Betty Friedan -- HERSTORY

"All revolutionary movements have been made by intellectuals, the educated. It’s nonsense to fool around with any silliness about whether or not the modern women’s movement was a white, middle-class movement. Absolutely. It was a white, middle-class movement from the beginning, though it always had blacks in it and it always had to do with the problem of poverty, which for women cuts across class lines. The people who could articulate the philosophy of this movement were people who had education, although for some, the education had come in the labor movement and not in college. That’s how movements happen." Betty Friedan

The oral biography of Betty Friedan, who fueled the women’s liberation movement that continues to work toward equal rights for women around the globe.

Betty Friedan -- The Women's Movement

"It isn’t accidental that the modern women’s movement exploded in America because the ideology of the mainstream of the movement is first of all that women are people; and being people, they can and must demand equality of opportunity and their own voice in the decisions of society, human freedom, human dignity, all the rest that is considered our American birthright. And that’s all it was. Everybody had such a hard time thinking this was a movement without an ideology, but the ideology of this movement was no more or no less than the ideology of all human evolution and of American democracy, but applied to women. That’s what was unique, and it was applied to us. We did it for ourselves and not abstractly—grocery baskets to the poor for some other race." Betty Friedan  

The oral biography of Betty Friedan, who fueled the women’s liberation movement that continues to work toward equal rights for women around the globe.

Betty Friedan -- HERSTORY

Betty-Friedan

"Well, they say the women's movement is the largest movement of social change of the last decades and in some ways it’s probably the largest revolution of all time, though it isn’t what anyone else has ever meant by revolution. You have to see it in its own terms. I think we’re only beginning to see the far-flung implications of the change. Also I think the women’s movement is only a step in a larger process of evolution, that it’s a stage. It’s been happening for a long time." Betty Friedan 

The oral biography of Betty Friedan, who fueled the women’s liberation movement that continues to work toward equal rights for women around the globe.

Betty Friedan – On Empowerment and Motherhood

"What I’m saying now is really unfinished. Where it seemed in the first stage that self-fulfillment for women was opposed to the family, in the second stage I think because the evolution of the family is based on the strengthened self and autonomy of women, they are not opposed. I do not think you can see a full celebration of the personhood of woman if you divorce the woman from the family. But the strengthening of the family is made possible by the new autonomy of women." 

– Betty Friedan, from 'Particular Passions: Talk With Women Who Shaped Our Times', by Lynn Gilbert. The oral biography of Betty Friedan, who fueled the women’s liberation movement that continues to work toward equal rights for women around the globe.

This is one of 42 oral biographies from the late 1970s captured in Particular Passions. Enjoy the Betty Friedan Chapter with our compliments in celebration of Mother's Day. See the offer on our Facebook page through Mother's Day, Sunday, May 12, 2103.

Betty Friedan -- HERSTORY

“It changed my life.” That’s what women say about the women’s movement, “It changed my life, it changed my whole life.” When they said it in the beginning, they meant the book The Feminine Mystique. Now they mean the whole women’s movement. It did change everybody’s lives, including my own. But I don’t want there to be any danger this time of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What I’m saying now is really unfinished. Where it seemed in the first stage that self-fulfillment for women was opposed to the family, in the second stage I think because the evolution of the family is based on the strengthened self and autonomy of women, they are not opposed. I do not think you can see a full celebration of the personhood of woman if you divorce the woman from the family. But the strengthening of the family is made possible by the new autonomy of women."

— Betty Friedan, in Particular Passions: Talks With Women Who Shaped Our Times.

The oral biography of Betty Friedan, who fueled the women’s liberation movement that continues to work toward equal rights for women around the globe.

Betty Friedan's oral interview from the late 1970s, available for $0.99, at Amazon and Apple.

Betty Friedan - On Motherhood

"My three kids are great. Who knows? They may think I would have been a better mother if it hadn’t been for the women’s movement, but I don’t think so. The way that you can have children now, when you’ve already started on your work and know what you can do, you are not subject to the guilts that women in my generation were. That was the worst, the guilts, the conflicts, the leaning over backwards against them. That put negative valences on one’s own enjoyment of motherhood. It’s such a short period. I wish that in the period when they were little, I wish I’d felt free to concentrate on them more. But when you’re under the aegis of the feminine mystique, there was the rebellion; and then to do anything at all, you’re going against the stream of society and you have your own guilts about what you’re doing."

— Betty Friedan, in Particular Passions: Talks With Women Who Shaped Our Times.

The oral biography of Betty Friedan, who fueled the women’s liberation movement that continues to work toward equal rights for women around the globe.

Available on Amazon and Apple.

Betty Friedan - Herstory in a chapter

"There was the great first movement for women’s rights beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft, and the early suffragettes in England and America who fought for the vote, and the early rights; but that movement came to a standstill with the winning of the vote in the United States in 1920, before I was born. It didn’t change the lives of women because the rights, while necessary, didn’t lead to the kind of changes that are happening now. The movement was aborted, or it was asleep. There was a backlash, which I then gave a name to: the 'feminine mystique.' We had to break through the whole image of woman and we had to define ourselves as people; and then we had to begin a process that’s still not finished, of restructuring institutions so that women could be people. The essence of the modern woman’s movement is equality and the personhood of woman. That’s what it is and that’s all it is. All the rest of it—all the images of women’s lib, the bra-burning, the man-hating, down with marriage, down with motherhood—was  an expression of anger based on an ideological mistake. It is not essential. It is not a part of the whole change. The anger was real enough, but sexual politics was not what it was really all about."

— Betty Friedan, in Particular Passions: Talks With Women Who Shaped Our Times.

Read the oral interview of Betty Friedan from the late 1970s - available at Apple and Amazon for 99 cents.

Women's History Month: Radcliffe Connections

In recognition of Women's History Month, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study presents Susan B. Anthony, Helen Keller, Amelia Earhart, Dorothy West, Betty Friedan, June Jordan, Julia Child, Anna Deveare Smith, and Elizabeth Warren. These nine remarkable women have all made history-and they have something else in common: a connection to Radcliffe.

I am proud that my portrait of Betty Friedan was selected for this video.

Betty Friedan - Herstory.

"Well, they say the women's movement is the largest movement of social change of the last decades and in some ways it’s probably the largest revolution of all time, though it isn’t what anyone else has ever meant by revolution. You have to see it in its own terms. I think we’re only beginning to see the far-flung implications of the change. Also I think the women’s movement is only a step in a larger process of evolution, that it’s a stage. It’s been happening for a long time." Betty Friedan - Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped Our Times."

— Betty Friedan, in Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped Our Times.

The oral biography of Betty Friedan, who fueled the women’s liberation movement that continues to work toward equal rights for women around the globe.

In celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Friedan's Feminine Mystique - enjoy her oral interview from the late 1970s; one of 42 interviews captured in Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped Our Times.

Betty Friedan - The Femine Mystique

"Today I see the same contradiction, in a way, between what almost becomes 'the feminine mystique' if we get locked into the reaction, the sexual politics of the women’s movement and the reality of women’s lives, including my own. Don’t forget that my own agony that led me to write The Feminine Mystique had to do with the mistaken choice: either/or. When I see us heading toward it again, when I see us denying the basic needs of women that do have to do with love and men and children, it denies a part of me, it denies a part of my personhood and what I am as a woman. I will not deny all that I am."

- Betty Friedan, in Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped Our Times.

The oral biography of Betty Friedan, who fueled the women’s liberation movement that continues to work toward equal rights for women around the globe. Available for $0.99 at Apple and Amazon.