Saturday, February 11, 2006
betty
Her legacy is our ability to choose. Girls and women now have all the choices they can think of, and the freedom to make them - or not - in huge part because of a feisty, argumentative, talkative, pushy, loud woman who was willing to to put pen to paper.
I was going to leave the comments on Friedan to others but decided I really had to say something myself. It's hard to believe that only 30 years ago married women could not be issued credit cards in their own name, but it's true. The world has changed so radically for women in the last thirty years that many newly adult women don't have any idea what things used to be like. All the talk about "having it all" is now about which choices to make or reject. As recently as thirty years ago, only the wealthiest and well-connected women could get a bank loan without a male co-signer. Being a woman was an exceptable "excuse" to not serve on a jury. Women's health books were shelved under "disease" in major book stores. It wasn't until 1971 (Reed v. Reed) that the Supreme Court held it unconstitutional for males to receive automatic preference as administrators of wills. And it was in that decision that the Court officially stated that women were "persons" (!).
In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a collection of her and others' thoughts compiled from a survey she conducted for her 20th college reunion. Boy did it shake things up. It's not overstating to say that this book was an emotional and intellectual earthquake in the just-out-of-the-conforming-fifties. She used words like "oppression" to describe the way many women felt about the way they felt "forced" to live but unable to talk about aloud. The book directly inspired thousands of women (and zillions indirectly). Women began to talk about what they really felt and admit if they hoped to find fulfillment in many and different ways. This spark that began the so-called women's movement is sometimes characterized as denigrating the role of homemaker but even Friedan delighted in raising her children. It's dreaming and making choices that were the holy grail. She thought everyone should be able to have dreams and make choices about their lives. And now we all can. And she started it. Bless her.
I was going to leave the comments on Friedan to others but decided I really had to say something myself. It's hard to believe that only 30 years ago married women could not be issued credit cards in their own name, but it's true. The world has changed so radically for women in the last thirty years that many newly adult women don't have any idea what things used to be like. All the talk about "having it all" is now about which choices to make or reject. As recently as thirty years ago, only the wealthiest and well-connected women could get a bank loan without a male co-signer. Being a woman was an exceptable "excuse" to not serve on a jury. Women's health books were shelved under "disease" in major book stores. It wasn't until 1971 (Reed v. Reed) that the Supreme Court held it unconstitutional for males to receive automatic preference as administrators of wills. And it was in that decision that the Court officially stated that women were "persons" (!).
In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a collection of her and others' thoughts compiled from a survey she conducted for her 20th college reunion. Boy did it shake things up. It's not overstating to say that this book was an emotional and intellectual earthquake in the just-out-of-the-conforming-fifties. She used words like "oppression" to describe the way many women felt about the way they felt "forced" to live but unable to talk about aloud. The book directly inspired thousands of women (and zillions indirectly). Women began to talk about what they really felt and admit if they hoped to find fulfillment in many and different ways. This spark that began the so-called women's movement is sometimes characterized as denigrating the role of homemaker but even Friedan delighted in raising her children. It's dreaming and making choices that were the holy grail. She thought everyone should be able to have dreams and make choices about their lives. And now we all can. And she started it. Bless her.
Technorati tags: feminism, women's history
Labels: farewells, modern culture
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