Betty Friedan - She Deserved Better

I met Betty Friedan, who wrote the "Feminine Mystique," when she was already being bashed as everything from "bourgeois" to "yesterday."  I was handling public relations at the University of Pittsburgh.  Ms. Friedan was heading up a protest on behalf of a female instructor at the university who had been denied tenure and committed suicide.  The method of checking out was particularly nasty and probably painful-- ingesting an insect killer.  Ms. Friedan used that manner of death as a metaphor for how the university had made the instructor feel "like a bug." That kind of rhetoric was passe.  I reported to my superior, "No, Betty Friedan is no threat here.  Just ignore it."

That was sort of the message the women's movement was also giving about her:  Ignore.  The revolution she had set in motion had died of its own success.  We women had choices.  We were too busy with our lives to listen to rhetoric.

Ms. Friedan tried for a comeback through the next major social movement - ageism.  She wrote "The Fountain of Age."  At the time I was ghostwriting a book on how to succeed in professional life post-40 and was deeply disappointed in "The Fountain of Age."  Ken Dychtwald had taken over that territory with his "Age Power: How the 21st century will be ruled by the new old." The age of Betty Friedan had truly passed. 

It is the Betty Friedans who leave us with those questions about success and failure, happiness and unhappiness.  Why do some people's careers, despite ups/downs, seem blessed, and their lives filled with satisfactions and others' seem so troubled?

She was plenty smart, graduating Smith College with honors.  But we all know there's no correlation between smart and anything else.  Smart can just be smart.  End of story.  She knew how to get this done, including establishing the National Organization of Women (NOW) to influence legislation affecting women.  But did she bet on the wrong horses?  For instance, she lent support to the doomed candidacy of Geraldine Ferraro.  Hillary Clinton is politically more astute.  When Senator Clinton dies, I won't be traveling a melancholy road describing her career and life.

Betty Friedan died today.  She was 85.  May she now rest in peace.  She deserved better.