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Ambivalent about BettyFebruary 05, 2006 No way I'd ever try to deny the key role played by Betty Friedan, who died yesterday on her 85th birthday, in the emergence and development of U.S. feminism's "second wave." She titled her second book It Changed My Life, "it" being the women's movement; it was her silence-breaking first book, The Feminine Mystique, that changed mine. What it gave me when I first read it -- as a college undergraduate, probably in 1970 -- was a whole other take on my mother and on the daddy-go-to-work-mommy-stay-home suburb I grew up in. My mother was placid when sober, furious when drunk. The furious mother made by far the deeper impression: when she yelled that she hated me, hated us kids, hated my father, wished she'd never married him or had us, I believed her. She was unhappy and isolated as well as angry; hers was not a life I wanted, but I half feared that it was contagious. The obvious alternative was to identify with my father and take his side, which I did. When I read The Feminine Mystique I was well on the way to becoming a queen bee, the kind of woman who brags that all her friends are men and claims that women aren't very interesting. Betty Friedan's book and the movement it helped catalyze aborted that trajectory and, well, changed my life. Within a year or so, Friedan spoke at my college. Of course I went. Every woman I knew went; the hall was packed. I don't remember what she said. She solicited written questions from the audience, and mine was one of those she read aloud and answered, but I don't remember what it was. What I remember most clearly is what she didn't say, and the question I didn't have the nerve to ask. The unprettified version went something like this: Ms. Friedan, you are not physically attractive. Neither am I. Many men in this society consider unsightly women fair game for public harassment and humiliation. I'm barely out of my teens and already I know this. You're a generation older -- you must have run into it a time or two. So why in your speech have you gone out of your way to portray yourself as popular with and attractive to men? My first encounter with the fat liberation movement was still a decade away, but still I knew Betty Friedan was holding something back. As the 1970s rolled on, I kept looking to the women's liberation movement to help explain my life, but my life had moved far beyond the white mommy-daddy suburbs and Friedan's feminism was no longer challenging. In some respects it even looked like part of the problem: Friedan was apparently willing to sell some women, notably lesbians, down the river in order to make feminism less threatening to men and to women who didn't want to look too closely at their own prerogatives and privileges. When her Second Stage was published in 1981, I was the book buyer at Lammas, D.C.'s feminist bookstore. The publisher's sales rep was surprised that I didn't order many copies. Of course the store would stock the book, but it was difficult to muster much enthusiasm for an author whose feminism only included the store's lesbian staff and many lesbian customers if we kept our woman-identification under wraps. Back then, feminists and lesbians who didn't meet the prevailing standards for physical attractiveness and general docility were continually subjected to variations on "You're just a feminist (or a lesbian) because you can't get a man." (Has this changed??) For years I avoided visible public roles because being fat made me an obvious target for the charge and, I thought, a liability to the movement. Thanks to the fat liberation movement and some stellar and totally unapologetic fat female role models, I gradually started performing my work and doing some public speaking. Time came when I totally recognized You're just a feminist because . . . for what it is: an attempt to keep unruly women in line. I wonder if Betty Friedan ever got to that stage. Her obit in today's online Washington Post (written by Patricia Sullivan) quoted her as saying in 1993, "It isn't that I have stopped being a feminist, but women as a separate interest group are not my concern anymore." The feminisms that Friedan disparaged, or at the very least did not embrace, recognized early on that women weren't and couldn't be "a separate interest group," and that within category Women exist all the other divides and loyalties encompassed by humankind in general. Feminism is a perspective, a way of looking at the world, a commitment to keep women on the stage, not off in the wings or perpetually in the audience. Did Betty Friedan eventually come to realize that? I don't know. I do know that without The Feminine Mystique I probably wouldn't have set out on my journey to a place where that perspective is possible.
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