Claire Green discusses the woman credited with initiating Second Wave Feminism.
Born Bettye Naomi Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois, on February 4th 1921, Betty Friedan is credited as one of the founders of second wave feminism. Her ground-breaking book, The Feminine Mystique, was published in 1963 and sparked a movement of consciousness-raising and political campaigns for the legal equality of women with men. The work pushed the invisible daily oppression of housewives and mothers into the political mainstream of the USA, identifying what Friedan called “the problem that had no name”. This became something of a catch-all term for the loss of individual identity, wasted potential and lack of fulfilment that many women in the 1950s and 60s felt but didn’t know how to remedy, and caused, Friedan felt, by the lack of positive role models of women with both a family and a career, as well as the broader ideological function of promoting passive domesticity to women in an age of Cold War, anti-Communist paranoia.
Following the success of The Feminine Mystique, Friedan co-founded the National Organisation for Women in 1966, which campaigned mainly for legal rights, such as abortion, and achieved the extension of Affirmative Action legislation to women and the passing of the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Friedan was also integral to the organisation of the 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality and its 50,000 strong march inNew York. Additionally, she was central to the formation of several other Women’s Rights Groups, such as the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws and the National Women’s Political Caucus, the latter alongside Gloria Steinem.
Despite these achievements, criticism remains of Friedan and her work. One of the main accusations levelled at her, and the second-wave movement more generally, is its preoccupation with the liberation of a very narrow group of women. The Feminine Mystique focused almost entirely on the lives of suburban housewives and mothers, and it has been argued that the second wave was both driven by and focused on white, middle-class women.
Friedan has also been criticised for playing down the roots of her political development, and her involvement with liberal-left activism. She began her journalistic career at university, writing anti-war, pro-union pieces for student publications, and later worked as a writer for the United Electrical Workers’ Union newspaper. Her awareness of social injustice developed early, partially in response to the anti-Semitic sentiments her family were exposed to during her childhood in 1920s Illinois, and this was channelled into an interest in Marxism, as well as Civil Rights, anti-fascist and union activism. Her biographer Daniel Horowitz has suggested her reluctance to acknowledge her left-wing background may have been simply a move to protect herself in McCarthy era America, or as a result of male chauvinism within trade unions pushing her away from the movement.
Whether she discussed it often or not, Betty Friedan’s development from left-wing campaigner to leading feminist shows us how inter-linked the two movements are, and what can be achieved when they influence one another.
From International Socialist Group site
