My work on Role/Reboot has led me to think about my career and experiences as a young woman in the 60s and 70s and how they relate to men and women today. From time to time, I will post stories that describe days of my life that may be of interest to others. This site is dedicated to gender relations, not to feminism as a separate subject. But without second wave feminism, and the work that was done earlier, women and men would not be as equal as they are today. How we got here is worth remembering.
Recently, the New York Times ran an interview with Rebecca Traister in which she talked about the importance of The Feminine Mystique and mentioned that her mother had a somewhat unpleasant experience with Betty Friedan. Reading this unlocked in me several experiences that I had with Friedan when I was much younger.
I Meet Betty Friedan
It is 1968. I am 21 years old, just out of college and beginning my career in New York City. I am interested in Democratic politics and see an announcement for a West Side Democratic Club meeting to be held at the home of Betty Friedan in the famed Dakota apartment building. My class at Barnard had read The Feminine Mystique as part of the required freshman curriculum. The women’s movement is just gathering steam and Betty Friedan is considered its catalyst. The chance to see this icon in person and also to see her home is irresistible.
Nervously, I enter the apartment, which is very crowded and, to my young eyes, oozing with sophistication and glamour. The apartment is large and filled with New York banter. A meeting is called to order. Betty Friedan is seated in the center of the room, directly in my sight, and a variety of speakers are talking about NYC politics and our West Side neighborhood. The discussion is animated and people are highly engaged and attentive.
Suddenly, the meeting is interrupted by a commotion at the entry door. A very drunk and disheveled man enters and starts screaming. “What do you f-ing liberals want? You are a bunch of f-ing liberals!”
Several burly men immediately spring to action and sprint to the door, lift this man up, and start to eject him from the apartment. As he reaches the exit, the intruder screams, “You can’t get rid of me, I live here!”
A silence comes over the room and Betty Friedan puts her head in her hands in embarrassment; the intruder, her husband, goes into the bedroom, closes the door and disappears. The awkward silence continues until the meeting facilitator decides to keep going. But the meeting winds down quickly and everyone leaves.
Not surprisingly, soon after, Betty Friedan and her husband divorce. I must have had a friend with me (I doubt I had the guts to go alone), but I do not remember discussing this shocking incident with anyone who was there because I didn’t know any one in the room.
To this day, I still wonder about that night and how it related to who Betty Friedan was. What was it like to be the husband of the feminist icon? Did dysfunctional marriage help spur Betty Friedan’s feminism or did her feminism and fame contribute to its deterioration? Or did her fame have nothing to do with what made the marriage fail?
How sad it was to see my heroine, Betty Friedan, humiliated in public by a husband who clearly could not handle whatever was going on between them. But I also wonder if this dynamic still plays out in marriages today, especially now as so many women achieve more than male partners. Can this generation of men deal better with the fame and success of their wives and partners?
I Meet Betty Friedan Again
Flash forward to sometime around 1985. By this point, I have become a frequent speaker on the changing workplace and the implications of women’s employment on business. I have started my company Work/Family Directions, and I have received lots of attention as a leader in the work/family movement and as an entrepreneur. I am also married and the mom of two young daughters.
The fervor of second wave feminism has passed. Women are in the workplace in record numbers and are struggling to succeed at home and work. But there is a lull in “the movement” and, despite my success, I am discouraged with the pace of change.
I am funded to conduct interviews with opinion makers about what’s next for women. As part of this project, I interview Jill Kerr Conway, who has just left the presidency of Smith College and is a visiting scholar at MIT. Conway, an Australian, is a historian of women’s history and is warm and very wise. After the formal interview, she asks me about myself. She must sense some exhaustion or weariness in me, because she asks an open-ended question about how I am feeling about my work. I say that I am worried that the momentum for women’s advancement has somehow stalled or is even going backwards. She leans forward and says warmly but firmly that I must not be discouraged. “No social change goes in a straight line; there are always ups and downs, and that is to be expected.” I find her words comforting and helpful.
About two weeks later, I go to California to appear at a conference on a panel with Betty Friedan, business guru Warren Bennis, and several other luminaries. I am a little intimidated by the company but confident that I have something to add. We each give our talks and take questions from the audience. The first question is to me, asking what I think is “next” for women’s advancement. I say that I feel like things are stuck and then describe my meeting with Jill Kerr Conway and quote from her advice to me.
Suddenly, Betty Friedan leaps from her chair and starts to yell at me. She says, “You cannot say that! Do not be casual about ups and downs. When we got the vote, it took seventy more years to continue the struggle again. We cannot afford that .” I feel deflated. I feel stupid. Hundreds of people have just seen Betty Friedan scold me.
In retrospect, I can see that the advice from these two feminist icons was not inconsistent. For Jill Kerr Conway, the advice was personal. It was compassionate and private. She wanted me to keep going and not get too discouraged. Betty Friedan’s outburst was to me as a leader, perhaps a motivator. My job on the panel, and hers, was to inspire and ignite passion in those who came to hear us. She was right. I should not have been fatalistic or resigned to going backwards in a public forum.
Over the years, I had other interesting meetings with Betty Friedan, but these two were particularly striking. All of us who care about persuading others and being activists must struggle with our private and public personas and how they affect each other.
If we are in relationships, especially with men, we cannot completely avoid the role expectations that we were raised with and that are reinforced by the culture around us. That must have been an issue in the Friedan marriage. We must also nurture ourselves and understand what we need to keep going, which is what was helpful about Conway’s advice to me. And as leaders and elders we must also try to inspire younger people to keep making the world better and to achieve more equality, which was at the core of Betty Friedan’s message.
A long and happy life requires much balancing and sorting. Change starts with the personal and the cultural. We live our values everyday and the relations between men and women are continual micro-events. We want to love and we want to contribute to the world and how we do both, men and women together, matters. The advice of those who came before can help us. I know it has helped me.