Thank you, Betty Friedan

Once someone is past a certain age (say eighty or so), it's not supposed to be a surprise when she dies.  That never seems to pan out in real life, though.  A wonderful article in the L. A. Times about Julia Child by a loving friend of hers basically said that the longer Child lived, the more it seemed that she was just never going to die. 

Betty Friedan's death was a shock to me partly on that account, and partly because it seems to me that when someone manages to become an icon, they really shouldn't be allowed to die.  (Or else they should have gotten their own demise tidily out of the way well before I came on the scene.)  And partly, I suppose, because there are so few writers who have become important to me who were actually alive when I read their work.  I had time to get used to the idea of Jane Austen, and even Shirley Jackson, no longer walking among us even before I read them.  Their deaths were almost incidental -- it was their papery immortality I was enjoying now.

Betty Friedan was different.  She was not only still alive but still writing when I read her most important book, The Feminine Mystique.  In a way, though, I felt as if I was reading a piece of history (which I was) rather than something that had anything to do with my life.  Not that I thought that sexism was anything like dead; but the idea that women who were financially able to stay at home with their children would be expected --

Wait.  Stop right there.  That's exactly the kind of sentence that makes me wonder just how far we really have come in the forty-odd years since FM was published.  Why is it that a woman who is working at home taking care of her children and household is always described as being "able" to stay at home, and always describes herself as lucky enough to be able to stay home?  I have met some fathers who are at-home parents (or employed very part-time but still the primary caregivers of their children and responsible for the lion's share of the housework) and who are perfectly happy to be doing what they're doing, and not one of them has ever said that he is lucky to be able to stay at home.  Why doesn't a woman who has a job as well as a family she loves ever describe herself as "able" to work, and "lucky" to be able to?  If feminism has come so far, why does it seem that money is still the only really okay reason for a female parent to work?  I have yet to hear a mother, when speaking of her gainful employment...

-- Wait a minute, here comes another important tangent.  Why is it always, and only, called "work outside the home" for women?  Even I, raging raving feminist booklady I, harbor no faintest idea that the majority of the population of America can pronounce the entire sentence "A woman's place is in the home" without sputtering into laughter or at least lowering their eyes and looking appropriately sheepish.  So why, when an adult female human being gets a job, do we speak of her working "outside the home," as if the house is her natural environment until and unless cruel want drives her out into the cold harsh world?  Talk about Victorian ideas.  Even if the phrase is only or generally used when a woman has children, it's still weird.  My husband and I became parents at the same time.  I have never once heard his current employment referred to by him or anyone else as work outside the home.  Maybe I'll start calling it that.  I'll tell people that my husband works outside the home, and tally up how many confused looks I get in the course of a day. 

But getting back to my original rant.  I have yet to hear a mother discussing her paid employment without making it very clear immediately that she is "only" working because her family needs the money.  To emphasize this point, she will sometimes list the things her paycheck covers -- the mortgage, the food on the family table, those shoes little Timmy is currently attempting to beat his brother senseless with.  She has to work. 

Well, all right.  As long as you really have to, I guess it's okay.  You go ahead, then.

Do you see where this is going?  Why are women still feeling as if they have to apologize for working?  Or at the very least account for it?

Women have always worked.  A quick look at the history of anywhere and anywhen will show you that the idea that women have only recently been "allowed" to work is a myth.  The poor have always been with us.  Heck, for an awfully long time the poor were the overwhelming majority, so it would probably be more accurate that the poor were us until the advent of the middle class, which was pretty damned comparatively recent if memory serves.  And poor women work.  Always have.  And then, after the middle class came along to make things interesting, women who were not technically poor worked -- for many reasons, but mostly because they may not have been poor exactly but they weren't rich, either.  Betty Friedan points out in the introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of FM that in 1963, the year it was published, nearly half of all the women in America "were already committing the unpardonable sin of working outside the home."  But that was okay, because they felt guilty about it, and because the jobs were almost never the kind of work one could call a career, in terms of pay and desirability.  If asked, they would explain that they had to work:  if they were single, because they had to support themselves until they got married (and in many cases were hoping to find a husband at work -- Friedan tells some pretty depressing stories about secretaries job-hopping in desperate attempts to find that special someone); if they were married, because their families needed the money for a house or a new house or just that ever-insistent grocery bill.  I wasn't there, but I'm willing to bet that at least these women had the decency to make up for such thoroughly unfeminine behavior by doing all the cooking and the housework. 

I will now hasten to go on the record as infinitely preferring to be in my thirties now rather than in 1963, or even 1983.  To finish the sentence I started before, I very much appreciate growing up in a time and place in which a woman would never be expected to hurry up and marry and have kids so her real life can start, and only work (preferably at some dead-end, non-threatening job at significantly lower wages than a man doing exactly the same damned thing) when and if dire financial need came along.  I'm just saying that it strikes me as odd that for all the changes for the better -- and there have been a lot of them -- a lot still sounds the same.  Think of someone saying to you "Look, I'll be honest -- I love my family, but I'd go nuts if I were home all day every day with just the kids and the housework.  Maybe for a little while, sure, but I need a real outlet for my talents and abilities, and I don't just mean a hobby.  I need to work.  I need the satisfaction of applying myself to a problem, to being a working member of my field, of making some money I can call my own."  If it's a man talking, your reaction is a bemused "Well, duh." 

And if it's a woman?

I remember when I was working one of those jobs no one expects to keep forever, behind the counter at a bookstore.  A chain bookstore.  Whee.  Those who weren't in management-level jobs (and some who were) were only there to put themselves through college, kill time between "real" jobs, or take on a second shift in addition to other work to pay off loans or bills.  One young man there had just finished an advanced degree in something impressive-sounding -- sociology, I think.  He was looking around for something real to apply himself to.  He was living with his fiancee, who was a Wall Street wondergirl and made more than enough money for both of them to live on, and live well.  She'd said in so many words that he could stay home for a while, indefinitely, forever if he wanted -- especially if and when they had kids.  I thought that sounded better than being screamed at by people who didn't know the name of the book they were looking for yet expected us to find it, but he made a face.  "I didn't get my master's degree so I could sit around the house all day," he said. 

I think it was the fact that it was a man speaking that ended the conversation right there.  Call me some kind of pinko commie freak, but I really think that everyone's attitude, including yours hearing about it, would have been different if the genders of the couple in question had been reversed.  Especially if the kids in question had been actual rather than theoretical.  Yes, a lot more of the women who work today are working at jobs actually worth having -- jobs a sane person would want, even enjoy -- compared to when Friedan wrote FM.  And that's a big step.  I just wish that the ones who have children didn't still feel like they had to explain.  And I really wish that the mothers I know who are at home with their kids would stop talking about what a privilege it is not to "have" to work.

But back to Friedan.  The Feminine Mystique wasn't so much ahead of its time as right on time.  There is no other explanation for the fact that barely twenty years after it was published, I could read it and be amazed that it had ever needed to be written.  Just this once, a prophet could be honored in her own country.

One tribute to Friedan in my local paper pointed out, from the author's own experience, just how far feminism has come in how short a time.  As the writer of the piece explained to her incredulous nieces -- one in her teens, the other in her early twenties -- she applied for a reporting job at the Washington Post in 1965.  She was required, as part of the application process, to write an essay.  The subject?  "How I Plan to Combine Motherhood with a Career." 

Now, the author of this piece points out that this was a "singularly inappropriate topic" for her to have to expound upon, given that at the time she was nineteen and childless.  I hate the idea that she's implying it really would have been all right if she'd just been a few years older.  The whole situation reminds me of a terrific "Doonesbury" comic from the seventies.  A main character, a recently divorced woman in her thirties, is applying for law school.  One of the questionnaires asks if the applicant is male or female, and then goes on to inquire, "If your answer is 'female,' why should we take a chance on you and train you to be a lawyer when you'll probably just quit and get married anyway?"  Surely the burst of horrified laughter that line inspired wasn't simply due to the fact that, well, the woman had just gotten divorced and was still bitter about the whole marriage state, so losing her to matrimony wasn't exactly an issue.  I think the fulsome essay topic from the Post would be no less humiliating for a woman who did indeed have offspring and the temerity to want a job as a reporter. 

(Speaking of former female reporters for the Washington Post -- Judith Martin, now writing as Miss Manners and a columnist for the Post in the sixties, mentions in her lamentably out-of-print book The Name on the White House Floor that she decided to marry Robert Martin "after he promised he would let me be a person, too."  "That passed for raging feminism in those days," she adds dryly.)

Depressingly entertaining anecdotes aside, it is truly remarkable how much depends on just the right book at just the right time.  Friedan's writing inspired a critical mass of people desperate for change and hey presto! here we are, just a few decades later, only half believing that want ads used to be divided up by which gender need bother to apply for which jobs.

Of course it didn't happen overnight, or easily.  But there's still something almost magical about what Friedan and the other early second-wave feminists were able to accomplish.  In a way, there was something almost enviable about having their work so very blatantly cut out for them.  My at-home-but-still-enlightened mother-friends and I have long, troubled conversations about what it means to be a feminist and a female primary-caregiving parent.  What message are we giving our daughters -- and our sons, for that matter?  What even is feminism, these days, other than a word most people feel uncomfortable applying or hearing applied to themselves?  These talks are important, but they lack a certain edge, a certain bracing bite.

Whereas when NOW was still a fledgling group, one of its first major victories was helping women win the right to keep their jobs as flight attendants even past the age of thirty or after marrying.

How horrible to live in a time when an employer could make such a requirement without blinking an eye, or being punched in one; but how exhilarating it must have been to have such a nice clean fight to throw oneself into.

Things got murkier later.  Friedan was accused of being reactionary, even anti-feminist, when she worried in print about women fighting for lives exactly like the ones that men had been living for so long.  She was concerned that the next generation might miss out by focusing too closely on career without working out how to viably factor in a family as well.  When a Los Angeles Times article opined that Betty Friedan must be spinning in her grave at the results of a recent study showing that a majority of women who have chosen to stay home with their children are happy with their choice, it was obvious that the author hadn't read anything Friedan had written after 1963.  "Chosen motherhood is the real liberation," she said.  "The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different."  But the devil is in the details, and she worried, in the pages of The Second Stage, about how women could find real fulfillment -- meet their own needs for intellectual nourishment, survive financially, and not have to miss out on the difficult but very real pleasure that parenthood can bring.

I remember how shocked I was the first time I heard a woman -- young, educated, intelligent -- say that she was staying at home with her children for "the long run" because her mother had been a feminist who had, as this woman put it, dropped her into day care at a very young age.  Her mother had loved her family and also loved her work, and the daughter had understood all that but also hated feeling so alone so often.  She wanted to make sure her children never felt the way she did. 

This is exactly the kind of thing Friedan was afraid of -- that women would feel that it had to be either/or.  This young woman had felt neglected by her own mother and decided that doing right by your kids, if you're a woman, means being with them, all the time.

I feel intensely uncomfortable when I hear such stories. 

I also felt intensely uncomfortable when I read about a scientist, tops in her field, who went back to lecturing three days after giving birth to her first child because the way to stay at the top of her field was to treat childbirth exactly as she would if she were a male parent -- that is, as if it had never happened, or happened to someone else. 

There has to be some other way.  Some middle path.

Please?

No easy answer to that question.  But Friedan tackled it in her later writing, and was promptly derided -- branded a reactionary, accused of being anti-feminist, oversimplified and insulted by young feminists.  (Read The Second Stage and then read Susan Faludi's take on it in Backlash, and then tell me if you feel convinced that you and Faludi read the same book.)

If The Feminine Mystique was the right book at the right time, The Second Stage was the package no one wanted to sign for.  Liberal feminists found it too conservative, and conservatives weren't going to be thrilled with the changes Friedan wanted -- not just for women, but for everyone.  She wanted to shake up the whole system.  Fighting for the right to work and live "just like men" wasn't good enough.  It wasn't even good, not any more.  Not even men should have to live the way middle-class men had once been expected to in America -- sole or main financial support for families they saw at night, if they could get home before bedtime, and on those weekends they didn't have to work (or bring work home).  Women had fought for maternity leave and some guarantee that their jobs would be waiting for them when they were ready to return to work; but what about parental leave for men, and a work environment that acknowledged that the families of employees had needs beyond the merely financial?

"The women's movement was necessary," Friedan noted in one of the greatest understatements of the century.  "But the liberation that began with the women's movement isn't finished.  The equality we fought for isn't livable, isn't workable, isn't comfortable in the terms that structured our battle.  The first stage, the women's movement, was fought within, and against, and defined by that old structure of unequal, polarized male and female sex roles.  But to continue reacting against that structure is still to be defined and limited by its terms.  What's needed now is to transcend those terms, transform the structure itself."

Maybe The Second Stage failed because the problems it took on were vaguer even than "the problem that has no name."  It was easy -- or at least comparatively straightforward -- to attack the notion that all women can be, are, and should be fulfilled by the same life-description:  wife and mother.  As another feminist later pointed out, it would be ridiculous on the face of it to claim, say, that men should be only and always farmers -- good, traditional, necessary, healthy work -- ignoring all differences of personality and preference.  And it would sound pretty funny for the opposite gender to be making such a claim, all the while refusing to dirty their hands with such "fulfilling" work.  It's easy to fight a stereotype by shouting "No!"  But what to do next?  We've learned what we don't want; what is the other side of the coin?  What do we do when, as Friedan hoped women would, we move past simple reaction against the ham-handed gender injustices of the past?

Blame the "mother" of a movement for not having a quick, easy, succinct answer to yet another problem without a name?

Maybe I feel so strongly about this exactly because in a way, Friedan was the mother of my own feminism.  She was the first feminist writer I ever read, though at the time -- I was a teenager, it was the eighties -- The Feminine Mystique struck me not so much as a feminist guidebook but as a history book.  Even in the sheltered suburbs where I grew up, the mothers who did at least some paid work outnumbered the entirely unpaid homemakers by a fairly wide margin.  When Friedan pointed out that devoting one's entire life to a work -- the rearing of offspring -- that would be accomplished in plenty of time to leave a yawning, boring stretch of years still needing to be filled seemed only logical, and I couldn't understand why she had to phrase it so vehemently.  I knew intellectually how revolutionary her words were at the time she first published them; I just couldn't imagine what it would be like to live in such a world.  It seemed as remote to me as the America she described in the pages of FM given to the feminists who fought for women's right to vote.  The nineteenth century and its restrictive clothing and high-sounding language didn't seem much quainter or more removed to me than America in the fifties.

Of course, part of The Feminine Mystique is a history book, a fact rarely mentioned.  But surely it was as revolutionary a gesture to honor the women of the past, sing their praises and outline their brave deeds to a world that seemed in danger of forgetting them, as it was to outline the woes of modern-day women.

I will always be grateful to Friedan for guiding me to the early feminists.  The single chapter she devotes to them in FM is brief, but covers a good deal of territory; and the quotes and anecdotes she chooses to emphasize are unforgettable.  It's ironic, considering that the women's movement Friedan helped usher in has often been accused of being too narrowly focused on white middle-class women, that her writing was my (and surely many others') introduction to Sojourner Truth's ringing "Ain't I a Woman?" speech, in which the former slave bared her work-hardened arm and spoke out indignantly against the idea of women as fragile, delicate creatures.  I sought out Truth's autobiography on the strength of that passage, possibly on the same shopping trip that I found a cheap paperback copy of Ibsen's A Doll's House because Friedan kept mentioning it and if I hear a book I haven't yet read mentioned often enough I go rapidly insane until and unless I finally sit down and read the damned thing. 

Anyway.  I remember, too, how moved I felt on reading in FM about Lucy Stone, who was clear-sighted enough to see what the routine changing over of women's names on marriage really implied about the value of the women themselves.  There's nothing wrong in theory with families being based around a single surname; but why does it always have to be his?  I know two families who based their decision on which name the partners would "keep" after marriage on which of the two possibilities was the most aesthetically pleasing, and I think this an eminently sensible approach.  I confess I cannot stay all the way in my chair when I hear grown intelligent women saying that they changed their names on marrying because they love their husbands so much and are so proud to be their wives.  What's love got to do with it?  Are they implying that my enthusiasm for my spouse is lukewarm because I kept my birthname?  If affection for one's mate implies an overwhelming urge to switch surnames, shouldn't they be worrying about the fact that their husbands didn't feel so inclined?  And why, if a woman feels that obliterating her nominal identity is a sign of passionate attachment, doesn't she go whole hog and change her first name, too, while she's at it?  Wouldn't that be the ultimate gesture of gosh-I-love-my-man?  "Hi, I'm Bob, and this is my husband, Bob?" 

But I digress.  Often.  If the chapter devoted to early American feminism is arguably the strongest one in the book, "Progressive Dehumanization" is the most problematic.  I never had the chance to ask her personally, and of course no one ever tells me anything, but it's my opinion that Friedan made the common mistake of worrying that her audience wouldn't take her subject as seriously as they ought to (that is, as seriously as she did) unless she shocked them into listening.  And so she compared the house of the American suburban housewife to "a comfortable concentration camp."

This was nearly thirty years before Mike Godwin came up with the law he modestly named after himself, in which he claimed that "as an online discussion group grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."  Following speedily in this little gem's footsteps (yes, I know that jewels don't have feet) was the online tradition that as soon as someone did mention the Nazis, he'd automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. 

This, in turn, reminds me irresistibly of the wonderful scene in the movie Soapdish in which Sally Fields' boss tells her that he's just following orders, and she retorts, in a tone of voice I've never been able to imitate effectively in spite of years of trying, "So was Hitler!"  I know this doesn't exactly have anything to do with the subject at hand, but it's really funny.

Actually, it might have a lot to do with the subject at hand, which in case you forgot too was Friedan comparing American suburbia to a cluster of concentration camps.  Fields' character is endearing, but can hardly be accused of being an intellectual heavyweight.  When she finds herself thrust abruptly into the middle of an argument she's desperate to win, she can only cast around for the biggest metaphorical rock she can throw.  And of course Hitler is the biggest baddie available for comparison. 

Shockingly, she doesn't make too compelling a case for her side (even when she reluctantly demotes her boss to mere Eichmann-status), and, to return to the land of not-humorous-at-all, neither does Friedan.  I could devote this entire essay, and another one besides, to everything that's wrong with Friedan's revolting analogy, but even if I had the heart, the work really doesn't need doing.  There is, thankfully, a certain amount of duh left in the world, and one doesn't have to back up a statement to the effect that a housewife's existence bears exactly no resemblance to that of a concentration camp inmate.  But I do want to touch just for a moment on why it's so disappointing that Friedan stooped to this analogy.

First, she weakened her own argument in the very process of trying to bulk it up against any assault.  She gave herself such an enormously bizarre premise to defend that it was simply impossible.  Even she couldn't quite phrase the analogy as a bald-faced statement; when it came to that, she faltered into a question -- "is [the American housewife's] house in reality a comfortable concentration camp?" -- to which the answer simply has to be no, no matter how hard she tries to sway her readers into even a tentative agreement.  And by being so absolutely wrong, she lost credibility.  All anyone who wanted to discredit her entire book had to do was mention the fact that Friedan had made such a comparison; did anything else need to be said? 

And then, once having put her name to such a statement, she trapped herself into having to defend it forever, or at least not recanting it.  Because if she backed away from one of her premises, how strong could the rest of them be?

Of course she should have admitted that it was a horrible, misguided analogy.  The rest of the book is incredibly strong.  And it was her first book.  She was in a fine position, I think, to explain one indiscretion away as a youthful error. 

I don't know if the fact that she herself was Jewish makes it more or less excusable that she'd make such a claim.  I rather think less.  Show me an American Jew in the sixties who hadn't lost relatives in the camps and I'll show you someone descended from a long line of orphans.  It just didn't happen.  Any Jewish family tree has huge scorch marks from sixty-some years ago.  Accepting that fact and everything it entails includes ruthlessly refusing to trivialize the more ghastly events of World War II.

So how come Betty Friedan is still one of my heroes?  Enough that I felt a real proverbial pang when I read of her death?

Because what she did was amazing.  What she wrote was amazing. 

And because even forty years after it was written, and almost twenty years after I first read it, The Feminine Mystique has saved my sanity and given me writing time that left to myself I might not have known how to claim.  Not only because that book helped change the world enough that I don't have to apologize for having my goal every day be to spend more time writing than housekeeping.  But because, in it, Friedan gave me that devilish little phrase "housework expands to fill the time available," and on my better days I hear my good angel whispering it in my ear.  And I'm reminded that when I have two hours to call my own, I can clean for both of them, or I can write for one and clean for one and probably get our apartment just about the same amount of clean. 

And without Friedan's writing, I might have felt too consumed with guilt to pursue my own.  If even in this new millennium I find it hard enough to turn away from the cleaning that constantly cries out for me to do it -- at least dust that shelf, it's right in front of you!  it'll only take a minute! -- and fix my gaze resolutely on my work, I'm not sure I'd have stood a chance when the feminine mystique was in full swing. 

So -- thank you, Betty Friedan.  I'm sorry I never took the time and trouble to say it when you were still here to hear.  But a lot of other women did.  And a lot of others don't even know they ought to.  And that's got to mean something.

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