betty friedan 1921-2006

even as a child, i knew i wasn't a second class citizen just because i didn't have a penis. the feminine mystique was the first book i read on the subject when i was old enough to be conscious of what actually was going on in the world. (just the other day i was in a pub. a friend happened to be there as well. i was sitting on the left, he was to my right. to his right another man sat down. the stranger's hand was in a cast. being the curious person i am, i asked what happened. he answered and just kept talking on and on and on. HOWEVER, he never ONCE talked to ME. he talked to my male friend. never looked at me, never even acknowledged i was there. normally i'd point out the error of his ways. some days i am just feeling non confrontational. i let it go. it wasn't worth my time or my energy. but yes, it still goes on and it will ALWAYS go on)


nice piece in opednews

Betty Friedan asked: "Is that all?"

by Mickey Z.

"The core of the problem today is not sexual but a problem of identity--a stunting of growth that is perpetuated by the feminine mystique."-Betty FriedanWhen Betty Friedan (1921-2006) attended her fifteenth college reunion at Smith College, she conducted a survey among her fellow alumni. What the women she spoke to had to say about the state of their lives eventually became a book that, upon its release in 1963, would spark a national debate about a woman's role in American society. The Feminine Mystique begins, famously: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 women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night-she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-"Is this all?""The book reached millions of readers," says Kenneth C. Davis. "Women were...suddenly discussing the fact that society's institutions-government, mass media and advertising, medicine and psychiatry, education, and organized religion-were systematically barring them from becoming anything more than housewives and mothers."Far from a manifesto, The Feminine Mystique focused almost exclusively on white middle-class women and eschewed radical solutions. Nonetheless, the book was a crucial catalyst in the re-launching of the relatively dormant woman's rights movement conceptualized by earlier feminists like Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger. Friedan herself recognized her obligation to takes things further...........