From http://www.usatoday.com/n...edan_x.htm

Friedan 'opened doors and minds'
By Tom Vanden Brook and Craig Wilson, USA TODAY
Activists and politicians paid tribute to Betty Friedan on Sunday, saying the founder of the modern feminist movement was a force in their own lives.

Friedan died Saturday, her birthday, at her home in Washington. The cause of death was congestive heart failure, according to a cousin, Emily Bazelon. She was 85.

Her 1963 best seller, The Feminine Mystique, detailed the lives of American women who were expected to find their fulfillment through their husbands and children. It helped reshape American attitudes toward women's aspirations and rights. She went on to found the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966. Friedan fought for equal pay for women, gender-free want ads, maternity leave and legal abortion.

"She was a giant in the 20th-century women's movement," said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation and former president of NOW. "Not only did she define the problem of women's status, but she also launched the movement to change women's roles forever."

Friedan also was a founder of the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971. At the time, there was one woman in the Senate. Today, there are 14.

"Through a life of social activism and powerful writing, she opened doors and minds, breaking down barriers for women and enlarging opportunities for women and men for generations to come," Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York said in a written statement. "We are all the beneficiaries of her vision."

"She sparked the modern women's movement," said Kim Gandy, the current president of NOW.

Friedan, Gandy said, helped young women see that there were career options beyond nursing or teaching. Gandy earned a degree in mathematics in 1973 and went to law school.

Friedan was born and grew up in Peoria, Ill. She graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts, where she earned a degree in psychology and edited the student newspaper. She won a fellowship and studied psychology for a year at the University of California at Berkeley. After leaving school, she settled in New York City in a Greenwich Village apartment with college friends and became a reporter. She married Carl Friedan, and they had three children. The couple divorced in 1969.

For 10 years, she lived as a housewife and mother in suburban New York while freelancing for magazines.

In 1957, she circulated a questionnaire among her Smith classmates. The results suggested many of them were, like her, deeply dissatisfied with their lives. Intrigued by what she had found, Friedan did more research. She organized her findings, illuminated by her personal experiences, in The Feminine Mystique. Millions of copies were sold.



"She tapped into a longing for something more in American women," Gandy said. "It resonated with our mothers and with us."

It was the leading edge of the "women's liberation" movement, and Friedan's views were controversial.

"In the '60s, to say this obvious fact that women were treated unequally was to make yourself the object of scorn and ridicule," Smeal said.

In 1964, Friedan urged the federal government to enforce the Civil Rights Act as it applied to gender, not only to race, religion and national origin. Founding NOW was a response to federal inaction.

Friedan insisted that the women's movement had to remain in the American mainstream, that men had to be accepted as allies and that the family should not be rejected.

"Don't get into the bra-burning, anti-man, politics-of-orgasm school," she told a college audience in 1970.

Katherine Spillar, executive editor of Ms. magazine, said some of Friedan's views were backward. "One of her great shortcomings is that she was slow to endorse the fight for lesbian and gay rights as part of the feminist movement," Spillar said in a statement. Friedan did later second a resolution on protecting lesbian rights at the National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977.

Friedan was also a founder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws in 1968. Today, it's NARAL Pro-Choice America.

"She really was one of those cross-generational leaders," said Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. "She was there to discuss the issue of keeping government out of our personal decisions."

In her 1981 book, The Second Stage, Friedan accused the leaders who followed her of having pursued "sexual politics that distorted the sense of priorities of the women's movement during the 1970s" and said they had opened the way for conservatives and reactionaries to occupy the center on family issues. In the book, Friedan also appeared to accept criticism that The Feminine Mystique was too dismissive of domestic life. "Our failure was our blind spot about the family," she wrote. Writer and feminist Susan Faludi accused Friedan of "yanking out the stitches in her own handiwork."

Later in life, Friedan moved on to issues affecting the elderly.

She said that while researching her last book, The Fountain of Age, published in 1993, she found that those who dealt with old people "talk about the aged with the same patronizing, 'compassionate' denial of their personhood that was heard when the experts talked about women 20 years ago."

Friedan felt her work on issues for the aging was as significant as her early work in feminism, Smeal said.

"She wanted people, especially women, to see these as years that could be creative and productive," Smeal said.

Contributing: The Associated Press

i know

She did some important work. R.I.P.


M

Too bad a lot of women never learned from her.

Her death (and life) isn't really getting the recognition she deserves... can this be made a sticky?

applekisses said:

I can't believe I didn't hear about this till today.

A pioneer The world needs more like her Rest in Peace wonderful woman

CarrieMpls said:

I know...I think it's just another back-handed message that the women's rights movement is still not taken very seriously.