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Betty Friedan, Author of 'The Feminine Mystique,' Dies of Heart Failure at 85
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Feminist Author Betty Friedan Dies at 85 Betty Friedan, Author of 'The Feminine Mystique,' Dies of Heart Failure at 85 Feminist author Betty Friedan responds during an interview in a New York hotel, in a May 10, 2000 photo. Betty Friedan, whose manifesto "The Feminine Mystique" became a best seller in the 1960s and laid the groundwork for the modern feminist movement, died Saturday, her birthday. She was 85. (AP Photo/Jim Cooper, file)
WASHINGTON Feb 4, 2006 (AP) Betty Friedan, whose manifesto "The Feminine Mystique" became a best seller in the 1960s and laid the groundwork for the modern feminist movement, died Saturday, her birthday. She was 85.
Friedan died at her home of congestive heart failure, according to a cousin, Emily Bazelon.
Friedan's assertion in her 1963 best seller that having a husband and babies was not everything and that women should aspire to separate identities as individuals, was highly unusual, if not revolutionary, just after the baby and suburban booms of the Eisenhower era.
The feminine mystique, she said, was a phony bill of goods society sold to women that left them unfulfilled, suffering from "the problem that has no name" and seeking a solution in tranquilizers and psychoanalysis.
"A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, `Who am I, and what do I want out of life?' She mustn't feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children," Friedan said.
"That book changed women's lives," Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, which Friedan co-founded, said Saturday. "It opened women's minds to the idea that there actually might be something more. And for the women who secretly harbored such unpopular thoughts, it told them that there were other women out there like them who thought there might be something more to life."
In the racial, political and sexual conflicts of the 1960s and '70s, Friedan's was one of the most commanding voices and recognizable presences in the women's movement.
As the first president of NOW in 1966, she staked out positions that seemed extreme at the time on such issues as abortion, sex-neutral help-wanted ads, equal pay, promotion opportunities and maternity leave.
But at the same time, Friedan insisted that the women's movement had to remain in the American mainstream, that men had to be accepted as allies and that the family should not be rejected.
"Don't get into the bra-burning, anti-man, politics-of-orgasm school," Friedan told a college audience in 1970.
Out of the gloom a voice spake unto me. 'Smile and be happy, Things could get worse."
So I smiled and was happy, and behold... Things did get worse.
Hope shes having alot of fun in HELL with her friend Andrea Dworkin.
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My tribute to Betty Friedan posted to NOW via Angry Harry.
Quote:
Farewell from the United Kingdom.
Feminism will eventually be seen as having been one of the greatest crimes against humanity the human race is ever likely to know.
Betty Friedan's professional and private life epitomises the very essence of the movement and everything that it has ever stood for.
Lies, deceit, selfishness, malice and, not least, unbelievable stupidity.
Extremism creates and realises its own antithesis. History has repeatedly testified to this reality. Due to the inevitable soiling of women's humanity that will take place in the eyes of the hundreds of millions of human beings who reap, and will continue to reap what the women's movement has chosen to sow over the past half-century, feminism throughout the western world will eventually deliver to the human race a reality in which women will be widely looked upon and treated with wary scornful contempt.
And indeed many of the most vociferous and emotionally motivated misogynists of the future will be women themselves. There is already a great deal of evidence that this inevitable tidal change of attitude is already happening - both in the USA and in my own country, the UK.
Farewell Betty Friedan, and in time the many others like you who have chosen to follow a course that you originally set. Your legacy to the world will be truly significant. Though not in the way you had imagined.
"Every age has its own characteristic illusions. They are likliest to lurk in those wide-spread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them".
C.S. Lewis 'Suprised by Joy'. 1955.
Yes I was fully aware of that when I sent it. And that is the reality of sending critical messages to any fanatical interest group- be it feminism, environmentalism or animal rights.
But it has to be read (even in part) to be censored. And if just one brainwashed soul gets the message that not everyone exists within their bubble of warped non-reality - it is worth it.
"Every age has its own characteristic illusions. They are likliest to lurk in those wide-spread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them".
C.S. Lewis 'Suprised by Joy'. 1955.
5th-February-2006
Feminist author Betty Friedan responds during an interview in a New York hotel, in a May 10, 2000 photo. Betty Friedan, whose manifesto "The Feminine Mystique" became a best seller in the 1960s and laid the groundwork for the modern feminist movement, died Saturday, her birthday. She was 85. (AP Photo/Jim Cooper, file)
