 54-55. See also conser¬

Kennedy, President John F., 66, 94, 190 vative right

Keyserling, Mary, 18 Mount Vernon College, 169-70, 172

Kindel, Maureen, 76 Ads magazine, 113

King, Rodney, 97 Myrdal, Alva, 179-80

Kirkpatrick, Jeane, 106
Knaak, Nancy, 48 National Abortion Rights Action League
Koffka, Kurt, 14, 45 (NARAL), 70, 1 12, 122, 166
National Endowment for the Arts, 102
Lader, Larry, 70 National Endowment for the Humanities, 135
Ladies Home Journal, 16, 176 National Organization for Women (NOW), 8,
Lear, Norman, 76, 77, 142 18-20, 26, 31-32, 39, 40, 48, 52, 59, 61,67,
Le Guin, Ursula K., 62 68, 72, 74, 76, 84, 89, 102, 107, 112-13,
lesbians/lesbianism, xiii, 20, 32, 33, 40, 42, 49, 117, 161, 166, 172, 174, 184, formation of,
61,71, 72, 97, 107, 127-28, 143-44, 166- 18-19, 122, 186-87; Legal Defense and
67, 172, 178 Education Fund, 70, 122; as NAACP for
Lewis, Flora, 144-45 women, 19, 32, 47, 49, 67, 122, 186
life expectancy, 10, 72, 137-38, 165, 168, National Women's Conference, 41,72, 128
179-80 National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC),
Lincoln, Abraham, 6 45, 53, 61,70, 112, 122, 161
New York University, 90, 125, 136, 143, 172
MacKinnon, Catherine, 119 Nixon. Richard, 26
MacPherson, Myra, 45, 50 nursing homes, 135, 138—39, 151
Madonna, 99
Mailer, Norman, 26
Oak Room, at Plaza Hotel, 19, 49, 113
Marshall, Justice Thurgood, 79
O'Neill, Cathy, 125
McCall's magazine, 16, 50, 62, 90
Our Bodies, Ourselves, 102
McGovern, Senator George, 12
Outward Bound, 118, 130-32
Mead, Margaret, 30, 123
Medicare, 149-50
Paglia, Camile, 108, 114
men: masculine mystique, xiv, 5, 10, 95, 168,
Parkhurst, Harriet, 13-14
179,- Million Man March, 180, movement,
95-96; as partners in second stage, 10, 24, Paul, Alice, 67
Percy, Senator Charles, 12
26, 36-38, 42, 53, 55, 57, 95-96, 108, 111,
124, 168-70, 173, 175, 180, 188; Promise Perot, Ross, 104-05

Keepers, 180; as victims of feminine mys¬ Peterson, Esther, 18

Planned Parenthood, 79
tique, 5, 95-96
Playboy magazine, 91, 142,- bunny, 91-92,- cen¬
Mendenhall, Tom, 184
menopause, 118, 121, 150-51 terfold, 92-93, 98, 115
pornography, 78, 79, 102, 124. See also censor¬
mental deterioration, 1 18, 135, 139, 147-48.
ship
See also age mystique
President's Commission on the Status of
Meuli, Judith, 123-24
Women, 47, 66, 122
Miller, Lisa, 125
Pretty Woman, 97
Miller, Ruthann, 21
Millett, Kate, 33, 123
Moccio, Francine, 175 Quayle, Dan, 97, 99, 107-08
 Index 199

racism/civil rights, 97, 102, 106, 142, 158, 163, Trusteeship for Women, 76
177. See also affirmative action Tyson, Laura D'Andrea, 156
Random House, Inc., 17 Tyson, Mike, 89, 116
Reagan, Nancy, 43, 82
Reagan, President Ronald, 59—60, 82, 100, University of Southern California, 74, 76, 84,
104, 106 90, 124, 125, 136, 143, 146, 156, 172
Redbook magazine, 16, 30, 52, 176
Reeves, Richard, 125 Vietnam War, antiwar movement, 12, 71, 177
Reich, Robert, 156
Reynolds, Burt, 92 Wake Forest University, 8-9
Richards, Ann, 116 Walker, Alice, 119
Robinson, Muriel, 81 Walters, Barbara, 125
Roe v. Wade, 70, 89, 100, 113—14. See also abor¬ Webster abortion decision, 102
tion Whitehead, Mary Beth, 79
Rollin, Betty, 21, 26, 27, 33 Wolf, Naomi, 1 14
RU 486, 101 Womansurge, 41
women: compared to blacks, 5, 19, 26, 67,•
Sanders, Marlene, 145—46 economic inequality of, 35-37, 40, 97, 99,
Schlafley, Phyllis, 187 115, 153-54, 157, 168, 176, 178, 180,-job
Schroeder, Representative Patricia, 89, 105 discrimination, 62, 63, 84, 89, 93, 109, 110,
Scull, Ethel, 23 155, 172, 179, 188,-media misrepresenta¬
See, Carolyn, 77, 81 tions of, 69, 105-07, 110, 116, 162, 178;
Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and political power of, xv, 5, 45, 53, 59-60, 61,
Human Needs, 11—12 67, 69, 70, 94, 103, 105, 116, 153, 178,- in
sex objects/female sexuality, 4, 5, 10, 12, 91- politics, 105, 106, 116, 170, 190, protective
94, 97 legislation, 69, 79,- scapegoating, 96-97, 99,
sexual harassment, 101, 103, 155, 169 102, 155-56, 158-59, 161, 169, 185,- super-
Shalala, Donna, 120 woman syndrome, 40, 53, 56, 62, 85, 185;
Sheehy, Gail, 121 violence against, 43, 97, 101, 114,- woman
Silence of the Lambs, 97—98 suffrage, 67, 74, 167, 177, 191
Silent Majority, 12 Women's Equity Action League (WEAL), 70
Smeal, Elbe, 49 Women's Forum, 112
Smith, Senator Margaret Chase, 66 women's movement, xi, 7-9, 18-19, 20—24,

Smith, William Kennedy, 89 25, 31-34, 40-42, 47-49, 53-54, 61, 68-

Specter, Senator Arlen, 105 71, 89-90, 94-97, 105-07, 113-14, 118—

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 74, 121 19, 122-24, 127-28, 134, 159-60, 177-80,

Steinem, Gloria, xiii, 22, 33, 45, 49, 61,70, 79, 184-88, 191-92,- revolution, xii, 5, 27, 71,

90, 107, 112-13, 119, 120, 122, 127, 187, 85, 138,- second stage of, 38, 43, 53, 55, 57,

191 62, 75, 78, 108-09, 124, 143, 155-59, 168,

Stimpson, Catherine, 123 179-80,- sexual politics, xv, 49, 61, 78, 123—
24, 128, 172, 178,- splits in, xii, 20, 32-33,
Thatcher, Margaret, 106 41, 49, 72, 106-08, 123, 172, 178, 191-92;
Thelma & Louise, 98 younger feminists' response to, xii, 41, 53,
Thomas, Justice Clarence, 89, 103 72, 75, 89, 105, 114, 121, 162, 172, 178,

Toffler, Alvin, 88 184-85

Travolta, John, 62 Women's Research and Education Institute, 60
Women's Strike for Equality, 8, 20, 21, 24, 32- Young Socialist Alliance, 71
Young Women's Christian Association
33, 40, 49, 72, 83
(YWCA), 60
Woodhull, Nancy, 145
Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, 157

W. W. Norton & Co., 16, 17 Zolotov, Maurice, 81

 DATE DUE

*
 TRENT UN VERSITY

0 164 0572733 4
 Biography / Women's Studies

Through these interviews Betty Friedan speaks fervently and combatively

for herself and the momentous causes she has fought for.
In 1963 Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was published, and since that time
this writer, teacher, public intellectual, and passionate advocate of social
and economic justice in America has remained in the public spotlight.
Transforming her into the mother of modern feminism, her landmark
book challenged the prevailing gender ideology in the country and ulti¬
mately led to one of the most profound movements for social change in
American history.
In these interviews her arguments about equity and fairness—as well as
the striking consistency of her views about men, women, and the American
family—provide a rich resource for scholarly research.
The interview genre captures Friedan's immediacy, her passion, her wit,
her candor, and her contradictions. In showing her political and philo¬
sophical development, they reveal her to be one of the twentieth century's
most significant thinkers.

JANANN Sherman is an associate professor of history at the University

of Memphis. She is the author of No Place for a Woman -. A Life of Senator
Margaret Chase Smith and, with Carol Lynn Yellin, The Perfect 36: Tennessee
Delivers Woman Suffrage.

ISBN 1-57806-480-5

University Press of Mississippi

www. u press. state. ms. us

Conversations with Public Intellectuals

9 781578 064807
Photo credit: © 2002 Nancy Crampton