Counters some myths about the women's movement
Epstein, Cynthia Fuchs
THE RECENT publication of two biographies of Betty Friedan, and the media attention the books have drawn, make this an apt moment to reflect on the myths about the women's movement that some on...
...We recalled others...
...Friedan had identified the fundamental social and self-stereotyping affecting all women and acting as a brake on their opportunities to achieve equality in American society...
...Her latest book, co-authored, is The PartTime Paradox: Time Norms, Professional Life, Family and Gender...
...Hardly...
...I was a participant in those early days, a member of the New York City Chapter of NOW at its founding in 1966, standing among the women and (a few) men Friedan recruited to march, agitate, and explain in every forum open to us what equality might mean in practice...
...Friedan was unwavering in demanding priority for women's economic security, autonomy, and equality and for changing the stereotypes of women's "nature...
...Give us the right to live, the right to a job regardless of sex...
...THERE ARE postmodernist writers today who believe they have discovered the idea of fractured identities, but they have never applied it to an analysis of the woman's movement...
...These were cases for factory workers denied promotion and seniority, for stewardesses who were fired when they married or aged beyond thirty-five...
...Some were at the same time wives and mothers...
...Well, she was both, and so it was with many of the activists in NOW whom she mobilized...
...The fights Friedan would have with some members of this group (who later split into separate factions) were usually about organizational structure or strategic emphasis...
...One marcher in the Women's March for Equality was Eleanor Holmes Norton, the AfricanAmerican congresswoman, then chair of New York City's Commission on Human Rights...
...A]ny suggestion that [women] feel ambivalent about maternity, marriage or homemaking" is so disturbing that the public's responses range from a "shiver of distaste to a convulsion of hate...
...Friedan had been making forays to Washington, partly under the cover of a new project—a sequel to The Feminine Mystique—to see what was happening...
...A patron of the Philadelphia art museum, where she worked, had given it to her...
...The feminist group around Friedan focused on the problems all women faced, and one of the first among them was limited access to the occupations dominated by men, whether as apprentices on a construction job or candidates for a congressional seat...
...In the fifties and sixties the term "middle class" was a point of identification for workingclass as well as middle-class women—for black women too, striving as they did to move from domestic labor into the white collar world...
...From the start Friedan argued that the stereotypes that defined women affected all women: women of color as well as white women...
...Along with the social scientists Sandra and Daryl Bem, I was able to show how the segregated ads defined good jobs as male and deadend jobs as female...
...I was asked to speak about the consequences of segregating helpwanted ads into "male" and "female" categories —a practice then common in newspapers...
...Friedan had a talent for drawing media attention to the basic issues and assembling a diverse group around her...
...The facts of history are lost to some critics...
...As an activist, scholar, and writer focused on the dynamics of sexism, and an associate of Betty Friedan's for three decades, I must confront one of the most serious of these myths: the view that the women's movement was created by white, middle-class women, led by white, middle-class women, to defend the interests of white, middle-class women...
...FRIEDAN WORKED with the EEOC, supplying some of the "experts" who would testify about the consequences of sexist practices on women workers...
...I had been researching and writing a dissertation analyzing the causes of women's exclusion from work defined as male (which later narrowed into a study of women in the legal profession...
...working class as well as middle class women...
...Thus I thought it would be informative to reflect on the movement's early days in conversations with Friedan and a few other veterans of those times...
...It noted the need for opening employment tracks to women and minorities, the dismal prospects these workers had for advancement or specialized learning...
...At the same time, the term "housewife" was what the sociologist Everett Hughes called a "master status" for nearly all adult women...
...The Feminine Mystique, the work of a journalist with high exposure to the social sciences, laid out the problems women faced in post-World War II suburban ghettos or in the symbolic ghettos of sex-labeled jobs and subordinate roles in public life and in the family...
...Friedan felt then that issues of sexual identity were diversions from NOW's main program...
...These are the works of simplistic analysts who ignore the variety of factors that contribute to changing social trends and disregard the indisputable advances in the position of women in American society today...
...He doesn't say what impact this might have had on the women's movement, but like many writers critical of the movement, he believes it ignored the needs of working-class and minority women...
...Today a spate of venomous articles and books from writers in conservative think tanks and in academic life blame the feminist movement for the disintegration of the nuclear family, for men's irresponsibility toward family and child support, for the high rate of divorce, and for women's supposed inattention to works of charity and community service...
...That was to come three years later when she would form an organization to promote women's issues and the ideas she had advanced...
...Horowitz rightly surmises that Friedan was cautious about offering a left-wing agenda in a book aimed at a popular market in the aftermath of the McCarthy era...
...The settlement AT&T worked out with the government was groundbreaking...
...The Post reported that speakers at the rallies condemned sexual discrimination by labor unions, by the medical profession, by churches, and in school curricula and advertising...
...Friedan had also been contacted by women eager to start mobilizing...
...The Washington Post reported that the marchers in the capital were made up of "Weatherwomen, black women, League of Women Voters members, women of the peace movement, Black Panthers and religious orders...
...As Alice Rossi wrote in the Americans for Democratic Action's ADA World Magazine in 1971, "a fundamental assumption of American society is that men's primary social roles are in work and women's primary social roles in the family...
...They also ignore the strengths society has been given by the women who made this peaceful revolution...
...The Post quoted the African-American leader Jean Wharton of the Washington Teachers' Union, "The women's liberation movement . . . concerns black and white women . . . because it's against a racist, capitalist system that oppresses all blacks, all women and all workers...
...Horowitz's suggestion—really more of an accusation—is that Friedan would have accomplished more had she written a frankly political book with a focus on the race and class issues confronting American women...
...According to Friedan the main drive, insofar as there was a set of priorities in those early chaotic days, was to strengthen the economic role of women...
...One million people worked for the company, which placed women and men, blacks and whites on distinctive tracks—the women as telephone operators (with a very few becoming supervisors of operators) and the men in crafts jobs with opportunities to rise within the organization...
...and it was a warning to other employers that they too must be sensitive to the rights of women in the workplace...
...She wrote about discrimination in factory jobs, the need for job training, for equality in labor unions, and economic security for housewives...
...The accusations and the apologies are ill-placed...
...Being a housewife or being characterized as one defined women more than any other status they might have...
...Friedan's book was a call to awareness, not DISSENT / Fall 1999 • 83 a call to arms...
...CYNTHIA FUCHS EPSTEIN is a sociology professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York...
...If one was (as I was) a graduate student or a writer, one also might be a wife and mother—and even if not, the feminine mystique might creep into your psyche, suggested by parents, a faculty committee, an employment agency, or your friends...
...Nevertheless, "the first legal cases were all for working class women" Muriel Fox, an early officer of NOW, recounted in a recent speech...
...Murray met with Friedan to propose "an NAACP for women," and urged that the new group follow the model of the civil rights movement...
...DorDISSENT / Fall 1999 85 othy Haener of the United Auto Workers was part of a new Washington group, as were Catherine East and her colleages in the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor, who had been collecting statistics to show the discrepancies in employment opportunities for men and women...
...It aimed at targets in all social classes and it fought to establish equality for women at every rung of the ladder—from workingclass women to those who aspired to high office in politics and the economic sphere...
...People of color were stuck in menial jobs, with no hope of rising...
...Of course, the women's movement has suffered accusations for more than its supposed middle-class focus...
...As movement veterans whose lives crossed in the sixties, we thought back to the time when after work hours, in living rooms and offices, an unorganized and shifting group of women and a few men struggled to come up 84 DISSENT / Fall 1999 with an agenda and a plan for activism...
...The composition of the marches and rallies held coast to coast that day reflected the heterogeneity of Friedan's allies and comrades in arms...
...Her demand for women's liberation was echoed by other women who, like her, had participated in or were psychologically prepared by the civil rights movement and the student revolts of the 1960s...
...But more important, did she and the early activists in NOW devote their efforts primarily to middle class women...
...The "truth" is more complicated than the version usually reported by ideological purists or those whose writings are aimed to "sell...
...As Friedan pointed out in The Feminine Mystique, even social scientists who should have known better participated in the stereotyping process, and dismantling the stereotypes became an ongoing part of the agenda for women in the movement...
...Addressing the Fifth Avenue marchers, she declared, "Give us the right to compete...
...Led by Friedan, tens of thousands of women marched in New York, "mostly women of all ages, occupations and viewpoints" according to the Times—and they were copied throughout the country...
...We all remember and interpret our experiences through the lens of the current moment...
...The New York Times, reporting on the nationwide Strike for Women's Equality called by Friedan for August 16, 1970—the fiftieth anniversary of U.S...
...With the now famous Friedan in charge—her book had sold a million copies and she was lecturing all over the world—a new women's movement took root...
...women's suffrage —commented that the National Organization for Women (NOW), the largest group in the August 16 coalition, "works to change the basic social structures by working for the Equal Rights Amendment and lobbying for federally funded day-care centers...
...When we met this past summer, we reminisced about the NOW group that rode a bus to Albany to persuade the legislature to include a provision for sex equality in the state Constitution...
...The EEOC eventually took on American Telegraph and Telephone (AT&T), the largest employer in the United States apart from the federal government...
...I was one such "expert...
...Some of these did so covertly —women in government agencies such as the Women's Bureau who were nervous about losing their jobs if they were seen as too activist, but who had done ground-breaking work in documenting the employment inequities women faced...
...The two biographies of Friedan, one gossipy and personal by Judith Henessee, a journalist, and the other a scholarly work by Daniel Horowitz, a historian, have revealed that she was not "just a housewife," but was a labor writer for ten years preceding the writing of The Feminist Mystique, and was a leftwing advocate for workers' rights before that...
...I also dug into dusty files to document and reconstruct the agenda of the past—locating news clippings and articles, as well as transcripts of the testimony I gave (at Friedan's instigation) before the Equal Economic Opportunities Commission (EEOC), the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, and various congressional hearings in 1967 and 1968...
...THE RECENT publication of two biographies of Betty Friedan, and the media attention the books have drawn, make this an apt moment to reflect on the myths about the women's movement that some on the political left as well as the right have accepted for the past thirty years...
...Was Betty Friedan really a writer concerned with the oppression of workers, blacks, and yes, women, and not really a middle-class housewife...
...Feminists in the sixties were very aware of their multiple and contradictory personalities...
...86 DISSENT / Fall 1999...
...This is not a bedroom war, this is a political movement," she maintained...
...Richard Graham, director of the EEOC, invited Friedan to meet behind closed doors to urge her to create public pressure because, she remembered, the hands of the EEOC staff would be tied unless demand grew for implementation of Title VII...
...Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, with Title VII prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex, seemed the dawn of a new age, but there was concern that it would not be implemented...
...THE IDEA of an organization to advance women's goals did not originate with Betty Friedan...
...Horowitz suggests that she betrayed this past in The Feminine Mystique by characterizing herself as a middle-class housewife who discovered "the problem that had no name"— women's lack of identity and purpose when not employed outside the home...
...0 F COURSE, all of our memories are suspect...
...The March for Equality was an example...
...But the rest of the group hardly cowered in the back...
...Put Sex in the Constitution," read a placard distributed to us by the radical black lawyer Flo Kennedy...
...If we can change what happens in the day," Friedan asserted, "the night will take care of itself...
...But he fails to credit her for bringing the more basic issues of sexism and inequality to public consciousness...
...Jews, Catholics, and Protestants...
...As she told me, the idea came from Pauli Murray, a black lawyer (who later became one of the first female Episcopal priests...
...They "advocated liberal abortion laws, peace in Vietnam, greater opportunity for black people and an end to the capitalistic system...
...Standing in a group in front of the state capitol, Friedan—ever the political strategist —moved Ti-Grace Atkinson to the front because, though she was a struggling graduate student, she looked elegant in her fox coat...
...Others in the group were writers, lawyers, businesswomen, union officers, government workers...
...But Mary Jean Tully, the first president of the NOW Legal Defense Fund, told me in another conversation that "everything needed to be done—there was no plan—we responded to the issue of the moment...
...This view is now so commonly accepted that feminist activists routinely cry mea culpa for neglecting women of color and of the working class...
...The EEOC became a leading instrument in creating job tracks for working class and minority women and men...
...The Statement of Purpose Friedan wrote for NOW pointed to race discrimination and the need to work for civil rights for everyone...
Vol. 46 • September 1999 • No. 4
