Queer Places:
Sag Harbor Jewish Cemetery
Sag Harbor, Suffolk County, New York, USA
Betty Friedan (February 4, 1921 – February 4, 2006) was an American feminist writer and activist. A leading figure in the women's movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century. In 1966, Friedan co-founded and was elected the first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), which aimed to bring women "into the mainstream of American society now [in] fully equal partnership with men".
In 1970, after stepping down as NOW's first president, Friedan organized the nationwide Women's Strike for Equality on August 26, the 50th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granting women the right to vote. The national strike was successful beyond expectations in broadening the feminist movement; the march led by Friedan in New York City alone attracted over 50,000 people.
In 1971, Friedan joined other leading feminists to establish the National Women's Political Caucus. Friedan was also a strong supporter of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution that passed the United States House of Representatives (by a vote of 354–24) and Senate (84–8) following intense pressure by women's groups led by NOW in the early 1970s. Following Congressional passage of the amendment, Friedan advocated for ratification of the amendment in the states and supported other women's rights reforms: she founded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws but was later critical of the abortion-centered positions of many liberal feminists.
Regarded as an influential author and intellectual in the United States, Friedan remained active in politics and advocacy until the late 1990s, authoring six books. As early as the 1960s Friedan was critical of polarized and extreme factions of feminism that attacked groups such as men and homemakers. One of her later books, The Second Stage (1981), critiqued what Friedan saw as the extremist excesses of some feminists.[2]
When she grew up in Peoria, Illinois, she knew only one gay man. She said, "the whole idea of homosexuality made me profoundly uneasy".[49] She later acknowledged that she had been very square, and was uncomfortable about homosexuality. "The women's movement was not about sex, but about equal opportunity in jobs and all the rest of it. Yes, I suppose you have to say that freedom of sexual choice is part of that, but it shouldn't be the main issue".[50][Note 1][Note 2] She ignored lesbians in the National Organization for Women (NOW) initially, and objected to what she saw as their demands for equal time.[49] "Homosexuality ... is not, in my opinion, what the women's movement is all about."[51] While opposing all repression, she wrote, she refused to wear a purple armband as an act of political solidarity, considering it not part of the mainstream issues of abortion and child care.[52]
But in 1977, at the National Women's Conference, she seconded a lesbian rights resolution "which everyone thought I would oppose" in order to "preempt any debate" and move on to other issues she believed were more important and less divisive in the effort to add the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution.[53] She accepted lesbian sexuality, albeit not its politicization.[54] In 1995, at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, she found advice given by Chinese authorities to taxi drivers that naked lesbians would be "cavorting" in their cars so that the drivers should hang sheets outside their cab windows, and that lesbians would have AIDS and so drivers should carry disinfectants, to be "ridiculous", "incredibly stupid" and "insulting".[55] In 1997, she wrote that "children ... will ideally come from mother and father."[56] She wrote in 2000, "I'm more relaxed about the whole issue now".[57]
She married Carl Friedman, a theater producer, in 1947 while working at UE News. She continued to work after marriage, first as a paid employee and, after 1952, as a freelance journalist. The couple divorced in May 1969, and Carl died in December 2005.
Friedan stated in her memoir Life So Far (2000) that Carl had beaten her during their marriage; friends such as Dolores Alexander recalled having to cover up black eyes from Carl's abuse in time for press conferences (Brownmiller 1999, p. 70). But Carl denied abusing her in an interview with Time magazine shortly after the book was published, describing the claim as a "complete fabrication".[3] She later said, on Good Morning America, "I almost wish I hadn't even written about it, because it's been sensationalized out of context. My husband was not a wife-beater, and I was no passive victim of a wife-beater. We fought a lot, and he was bigger than me."
Carl and Betty Friedan had three children, Daniel, Emily and Jonathan. She was raised in a Jewish family, but was an agnostic.[Note 3] In 1973, Friedan was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II.[84]
Friedan died of congestive heart failure at her home in Washington, D.C.,
on February 4, 2006, her 85th birthday.
Some of Friedan's papers are held at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.[85]
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