A study of feminism through some key thinkers: 2 - Betty Friedan

In my first article I talked about the real founder of modern feminism (second wave feminism if you prefer to call it that), Simone de Beauvoir in her 1949 book 'The Second Sex.'

This article will deal with the next important feminist thinker, a far more sympathetic character IMO than de Beauvoir whose cold lack of humanity I find disgusting and totally anti-life. As well as being logically and factually wrong on almost every level de Beauvoir is also MORALLY wrong.

Betty Friedan's book 'The Feminine Mystique,' published in 1963, is quite different. It's written in a spirit of anguish rather than anger, sympathy rather than callousness and instead of setting cultural norms and biology in opposition - as de Beauvoir does to the point of near insanity - Friedan sees both as part of a whole.

She begins by, IMO rightly, attacking the so-called 'standard' of beauty for women. The problem she addresses is very much still a live issue, at least in the West, and her criticisms of the pressure on women to conform to a mythical and, to be honest, impossible 'ideal' of beauty are as valid now as they were back in the 1950s when she made them.

Friedan points out that the 'standard' of this 'ideal' beauty are laid down by white men and that their 'ideal' automatically condemns all non-white women to second-class status even in 'the beauty stakes.' Slim, blonde-haired white women with bodies almost airbrushed out of existence, female sexuality safely transformed into some non-threatening antiseptic imitation of real women that is more like a living doll than a real human being.

Friedan also fiercely attacks - and again I agree with her - the stereotyped gender roles with the woman as having at least play the part of a 'dumb blonde,' the lack of ambition beyond that of becoming a housewife and mother, the expectation that the woman will simply cook and clean and have babies and not much else and in general the stereotyping of a woman's role and confining her 'sphere of influence' to the home and family.

Women are capable of doing pretty much anything a man can do and their gender shouldn't be a factor that holds them back. Even less should some 'ideal' of beauty dominate their appearance in life and it's even more ridiculous that they should be expected to behave like some living doll who never grows up.

The book includes an interview with a wife and mother who said she felt 'terror' at being alone, had never seen any kind of positive female role model for a 'working mother' and Friedan pointed out that this woman was anything but untypical.

Friedan described what she called 'the problem that has no name' as follows:

"The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning [that is, a longing] that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States.

Each suburban [house]wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries … she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — 'Is this all?"

The effects of the obsession with 'slimness' have largely created the crisis of anorexia and bulimia in the Western world.

All these things are totally avoidable and only come about because of the stupid desire to look like a stick insect.

The psychological stress of domesticity is an area Friedan addressed and, as she put it in her book, 'for over fifteen years women in America found it harder to talk about this problem than about sex.'

The role model of a single-income household with the man as the sole breadwinner was one that, in spite of the evidence of the war when women proved themselves capable of carrying out men's jobs just as well as the men themselves, hung around for many years.

Friedan doesn't see men as the enemy; she doesn't think that there's anything WRONG with being a wife and mother; she doesn't think that a woman who IS a wife and mother is some kind of failure.

What she wants is for women to have the same opportunities to work and be educated as men do.

Now this is where it gets complicated and I start to disagree with Friedan; not so much with what she's advocating herself as the way in which her followers (far fewer now than there once were, sadly; de Beauvoir and her disgusting cocktail of misogyny and misandry has replaced her liberal feminist approach to a large extent) have turned Friedan's entirely justified complaints into a litany of whinges, demands for special treatment, demonization of not just men but women who are 'only' wives and mothers and who basically are trying to create a matriarchy in place of the patriarchy which they believe existed before. (It's no accident that many of the rad fem miso/misa types are huge fans of the Bachofen/Brissault/Engels et al version of prehistory in which the myth of a former matriarchal culture - totally idealized rather than regarded as being just as capable of having faults as any patriarchy - is presented as holy writ).

Because the whole idea of patriarchy is so central to modern feminist thinking I'll deal with that in a later article. It's not really an issue that Friedan tackles in 'The Feminine Mystique' where she's (rightly) concerned with the obsession with conformity to a ridiculous 'ideal' of feminine beauty and the confining of women to a role of domesticity.

Much of the second thrust of her complaints is addressed more fully in a slightly later work which I shall talk about in my next article. That will introduce my first British feminist thinker!

Friedan remained a champion of liberal values throughout her life. She saw feminism as a means of giving women greater opportunity in life and having a more varied way of interacting with the world rather than the home alone. As she got older and encountered the radical feminist lobby, she was appalled. She condemned them for their illiberalism, for their misandry, for their dishonesty and their overall demonstration of their misogyny by adopting the same distorted view of the world as de Beauvoir, where only 'male' values and characteristics matter and the only way forward for feminists was to become the type of 'phallic woman' we've already discussed in de Beauvoir's case.

Friedan condemned them roundly and coined a very appropriate name for them, 'female chauvinists.'

An engaging, loveable and complex character, she founded NOW (the National Organization for Women) though frankly the way it's developed in recent years would certainly not be in directions Friedan would have approved of.

A great thinker and influence and a woman who thoroughly deserves to be a feminist icon even though she's probably nowadays thought of as some old-hat liberal feminist who can be safely canonized and worshipped from a distance like Wollstonecraft.