Conference turris::womannotes-v1

693.0. "Betty Friedan - 25 years" by STUBBI::B_REINKE (where the sidewalk ends) Sun Jan 31 1988 21:33

      
The following is from a clipping that my mother-in-law sent me (she is
a remarkable woman!) It is taken from the Christian Science Monitor
sometime in January tho I do not have the exact date.

    
     Where were you when the 'Mystique' was shattered? 
    
Twenty-five years ago next month, a 42 year-old house-wife and mother
of three in Rockland County, N.Y., shook American social structures to
the core with a best seller that launched the modern women's movement.
Contending that deeply entrenched attitiudes and social barriers
imprisioned educated women in a "house-wife" trap, Betty Friedan
called for expanded career opportunities and equality with men. 
    
So powerful was her message that many women still chart the 1960s by
two reference points: where they were when President John F. Kennedy
was shot, and where they were when they read "The Feminine Mystique". 
    
Ms Friedan appreciates how long a 25 years it has been when she hears
college students tell her with youthful enthusiasm. "Oh, we've studied
you in our history books!" 
    
Friedan hardly resembles a figure embalmed in a history text. Sitting
in the booklined living room of her 40th-floor apartment overlooking
Central Park, she is dressed in green turtleneck, black slacks, and
white Nikes. Modern art hangs on salmon-colored walls, and winter
sunlight bounces off a carved settee upholstered in a splashy
red-and-purple print. 
    
But more and more these days, Friedan feels like her own historian.
She has just left for Los Angleles to serve as a visiting
distinguished professor at the University of Southern California where
on Feb 9 she will be the guest of honor at a gala celebrating the
silver anniversary of her now classic volume, 

At this personal point for looking ahead and looking back, how does
Friedan see what she calls "the adventure of my own life" relating to
"the wonderful adventure of the women's movement itself, this
passionate journey that has changed possibilities for women"? 

Her rhetoric gives away Friedan as an incorrigible optimist. How could
she have written "The Fmenine Mystique" in the first place without a
surplus of hope?  But in an interview full of the retrospection,
introspection, and prophecy appropriate to an anniversary, she sounded
an uncharacteristically sober note before letting her natural
enthusiasm take over. 
    
Friedan worries about "a new feminine mystique in the air, which could
get much worse if the stock market crash and the tremors we are
experiencing are followed by recession and serious umemployment.  If
there is going to be any kind of a recession, some kind of
uncertainty, women make a good scapegoat, because every family has
one." 

Already she finds troubling evidence of that new mystique.  The forms
may vary but the implied message remains the same" "Give up your
feminist dreams. They were wrong. Go home again." 

Friedan takes two new movies as her text. In "Fatal Attraction" a
"sexually aggressive and crazy" career woman is protrayed as "pure
evil, pure menance - to the family, to the man who dallies with her.
She is famally killed by the sweet housewife, with the audience
screaming, 'Get her, get her.' It's a very disturbing movie." And in
"Baby Boom," a career woman leaves her job in New York and "goes off
into the bucolic wilderness to raise a child." 

With the new mystique, even fashion becomes a subtle trap.  "There's 
no way you can wear skirts as short as they're showing for spring 
and do anything serious," Friedan says.  "The 12 inch skirt and the 
7-inch heels - I say, watch it, watch it.  There's something ominous 
here. I think some of the new fashions are expressing somewhat of a 
backlash against women."

In the years since "The Feminine Mystique" was published, Friedan has 
watched her perspectives lengthen and broaden.  Disturbed that 
feminism was being perceived as "battle of women against women," and 
"a battle against the family or motherhood," she wrote "The Second
Stage" in 1981, outlining the need for "new institutions" such as
child care and parental leave.

The mother of feminism is now a grandmother. One son, Jonathan, an 
engineer in Philadelphia, is the father of two young sons.  Another 
son, Daniel, is a theoretical physicist at the University of 
Chicago.  Friedan's daughter Emily, who was only 6 when "The Feminine
Mystique" was published, is now a pediatrician in public health in 
Buffalo, New York.

Time indeed passes. This year Friedan is completing a third book,
"The Fountain of Age," dealing with "the pernicious denial and 
mystique of age."

As senior stateswoman of feminism, she views all that's happened in
the last 25 years and says, "One has to feel quite wonderful about it. 
Change is really beiginning to be visible."

Women, she notes now constitute 40 percent of students in law schools
and medical schools. Instead of "just cooking the church supper." they
are serving as Protestant ministers and as rabbis, and "theology based
on women's experience as well as men's is a much more rich and vital
theology," she says. 

On the home front she observes "a rather delicious diversity of new 
kinds of families.  Women and men want to share the parenting 
now.....There is new trial and error as younger and not-so-young women 
and men in various stages of partnership or marriage work out 
patterns that at least have a goal of equality."

But still the historian in Friedan, and the activist who has been part
of history, worries that the history of feminism is already being
forgotten. The backlash - the feminine mystique in reverse - may go
unnoticed by young women who take for granted hard-won entitlements
they have inherited.  So in addition to her practical agenda -
parental leave and child care legislation now before Congress, job
flexibility, benefits and pensions for parttime workers - Friedan
wants "a new wave of consciousness-raising." 

When she tries to close the gap and explain the "clear and present 
danger" to a generation not  even born when "The Feminine Mystique" 
was published, she tells the story of the girdle.  

She begins by asking the women in her college audiences, "How many of 
you have ever worn a girdle?"

"They laugh," she reports.  "so then I say, 'Well it used to be, not 
so long ago, when I was your age, or your mothers were your age, that  
every woman from about the age of 12 to 92, who left her house in the 
morning, encased her flesh in rigid plastic casing. She wasn't 
supposed to notice that the girdle made it difficult for her to 
breathe or move. she didn't even ask why she wore it. But did it 
really make her more attractive to men?"

"I ask them,'How can you know what it was like to wear a girdle, when 
you've never worn anything under your blue jeans except a biking brief?
And how can I expet you to know what it felt like when being a woman 
meant you wore a girdle over your mind, your eyes, your mouth, your 
heart, your feelings, your sexuality, as well as the girdle on your 
belly?

" 'Life is not simple, and you're not always going to be happy. But 
it's so much better to live, to move and walk and talk and breathe and 
feel, without that girdle on.  You would *never* put it on again if 
you know what it felt like. But they are trying to put you back in 
that girdle.' "

    How many womannoters remember their first encounter with 
    "The Feminine Mystique"?  I remember that Betty Friedan spoke
    at my campus during my sophmore year.  I am a bit sad to admit
    that my friends and I were rather hostile to her message. We
    called her "the feminine mistake" and commented mostly on
    how unattractive she was. sigh. Times have changed.
    
    Bonnie

    I don't remember when or where I first read it, but I do remember
    thinking how little it had to do with the everyday problems of the
    women I grew up with.  It was hard for us who lived on the borderline
    of economic survival to identify with the problems of an educated
    woman sitting around her suburban house being bored.  We didn't
    have that luxury.
    
    Now I'm educated and living in the suburbs -- well, close to the
    suburbs, I guess . . . what ironies.
    
    --bonnie

re: .1

Bonnie, I don't find it disturbing that you acted the way you did when 
Betty Friedan came to your college - I find it encouraging.  It shows how
much people can change.

             Carol

five years!  twenty five years! twenty five years!  twenty five years! twenty 
 twenty five years!  twenty five years! twenty five years!  twenty five years!
  twenty five years!  twe          ears! t       ive years!  twenty five years!
twenty five years!  twe             s! t           years!  twenty five years!
 twenty five years!  tw              s!             years!  twenty five years!
  twenty five years!  t                              years!  twenty five years!
five years!  twenty fiv                              twenty five years! twenty 
 twenty five years!  twe         WOW!               years!  twenty five years!
  twenty five years!  twe                         ve years!  twenty five years!
twenty five years!  twenty                      ve years!  twenty five years!
 twenty five years!  twenty                    five years!  twenty five years!
  twenty five years!  twenty                 ty five years!  twenty five years!
five years!  twenty five years              years!  twenty five years! twenty 
 twenty five years!  twenty fiv           enty five years!  twenty five years!
  twenty five years!  twenty fiv         twenty five years!  twenty five years!
twenty five years!  twenty five y      twenty five years!  twenty five years!
 twenty five years!  twenty five y   s! twenty five years!  twenty five years!
  twenty five years!  twenty five y  rs! twenty five years!  twenty five years!
five years!  twenty five years! twenty five years!  Thanks Bonnie! twenty