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.

FASHION WEEK & BETTY FREIDAN EACH DELIVER A POWERFUL MESSAGE

“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.” - Betty Friedan in “Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped our Times.”

Betty Friedan launched the contemporary modern women’s movement when her book, The Feminine Mystique, published fifty years ago exploded the myth of the happy homemaker. This one book galvanized women to mobilize at a grass roots level to help women become what they had the potential to be.

Fashion Week on the other hand, delivers an equally powerful message: how women should look. Fashion Week is a road show produced twice yearly that utterly dazzles with a series of hourly blockbuster events. The stunning and not so stunning designs, the excitement, the buzz, the anticipation, the frenzy is broadcast by the media around the world.

What one see are gorgeous clothes, on lanky young models, so tall, so young and so beautiful. They have neither breasts, nor hips, or backsides, and their skin is flawless. They look and move like zombies, staring out from vacant eyes. What you are meant to see, is just the clothes and you do. I was there for the first time and I was spellbound. The pull to look as these young models do is powerful not rational.

Can we integrate how we are told to look with who we can be? Two messages: one delivered to the eye, one delivered to the mind. Can they ever be integrated?

Particular Passions: Betty Friedan is available on Amazon and Apple.

FRIEDAN: 50 YEARS, THE IMPACT OF TIME

Betty Friedan turned the world topsy-turvy, with her landmark book “The Feminine Mystique. Women viewed themselves from a new perspective setting in motion changes for themselves and between the sexes that were unthinkable. Fifty years has seen more radical changes in women’s identity, how women function, women’s relationship with men, than going back to the beginning of time. We haven’t achieved complete success in our goals which are constantly changing, but the massive machinery Friedan set in motion has great staying power and will help us get there... wherever "there" is.

As she said in my book, Particular Passions: Talks With Women Who Have Shaped our Times “The way... 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 was the worst, the guilts, the conflicts... That put negative valences on one's own enjoyment of motherhood. It's such a short period. I wish I'd felt free to concentrate on them more.”

To put our lives in historical perspective read Friedan in her own words in a chapter from Particular Passions. You'll find things like the guilt about motherhood remains the same, but others that have changed dramatically… for the better.

Available at Amazon or Apple for only $0.99. It's a treat and a bargain. As good as a caffe latte and cheaper.

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