The New York Times Magazine, which three years ago gave us an article called “Voices from the Post-Feminist Generation,” has just put another nail in the coffin of feminism by publishing Betty Friedan’s article called “How to Get the Women’s Movement Moving Again.” That title and the accompanying artwork clearly convey the message that the women’s liberation movement is stopped dead in its tracks.
Friedan has discovered that young women believe that “women’s rights are not chic in America anymore” and that feminism has become “a dirty word.” She admits that “the movement is in trouble,” that it has been wasting its energy in “a bitter, vengeful internal power struggle,” and that feminist nostalgia harks back to “old rhetoric, old ideas, old modes of action.”
Friedan made her fame and fortune by interviewing suburban housewives, diagnosing their difficulties as a “problem that had no name,” and reciting their litany of tiresome complaints in her 1964 best-seller called “The Feminine Mystique.” She is the founder of the movement of women who believe they are an oppressed minority.
Friedan’s article is a direct appeal to the nonradical feminists to regroup and take up the fight for “second-stage feminism.” Her bete noire in this battle are the Reagan Administration and “the paralysis that fundamentalist backlash has imposed on all our movements,” on liberalism and humanism as well as feminism.
It’s clear that Friedan has learned a lot that her radical feminist sisters have yet to learn. Since she is the godmother of the 21-year-old women’s liberation movement, her admissions in this lengthy article are significant.
Friedan’s recent interviewees, she says, are women “trying to ‘have it all,’ having second thoughts about their professional careers, desperately trying to have a baby before it is too late, with or without a husband, and maybe secretly blaming the movement for getting her into this mess.”
She urges women to “confront the illusion of equality in divorce,” citing the new book by Lenore Weitzman called “The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children in America.” This book details how, after all states adopted easy, no-fault divorce laws, divorced women and their children suffered an immediate 73% drop in their standard of living, while their ex-husbands enjoyed a 42% rise in theirs.
Weitzman shows how the “equal” division of the marital property was grievously hurtful to wives because it denied the wife a share in the growth of the husband’s earning power which she had helped to create, and also because it usually meant the forced sale of the house (which formerly was awarded to the wife and children).
The truth of the matter is that the economic consequences of the no-fault divorce laws were not “unexpected;” they were predicted by those who then opposed easy divorce laws. Millions of women have been economically devastated by the change in divorce laws — one of the few legislative “successes” of which the feminist movement can boast.
Friedan freely admits that “feminists originally supported” no-fault divorce laws. Now she calls for “urgent grassroots political support” to get rid of them.
After admitting they were wrong about divorce laws, Friedan calls on women to “affirm the differences between men and women.” Would you believe! She brashly admits a fundamental error of her movement: that “first-stage feminism denied real differences between women and men except for the sexual organs themselves.”
Now she says what must be to unenlightened first-stage feminists the ultimate heresy: “Bring in the men. It’s passé, surely, for feminists now to see men only as the enemy.”
Finally, Friedan admonishes feminists to “move beyond single-issue thinking” because she does not think that “women’s rights are the most urgent business for American women. The important thing is somehow getting together with men.”
Perhaps Friedan’s Times article will develop into another best-selling book under a new title, “The Feminist Mystique.” It certainly is an interesting study in psychology to catalogue the changing attitudes of feminists as the biological clock ticks on. The feminist psyche is profoundly contradictory.
However, an even better title when Friedan writes about “beyond the second stage” would be “The Feminist Mistake.”
