It's all White

The problem without a name coined a certain writer. She passed away last week. And the reaction to that passing was par for the course -- White woman dies and attention follows. One feminist site had a post by a visiter whining that Betty Friedan didn't receive as much attention as Coretta Scott King. We're not exactly sure why she should have, but we have to wonder what world that poster is living in?

As C.I., Betty, Mike and Cedric noted repeatedly, the paper of record, The New York Times never saw fit to run an editorial or a column on Coretta Scott King. They did, however, see fit to run one on Friedan on February 8th. A Judith Warner (who has been contract labor for the paper before) weighed in on her own personal tragedy that led her, in 2001, to identify with Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. The personal tragedy? Being able to cut back on her paid work hours to spend more time with her children. Now most working Americans (male or female) never find themselves in such a crisis these days where single-parent homes and two-income families are pretty much standard fair. But the paper of record loves their "ladies who leave the rat race" and, by hook or by crook, they always manage to find them.

[Contrary to Warner's experience, Katha Pollitt notes attempting to teach The Feminine Mystique in 2001 and shares:
You might as well be teaching Jane Austen. The way you'd have to explain about curates and Bath and entailed estates, you have to tell them how women dressed up to go to the market, how women's magazines obsessed about the fragile male ego and how dropping out of college to get married was indulgently viewed because you weren't going to use your education anyway. The vast American obliviousness that shrouds in a kind of Gothic mist everything that happened before last Tuesday has swallowed up the system of laws, social practices and cultural understandings Friedan described. My students felt a bit exasperated by Friedan's suburban wives, their low-level depression and seething dissatisfactions, their "problem that had no name." If they were so unhappy, why didn't they, you know, do something about it? None of my students planned to spend their days waxing the kitchen floor; even their mothers hadn't done that. But if they did, it would be--the magic word--their choice.]

Last Sunday, when Friedan's death hit the papers, C.I. weighed in on it. Ava and Jess who help out with the e-mail noted a small swarm of angry e-mail to the public account (where visiters e-mail) including a few that maintained no one would read The Common Ills again. (Not just the person e-mailing, "no one.") The reality was that the community didn't take offense to the post. Quite the contrary, it was loudly applauded (and all of us working on this edition applaud it). The same way that those of us who listen to Democracy Now! on WBAI weren't upset when fund raising meant we missed out on the segment on Betty Friedan. (We don't think we missed anything, no offense intended to Amy Goodman or Juan Gonzalez.)

"The mother of us all" cried some of the press. The woman who started a revolution. The woman who led a revolution. Hell, why didn't they just come right out and say she was the revolution because that's what they were implying.

So during the week, we checked with women from that time period. Whether it was professors or Ruth (who credits Pat Mainarid's "The Politics of House Work" with impacting "my married life" but not Friedan's book), relatives or friends, we found a number of women who knew of "the book" but very few who had read it and none that claimed to have been influenced by it.

The second wave of feminism doesn't arise from a book by Friedan. Not among the women we spoke to. Where did it come from? Activists. Activists working on issues. Student rights, civil rights, the anti-war movement . . . They saw themselves committed to fighting for others' freedoms but within the organizations they worked in and with, they weren't free. They were the note takers, the typists, the "get me some coffee" drones. They saw their ideas shot down -- the same ideas that if a man proposed something similar at a later time, were "wonderful" ideas. They saw the men stop them in the middle of a joke to finish it for them because women couldn't tell a joke "right." All of those double standards as well as the sexual double standard. Yep, in the midst of a sexual revolution, that double standard still existed. If you wanted to be exclusive (which 12 women felt the need to point out that in their experiences meant he could sleep around but they couldn't) you were a 'nag' or worse. And if you didn't want to 'put out,' your ass wasn't radical and you didn't know the first thing about liberation.

"Every sexual decision was imposed, not agreed upon," said one woman who graduated college in 1967, said with such raw emotion that the years must still be fresh.

"Look," offered another who said not to call her a "60s radical because I'm still radical", "that book might have helped my mother understand a little bit of what I was trying to do but it didn't have a thing to do with the battles I was fighting. I wasn't off in suburbia trying to figure out what color scheme to do my kitchen in in order to escape my boredom. I was on the front lines fighting for truth and justice."

Ah yes, suburbia. The narrative. Little Betty Friedan, the housewife, locked away in the suburbs. A watered down version of reality (like the politics in her book). But didn't the media love it and lap it up? White woman, naturally. Housewife wants more! We don't dispute that the press had a field day with their self-pleasing cautionary tale at the time. We just don't think you credit a book, by what the media portrays as an unhappy homemaker, for a movement that arose from women witnessing that even in the liberation movements, all things were far from equal.

But the press loves to single out. Loves to reduce a movement to one person. And when they can couch it on domestic terms, even better. When they can do it with a White face, all the more better.

So you didn't hear about Friedan ripping apart NOW in the eighties. You didn't hear about The Second Stage and how it was so similar to the tone Reagan set. You didn't hear about Friedan the scold who slammed feminism (and other feminist figures). Her well known homophobia was either overlooked or minimized. Some, in order to justify their praise, felt the need to point out that seventies' "surprise" where she voted to include gay rights on the platform. They didn't point out that Friedan, as was so often the case, played that for maximum publicity, from staying silent to come forward at the last minute. They didn't note the fact that she trashed feminists (in the feminist sense of the term) for "focusing" on rape. That she trashed them for 'turning against motherhood.' Wonder where that (false) talking point got traction? Look to Friedan.

But no one was too interested in doing that.

It's funny because a number of us have read a great deal of Alice Walker. (Three of us can state that they've read every book she's published.) And we're not remembering an ode to Friedan.
Could it be that we're looking at a White phenomon?

We think that's the case. Friedan was a White phenomon. She wrote from the middle class experience. While the women we spoke, women coming of age in the sixties and joining the second wave of feminism, could cite many books, The Feminine Mystique wasn't one of the ones they noted. (The most often noted was one was Sisterhood Is Powerful -- a collection edited by Robin Morgan and one of the first feminist anthologies.)

What did they think of when they thought of Friedan?

"The way she trashed domestic violence activists and said we should be working with Girl Scout groups instead of focusing on 'victim' issues," remembered one 51-year-old woman.

B-b-but she was "the mother of us all." Maybe if you were White, middle class, married and didn't have to work, came back the reply.

B-b-but she wrote the "blue print."

"Not to my life," said Anne who traces her own moments of "clicking" to the student activism of the sixties. "And the 'blue print' she ripped up with that awful book. [The Second Stage.] She was the Norma McCorvey of the feminist movement. [Norma McCovery is the real name of Jane Roe in the Roe v. Wade lawsuit.] She changed her positions to suit her fashion and did real damage to the movement."

What really happened? Could it be that Friedan's real impact was on her own generation, her own class, and her own race? The set that Mick Jagger and Ketih Richards lampooned in "Mother's Little Helper"?

We won't argue that it didn't reach beyond the set but we also won't argue that the second wave activism took root because of a book as opposed to real life experiences that weren't dealt with in said book. That view goes against the grain, goes against the norm and all the more reason to express it.

Friedan tidied up her own history in promoting the book which is another issue left unnoted in the "We remember Betty!" press coverage. There were radical roots there but that wouldn't play well in the mainstream media. So she simplified and the press aided and abetted. It's really not surprising that they'd continue to do so when noting her passing.

No more surprising than that White Gail Collins would run on op-ed about Friedan while avoiding the topic of Coretta Scott King. King didn't write a book that could be packaged and repackaged into a "Fellows, look out for what's coming!" report. She just lived her life with the activist spirit burning throughout. What were Friedan's thoughts on the current war? Or did she not bother to weigh in?

A number of right-wingers tried to say that the funeral of Coretta Scott King was hijacked by lefties to promote their causes and bash the Bully Boy. Their ignorance and lies weren't surprising. But maybe the lies worked on a few people? Maybe because the mainstream press coverage was most comfortable noting her as the wife of the man who gave the "I Have a Dream" speech -- as though that was where her life began and ended?

That's not reality. Coretta Scott King was a feminist, she was a civil rights activist, she was a fighter against poverty, she was a critic of the war. She never turned her back on a movement or ripped apart her own work.

Since Gail Collins refused to run any column or editorial on Coretta Scott King but did run one on Friedan (written by someone of her "class"), we would have had to compare the two women. But seeing a post noting the following, we knew we had to offer another point of view:

Without taking anything away from Coretta Scott King (well deserved attention), I regret Friedan does not get similar attention. She has had a much greater impact because it was for a population that is not recognized, one that is taken so much for granted: the mother/shore syndrome (thank you my fellow man).

"Without taking anything away"?

"Much greater impact" does exactly that, Frieda, exactly that. As does "for a population that is not recognized, one that is taken so much for granted." Shall we take that to mean, 'silly African-Americans engaged in their silly struggle' because it honestly strikes us that way. Black, White, Latina, it strikes us that way.

"Without taking anything away"?

We'll note this from Feminist Wire Daily:

King played a significant role in the founding years of the National Organization for Women (NOW). She hosted NOW's second convention in Atlanta, Georgia. King was appointed by President Carter to serve as a commissioner on the National Commission on the Observation of International Women's Year, which was led by Bella Abzug.
On what would have been Martin Luther King’s 50th birthday, King dedicated the public observation to the drive to make his birthday a national holiday, as well as the drive to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. King faithfully attended the annual brunch of the National Congress of Black Women, led by Dr. C. DeLores Tucker, a civil rights and women's rights champion who passed away last year.
"Over and over again, Coretta Scott King lent her words, her encouragement, her acts, and her deeds for the drive for human rights, civil rights, and women's rights worldwide," said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation. "She wisely used her historical position to further the rights of all people."

Frieda, it seems to us you're taking a great deal away. But that may not be your fault, you may be basing what we see as your ill informed opinions upon the "takeaway" from the mainstream media coverage. We also wonder how much you absorbed from that autographed copy of The Feminine Mystique since you're so quick to dismiss King's accomplishments which went far beyond, whether you know it or not, "the wife of." If it's any comfort, Gail Collins obviously shared your opinion that Friedan had a much greater impact" and we're sure that they'd she say her editorial choices were made "without taking anything away from Coretta Scott King" as well.