Remembering Betty Friedan

A woman died yesterday, a woman who changed my life, maybe saved it - if you're a woman, she also changed your life, whether you know it or not. I was twenty years old in 1963 when Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. Twenty years old, on the cusp of becoming an adult woman, with no idea what to do, how to do it. Except that I knew I didn't want to repeat the lives of my mother and aunts; didn't want - couldn't want - the life my classmates were preparing for, pairing off with engagement rings as graduation grew nearer. I wanted to be independent, to travel, to explore the world as my male classmates were intending to do, wanted, most of all, to understand what to do about the feelings I had to acknowledge I had for other women.

Alvin Toffler calls Mystique, "the book that pulled the trigger on history." And it was. Those who were born after l963, or were too young at the time to be paying attention to one of the seminal books of their century, can not know how this book and the movement it inspired, changed this country. The feminist movement was not women protesting the Miss America Pageant by burning their bras, it was a social tidal wave of change for every institution in this country. Friedan was eventually criticized for writing to a middle-class, white and married audience of women, but the door she opened for them ultimately let through a flood of women of color, single women and lesbians. Friedan gave us permission to be full participants in the panoply of life, pursue educations, adventures, jobs, lives that had not been scripted for us in the fifties.

To know what those fifties lives were like for women, go here and read the first chapter of Mystique. It's like a bad dream. Or a bad joke. But it was neither; it was the bad reality of my mother's life, maybe your mother's too. A reality that left a wildly intelligent, creative woman bitter and cramped and mean as the years wore on. She resented our educations, our wandering through Europe with backpacks and boys, our jeans and boots, the books we read, in a word - our freedom from the strictures under which she had lived her entire life.

Friedan died on her 85th birthday, after a long life of writing, teaching, lecturing and leading a movement that gave us the possibilities woman and girls now have. We can be anything we choose to be, even, in the end, wives and mothers. It's a choice now, not a prison. If you aren't as familiar with Friedan's life and work as you might be, this article in today's New York Times gives a good summary of both: Betty Friedan, Who Ignited Cause in 'Feminine Mystique,' Dies at 85.

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