www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, April-May 2006Betty Friedan's legacyBetty Friedan died in February on her 85th birthday. Her ground-breaking book THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE, published in 1963, captured what she called "the problem that has no name," which she defined as "simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities." She was a leader in a movement that made it possible for women to understand that our frustrations, dissatisfaction, and smoldering anger with the limitations society imposed on us, did not mean we were crazy, or that something was wrong with us. Rather, Friedan's book was an articulation of an Idea whose time had come and part of the movement wherein women recognized that something was wrong with a society that would oppress women and it needed to change--NOW. The small women's group I was involved with in 1967 sent a representative to the second convention of the organization that Friedan helped found in 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW). Our group, which included women active in the civil rights and anti-war movements as well as students, looked at what NOW was demanding--equality with men within this capitalist society, the right for bourgeois women to work when poor and Black women had always worked--and rejected it outright. We were not alone. Radical women explicitly rejected equality as a goal and instead demanded WOMEN'S LIBERATION. Friedan was a founder of several important organizations besides NOW, including, in 1969, the organization now known as NARAL Pro-Choice America; but she was important to the movement's development, not only when she was right, but also when she was wrong. Friedan was so fearful of bad press destroying the movement that she let that set her ground. Instead of rejoicing in the rise of Women's Liberation, she saw it as a rival and too radical. Likewise, she did not grasp the lesbian movement as both emerging from the WLM and as a new source of strength and ideas. She so feared the taunts by anti-feminists and the media that "feminist=Lesbian" that she coined the expression "the lavender menace." Friedan was able to transcend some of her inner contradictions, eventually coming to embrace the gay and lesbian movement, for example. The contradiction she never comprehended is that women can never be free under capitalism. Nothing she ever did challenged capitalism or understood the relationship between women's oppression and the mode of production. It is why the WLM has to move beyond her. While it doesn't cancel out what she did accomplish, her limitations reveal why the struggle must continue--and will. --Terry Moon |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
