Saturday, February 04, 2006

Friedan: Naming the Problem That Had No Name    AP Sometimes a revolutionary comes around whose revolutionary act is simply the offering of a different perspective. Betty Friedan, who died yesterday at 85,  gave us a revolutionary perspective that laid the groundwork for feminism, for equal rights for American women, for education and job equity, for social, financial and physical autonomy. This is not an overstatement. In her 1963 book "The Feminine Mystique" she performed an "emperor has no clothes" feat and laid waste to the 1950s Donna Reed model of how life should be lived by American women.  As the AP report on her death puts it: 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. We are who we are able to be today in large part because of Friedan. Read the opening pages of The Feminine Mystique here. You will be astonished and perhaps get the creepy shivers when you see that The Stepford Wives was not far removed from the reality that she described and named for what it was. Let me mention here too the passing of playwright Wendy Wasserstein, 55,  earlier this week, who commented with humor and poignance about the new dilemmas we faced as we lived out that feminist vision described by Friedan.   AP -RH 8:20:24 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2006 Robin Herman. The Girl in the Locker Room™ name and design are trademarks owned by Robin Herman. Last update: 3/1/2006; 9:41:20 PM. Powered by   Girl in the Locker Room!