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of the congress, the  Menaces cut the lights, grabbed the microphone, and
seized the stage. They took the organizers to task for not including out les-
bians on the program and handed out their manifesto,  The Woman-
Identified Woman, which argued that because lesbian women were at the
forefront of the struggle for women s liberation, support for lesbians and an
open commitment to lesbian liberation was essential to the movement s
fulfillment and success. The divisiveness at the gathering led some women
to call it the  Congress to Divide Women.
To Friedan, such divisiveness spelled disaster. On other occasions,
Friedan had derided lesbianism as a  red herring. If feminism continued
to go in this direction, she warned, it would  boomerang into an era of sex-
ual McCarthyism that might really paralyze the women s movement, and
hurt them [lesbians] and everyone. 43 Coining a controversial term to de-
scribe the threat, Friedan invoked the scare tactics of an earlier era, all the
while insistently denying that she was homophobic. She was just a  square
from Peoria, she claimed, and a reflection of  the mainstream. (In 1977
she finally admitted her homophobic feelings both to herself and to the
large audience of women gathered at the National Women s Conference in
Houston, where her words apparently brought down the house.44)
In the end, Friedan conceded that her antilesbian campaign was inef-
fective.  I didn t succeed in convincing them, she lamented.45 Ultimately,
however, Friedan may have lost this battle but won the war. Many lesbian
women felt alienated from NOW and left the organization,  purged by
Friedan s assaults.
In the years that followed,  The Personal Is Political became, for some,
a call to NOW s leadership to recognize lesbian rights as civil rights both
within and beyond the organization functioning much as the slogan had
for the women of the New Left. For others, the slogan became shorthand
02 siegel text 4/20/07 9:35 AM Page 89
THE BATTLE OF BETTY 89
for the political infighting within NOW that was often very personal in na-
ture. For Betty Friedan, it remained a powerful phrase, one that had been
sorely but not, she hoped, irretrievably corrupted.
REFASHIONING FEMINISM
The lavender menace fiasco and the lack of a concerted focus on issues
Friedan felt were truly important, such as child care left NOW s founder
feeling alienated from the organization she had brought to life. Perceiving
her organization to be co-opted, Friedan took her politics elsewhere, al-
ways searching for ways to broaden the appeal.
In 1970 during a two-hour  farewell address at NOW s Fourth Na-
tional Conference in Des Plaines, Illinois, retiring president Betty Friedan
surprised everyone by taking it to the streets. It was during this address that
she called for the  Women s Strike for Equality (detailed in chapter 2).
From Friedan s vantage point, the strike was a public relations campaign.
In her memoir, she described her motivation for organizing it. By staging
what she called  a serious action, she hoped to get the focus off sexual pol-
itics and back to the fight for equal opportunity in jobs, education, child
care, and women s right to control their own bodies issues that were fi-
nally being addressed.46 Friedan urged the organizing coalition to make
sure that the day would not be dominated by radicals, and indeed, recall,
the coalition defined  politics as she did. Her stamp was particularly evi-
dent in New York City, where the strikers had ended their day with a rally
at City Hall, the symbolic center of political power.
After it was over, Friedan publicly called August 26, 1970  a political
miracle experienced personally by the women who made it happen and
animatedly instructed the crowd gathered in Bryant Park:  This is not a
bedroom war. This is a political movement, and it will change the poli-
tics. 47 Friedan used the occasion to remind her audience that women s
self-denigration, and not men, was the enemy. She wanted heterosexual
women to be able to identify as feminists without having to question their
intimate connections with men. Her words were picked up by national
newspapers, including the New York Times.
02 siegel text 4/20/07 9:35 AM Page 90
90 SISTERHOOD, INTERRUPTED
According to Friedan, the strike did something more than help many
women take a first step toward developing the self-confidence they needed
to become fully actualized human beings; it made them feel radiant. De-
scribing the impact of that late-summer day on countless lives, Friedan
would often quote from letters women had sent her in which they de-
scribed the way the strike had made them feel:  It made all women feel
beautiful.  It made me feel ten feet tall. 48 By giving women a collective
jolt of self-confidence, Friedan maintained, the march was a turning point
for the movement. On August 26, she wrote, it suddenly became both po-
litical and glamorous to be a feminist.49
Starting in 1971, and fully aware of the irony, Friedan began writing a
regular column for McCall s,  Betty Friedan s Notebook, in which she
continued her effort to refashion feminism into something more classically
 feminine. 50 She also wrote for The New York Times Magazine, Saturday
Review, Harper s, Newsday, TV Guide, Mademoiselle, Ladies Home Journal,
True Magazine, and Family Circle but nothing symbolized her transition
from movement insider to commercial marketer more than her tenure at
McCall s, which lasted until 1974.
Friedan s media-savvy was prescient. In 2002 actress Ashley Judd wore
a T-shirt with the words  This is what a feminist looks like to a photo
shoot for Glamour magazine, and Ms. subsequently invited her to appear
on the cover of its spring 2003 issue, along with fellow feminists Margaret
Cho, Whoopi Goldberg, and Camryn Manheim, to show a new genera-
tion that feminists were not all axe-wielding and frumpy. In writing  Betty
Friedan s Notebook, Friedan basically did the same thing. The column
was an attempt to replace one image of feminism with another. While
Friedan publicly described her engagement with McCall s as a way of  bow-
ing out . . . of the power struggle, a space in which she might  try to come
to new terms with the political as personal, in my own life, these columns
were her mass-scale rebranding campaign.51
Friedan was fully aware of the irony that the author of The Feminine
Mystique an exposé of how women s magazines (among other forces)
helped keep women down was now writing for a magazine once consid-
ered a cause of the problem that she had given a name. Yet she wisely rec-
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THE BATTLE OF BETTY 91
ognized the significance of a women s magazine as a vehicle for dissemina-
tion much as the youth voting campaign, Rock the Vote, recognizes
MTV as an effective partner because of its appeal among the audience they
wish to reach.
Although addressed to  the movement at large, Friedan s columns were
specifically targeted to 8 million readers, the suburban housewives, women
with children and/or jobs, married and divorced, who still had to deal with
housekeeping, meals, and laundry.52 Calling attention to her own back-
ground, Friedan fashioned a voice she thought McCall s readers would ac-
cept as their own.  I am a revolutionary, she explained to her readers.  I
also happen to be an American pragmatist,  Middle American, if you will,
since I did grow up in Peoria, Illinois. 53
Friedan was merciless in her condemnation of the radical feminists who
had usurped her and NOW. Many of her entries bore titles that empha- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]