The Second Stage
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
Books: ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE Twenty YEARS ago, Betty Friedan provided college-educated, suburban housewives with a label for "the problem that had no name" - the feminine mystique. She now offers...
...women who have relation-" ships, but no commitments...
...It may be churlish to say so, but I doubt that Mrs...
...But in writing it, Mrs...
...Friedan's recent writing, now gathered in this book, suggested that she had become acutely aware of that fact...
...Apologies and reassessments notwithstanding, Mrs...
...A third woman's movement, nicely fitted between the other two would accommodate the real interests of most women in this country...
...Perhaps those confusions and pleas inspired this book...
...In fact, the issues that Mrs...
...The Beta style long practices by successful feminist leaders is hailed by corporate managers, as a welcome balance to the overly analytic, rational, quantitative, and masculine Alpha style...
...Friedan will be among the founders of the third woman's movement, but then neither will Mrs...
...Most work, not because they have been liberated from the feminine mystique, but because most families can no longer THE SECOND STAGE Betty Friedan Summit, $14.95, 320 pp...
...Friedan seems to believe that it is an image problem and not " matters of substance that divide women on the woman question...
...Most women in this country are married...
...The Second Stage adds to that style the worst of social scientese and journalese: a pastiche of Freudianism and laundered sociobiology, the lame-footed anecdote that parades as evidence, the personal encounters that are inflated into revealing trends...
...Over the last decade women who fit the ideal image of neither movement have felt out of place in both...
...Powerhouses at work, successful career women are fearful of having children and losing their place on the career ladder...
...Friedan does not seem to fully understand what the first woman's movement did to bring on the formation of the second...
...Friedan's political agenda for the second stage is the conciliation of polarities, of males and females at West Point and elsewhere...
...But for every woman who has too many choices, surely there are many with too few...
...Although hardly attending the real problem of real differences, Mrs...
...The Second Stage is an effort to reoc-cupy the territory her woman's movement unwisely abandoned to Mrs...
...Most women, when polled, believe that abortion should be legal, but not available on demand...
...Others have called for conciliation or, at least, the grounds for agreeing to disagree...
...Most women think there should be equal pay for equal work...
...When acknowledging differences, she papers them over...
...Friedan has picked up this new refrain: too many choices, too much to do...
...Many have stood perplexed between the first woman's movement and the second, finding truth and error in each camp...
...Friedan tweaks her host, an army major, and points an anti-military finger, "Do they actually line up and march like that when they have to fight...
...Schlafly...
...and, although not most, a very significant number of women, have helped to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA...
...that women should have equal opportunities for education, jobs, and advancements...
...Reviewing West Point cadets, male and female, marching to lunch, Mrs...
...The first woman's movement must attend to these realities that too often tug and pull in opposite directions...
...of liberals and conservatives, of . . . you name it...
...The excesses of sexual politics that gave a tawdry image to her woman's movement were the work, she says, of bad companions - the media, women refugees from the radical student movement, and counter-culture earth mothers...
...Friedan: In our culture the individual worth of men and women is measured by their work, while the primary sources of emotional satisfaction for most adults come from families, spouses, children, and life in small groups...
...While getting in her licks at the bad companions, she also apologizes and urges a more sober assessment of what women and men must face in the Reagan years...
...Friedan is off in all directions in search of new answers, new research findings, new ways of looking at things...
...Friedan helped to found, and the one that found itself in reaction to hers-Mrs...
...Rather than clarifying and sharpening areas of agreement and disagreement, she obfuscates...
...Schlafly.her will Mrs...
...Friedan too often occupies the high ground of rhetoric, extolling lifecherishing values instead of exploring the genuinely contradictory definitions of those values held by the two woman's movements...
...Improbable as it may seem, we could bridge the old conservative-liberal chasm, if we realize the true protential of that elusive new male-female, second-stage mode...
...of pro-choice and pro-life activists...
...But in different ways both measures subtly threaten working class and traditional-minded women and men who resist the shifts in power that each measure entails...
...Attending a meeting at the Stanford Research Institute International, she delights in finding that the Beta style, "based on synthesizing, intuitive, qualitative thinking and a 'contextual,"relational' power style," is receiving serious attention...
...But overall we hear very little in these pages about women forced to take low-paying jobs, to leave children without adequate care, to forego having children, or raising them alone, because the men in their lives won't support offspring...
...Although acknowledging the power of the anti-woman woman's movement, Mrs...
...Supermoms whose days and nights at work and at home are scheduled like battleplans down to the last minute feel they have no time to sit back and enjoy any of it...
...Schlafly's...
...Two slogans, two poles, and the outcome is two women's movements: the one Mrs...
...At the Baltimore session of the White House Conference on the Family, she feels she has resolved a priest's difficulty with abortion by a semantic sleight of hand: everyone could support "the choice to have children...
...most have children...
...She now offers to their heirs, college-educated, urban career women, another label for a new problem - the feminist mystique...
...In her travels, Mrs...
...Margaret O'Brien Steinfels live on one income...
...In short form the feminist mystique sums up the excesses of the woman's movement, the anti-male, bra-burning, separatist forays of sexual politics that have come to be serious liabilities in our present less indulgent political atmosphere...
...She is, I regret to report, simply off...
...She is off to West Point, off to meetings with rabbis and priests, off to international conferences...
...Coeds free to go to law school, to medical school, to marry, bemoan the range of choices that lie before them...
...Friedan sees as the bedrock of woman's liberation, passage of the ERA and preservation of abortion on demand, are precisely the issues that brought the second woman's movement into existence...
...Abortion and the ERA are the political children of upper and upper-middle class men and women who believe both measures are an unalloyed benefit to all women...
...Unsettled by the problem of too many choices, rather than too few, Mrs...
...Friedan pays some attention to older divorced women left without husbands, without skills, without careers or pensions, and with too few economic and social choices before them...
...Those alive and reading in 1963, when The Feminine Mystique was published, will remember the endless yardage of popular prose laced with pseudo-psychology and sociology, chapter after chapter badly patched from old magazine articles...
...Schlafly and the Radical Right-family, children, men, intimacy, and (in the oft-repeated phrase) "life-cherishing values...
...But, in fact, she does not oppose the military life for men or women...
...In short, we hear a great deal from the women who are the success stories of the first woman's movement and very little from those who carry the burdens of liberation, but receive very few of its benefits: women who must work, but have no career...
...Unfortunately these concerns are not the focus of The Second Stage, but another dilemma recently brought home to Mrs...
...women who have children, but no childcare...
...most work and are paid less than a man doing equivalent work...
Vol. 108 • December 1981 • No. 23
