Women Owe an Enormous Debt to Betty Friedan
I recently rediscovered a marvelous book by Betty Friedan, the mother of the second feminist movement. The 672-page book, The Fountain of Age, was published in 1993, exactly 30 years after her seminal work, The Feminine Mystique, which is credited with launching the feminist movement in which many of us participated. By 1993, Friedan was 72 years old and became as concerned about the issues of aging as she had been about the issues of women’s freedom and independence in her mid-40s.
Often forgotten, or just not acknowledged, Betty Friedan was a superb researcher. She went to extraordinary lengths to study her subject, traveled extensively to interview experts, and attended classes and conferences where she could learn about the issues she wanted to address in her writing. She was, at heart, an academic, with all of what that term means. She spent her life observing, studying, lecturing, and writing, and on the way, did a bit of organizing. She spent her undergraduate years at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and it was there, at a women’s college, that she formed her early adult consciousness about women’s lives—both as they were and as they might be.
Those of us who went to women’s colleges (and I was one) had an important experience that was at odds with the “outside world” as we knew it: We were taken seriously. In no other environments in the 1940s and 1950s were young women regarded with so much respect. Professors sought out and listened to our ideas. Other students partnered with us in collaborative research papers. Famous people like Margaret Meade and Bertrand Russell came to the campus to lecture and often stayed in our dormitories for weeks. We sat around informally in the dorm living room sipping coffee with some of the greatest minds of the day. We posed questions, and they answered. They made statements, and we discussed them. We were treated as if our ideas had merit.
In the outside world, women were rarely consulted about what they thought. Their careers were mostly limited to teaching, nursing, and secretarial work. They were helpmates, not equals. They were caregivers, but not doctors. They were responsible for the kids, but not for the educational institutions.
