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Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America
From: Columbia University
| By:
Daniel Horowitz |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Ever since the 1963 publication of her landmark book, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, feminist pioneer and founder of the women's organization NOW, has insisted that her commitment to women's rights grew out of her experiences as an alienated, white, suburban housewife in America. Yet, as historian Daniel Horowitz reveals in a provocative lecture at Columbia University, the roots of Friedan's feminism run much deeper. |
 n 1943, 20 years before the publication of The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, a little more than a year out of college, wrote an article that began by warning male readers that cooking in the kitchens at their homes were "revolutions of the forgotten female," who were coming to realize that they produced something other than children. Friedan then told of how much women had learned from working in the factory, including that housekeeping was solitary and boring. |
She concluded her piece with a quote that contained both a hope and a threat: "And the men must work along with us in the solution of our basic home problems or there will, in the end, be no homes worth mentioning in the U.S.A." |
Yet in 1973 Friedan remarked that until 1957, when she started working on The Feminine Mystique, "I wasn't even conscious of the woman problem." In the 1970s, she first publicly acknowledged how in the mid-1940s she and her friends considered themselves in "the vanguard of the working-class revolution" and participated in "Marxist discussion groups." At the same time, she commented that right after the war she was "very political, very involved, consciously radical" but "not about women, for heaven's sake." Even now, Friedan leaves the impression that her landmark book emerged principally from her own suburban captivity. |
The success of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was due in large measure to its claims that it spoke from and to the experiences of suburban housewives. Friedan's feminism had its roots less in suburban captivity of the 1950s, as she claimed, than in labor radicalism of the 1940s. That is a story that hasn't been told until now but one of which Friedan herself and American feminists, young and old, should be proud. |
Friedan's version of her life, which historians and journalists readily accepted, hid from view the connection between the union activity of the 1940s and early 1950s and the feminism she articulated in the 1960s. In the short term, her experience in the suburbs prompted her to write The Feminine Mystique. A longer-term perspective makes clear that the book's origins lie much earlier. An exploration of her experiences as a radical and activist in the 1940s and 1950s is crucial to understanding Friedan's life and the history of modern feminism. |
Consider what standard references, journalists and historians say of Friedan's life in the 1940s and 1950s and of her relationship to the emergence of feminism in the 1960s. They all agree that Friedan's feminism emerged first as a result of her writing of The Feminine Mystique (1963). The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography (1995) says, "She married in 1947 [which is true] and for almost the next 20 years lived the life of a conventional suburban housewife/mother [which is not true]." |
This version of the story of Friedan's life has been a centerpiece in the history of feminism in the 1960s, which, most women's historians argue, emerged without any connection to earlier expressions of organized feminism. I should add that Friedan's story is very difficult to dislodge. In the first biography of Friedan written for adult audiences, Judith Hennessee has said, "During her years as a labor reporter Betty received a complete education in women's issues, but there was no 'click,' no moment of truth" when the discussions of women's issues she heard in the early 1950s resonated. |
The Smith years: Friedan's political education
When Betty Friedan arrived at Smith College in the fall of 1938, she had already been sensitized to issues of anti-Semitism, labor union organizing, and to the alternatives that young ambitious girls like herself faced when she was growing up in Peoria, Illinois. |
Smith College in Friedan's years, 1938 to 1942, fundamentally shaped her outlook on the world, including on women's issues. There Friedan first developed a sense of herself as a radical. Courses she took, friendships she established with peers and professors, events in the US and abroad, and her campus leadership all turned her from a provincial outsider into a determined advocate of labor unions as the herald of a progressive social change, a healthy skeptic about the authority and rhetorical claims of those in power, a staunch opponent of fascism, a defender of free speech and a fierce questioner of social privilege expressed by the conspicuous consumption of some of her peers. When she graduated, in 1942, she had earned honors equal to her ambition: junior Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, and editor in chief of the student newspaper. |
More important for the history of feminism, Friedan's years at Smith provided her with an education on women's issues. In her junior year, she took an economics course with Dorothy Wolff Douglas, a course on social movements and socialism taught by a woman who would serve as a role model for many Smith students |
A wealthy and compelling person, Douglas was a mother, a scholar, a teacher and a radical. In February of 1941, on Friedan's 20th birthday, in a lecture on women in Nazi Germany, Friedan recorded what Douglas had to say about the condition of women under German fascism. Douglas mentioned what she called the "feminist movement." In contrast, she talked about the "traditionalism" of the National Socialists' attitude to religion, women, children and family. Nazis insisted, she noted Douglas as saying, on placing children at the center of family lives. |
They celebrated motherhood. They opposed women working outside the house in professional positions, but not as farmers and manual laborers. They minimized the intellectual capacity of women, emphasizing instead the importance of their feelings. These ideas of an anti-fascist professor found echoes more than two decades later in The Feminine Mystique. Friedan restated what Douglas had said in 1941: conservative forces, this time in America, were suppressing the legitimate aspirations of women by forcing them to stay at home and focus on housekeeping and child-rearing. |
At Smith, Friedan linked her journalism to political activism and this is clearest in her senior year, 1941-2. That fall saw a series of events of extraordinary intensity, including the denunciation by the college president of an editorial Friedan had written in which she expressed her opposition to American entry in World War II. Of special interest is, at the very end of October, the publication by a Smith student of a piece in the campus humor magazine that poked fun at the maids who cleaned students' rooms and at students who befriended them. Exactly one month later, a group of maids at Smith announced they would seek a charter for a union from the American Federation of Labor. |
At the same time, male building and grounds workers were organizing into a union--an effort that Friedan, who had just returned from a summer at Highlander Folk School, supported as the editor of the student paper. Thus, at Smith, within the context of anti-fascism, Friedan engaged herself in a series of issues on women and workers. |
The 1940s: Friedan as journalist and radical
After she left Smith, Friedan spent a year as a psychology graduate at the University of California, Berkeley. There she began nine years, from 1943 to 1952, as a labor journalist, first for Federated Press, a left-wing news service. Then, for about six years beginning in July 1946, precisely at the moment when the wartime Popular Front came under intense attack, Friedan was a reporter for the UE News, the newspaper of one of America's most radical unions. |
In her years at the UE News, the union was under attack for what many believed was its leadership by American Communists and the progressive position it took on issues concerning African-Americans and women. Not coincidentally, it was also the object of concerted attack by HUAC, FBI, the Catholic Church and the CIO. |
As a labor journalist, Friedan stood for a wide range of progressive issues. She attacked discrimination directed against Jews, African-Americans, Latinos and even senior citizens. She campaigned for freedom of speech and against the hardening of the lines between the US and the USSR in the postwar period. She criticized greedy corporations and celebrated heroic workers. As World War II ended, she campaigned against world hunger, for civilian control of atomic power and for a full recognition of the Nazi Holocaust. |
Critical to understanding the connections between her 1960s feminism and what she did in the 1940s and early 1950s is the recognition that as a labor journalist Friedan, beginning in 1943, wrote articles and pamphlets on women's history, sex discrimination and protests by women. In the 1940s Friedan was aware of discussions of women's issues in the American left. In 1943, 20 years before the publication of The Feminine Mystique, she wrote the article that I referred to at the beginning, a warning to men and a call to women to recognize the importance of working outside the home. |
In addition, Friedan was well aware of the Congress of American Women, the most important left-wing feminist organization in the immediate postwar world. The congress engaged the energies of key figures in women's activism of the 1940s, including Susan B. Anthony II and Dorothy W. Douglas. It was also an important experience for several women, including the historians Eleanor Flexner and Gerda Lerner, who would emerge as important feminists of the 1960s. Indeed, in 1946 Friedan worked on the story in which Federated Press announced the creation of the congress, an organization killed several years later by McCarthyism. Friedan knew of discussions among progressive feminists, taking place around 1946, about housework, day care and what they called male chauvinism. |
Then, in 1952, Friedan authored a pamphlet entitled "The UE Fights for Women Workers." Its central theme was how, in an effort to improve the pay and conditions of working women, the UE fought valiantly against greedy corporations that sought to increase their profits by exploiting women. To back up the call for equal pay for equal work and against discrimination directed toward women, she countered stereotypes justifying lower pay for women: that they were physically weaker, entered the work force only temporarily, had no families to support and worked only for pin money. She highlighted the "even more shocking" situation that African-American women faced, having to deal as they did with the "double bars" of being female and African-American. |
The 1950s: an alternative suburban life
Friedan married in 1947 and with her husband, Carl, started a family, which eventually included three children. Around 1950, they moved out of Manhattan to the suburbs. In the 1950s, Friedan was a suburban housewife, but she was no ordinary suburban housewife. Nor did she live in ordinary suburbs. The first suburb was Parkway Village, Queens, a group of garden apartments that had an extraordinarily cosmopolitan mix of people, including diplomats from the United Nations, African-Americans and American Jews. There she was a leader of a rent strike. |
In addition, there she transformed the Parkway Villager from a chatty source of community news into an activist publication, one that pictured a heroic community committed to social justice by fighting greedy bankers. She also wrote or edited a series of articles on families in which husbands and wives cooperated in raising their children and doing household chores. |
In 1956, Friedan moved to Rockland County, a New York suburban area around 15 miles to the north and west of Manhattan. Initially, the Friedan family settled in Sneden's Landing, which a contemporary described as a community of artists and writers whose "fetish is non-conformity, individuality, originality." In 1957, the Friedans moved to Grandview-on-Hudson, a tiny and distinctive suburb in Rockland County. Here, as a suburban housewife, with three kids and a husband who commuted into Manhattan, she also founded and ran the Intellectual Resources Pool. |
This effort was a nationally recognized, foundation-funded series of programs that included school enrichment and adult-education efforts. Work on the Pool enabled her to answer people like Senator Joseph R. McCarthy by proudly proclaiming the importance of intellectuals and ideas in American life. Her efforts rested on a commitment to asserting the importance of individual identity in an age of conformity, ideas then common among social critics and social and behavioral scientists, most notably her Berkeley professor Erik H. Erikson. |
Through her work on the Intellectual Resources Pool, Friedan pondered the fate of middle-class females--teenage girls who were struggling with issues of adolescence, suburban matrons who were committed to revitalizing their communities by volunteer work, and those like herself who wanted to sustain an intellectual and public life in the suburbs. |
Among those involved in the pool were some of the most important American radicals who shaped the 1960s: Herbert Gutman, the pioneering labor historian; C. Wright Mills, the sociologist who was such an important inspiration to young radicals in the 1960s; Harvey Swados, whose On the Line (1957) vividly portrayed the impact of assembly-line work on the lives of laborers. Although Friedan knew these men, there is reason to believe that at least some of them did not take her seriously as a writer. |
As a suburban housewife, Friedan was also a freelance writer for mass circulation magazines. She wrote articles that mildly challenged the Cold War consensus, opposing the idea that women should stay at home and be content to take care of the children. |
A comparison of the drafts of the articles with the final versions reveals that she was learning that she could not challenge complacency too forcefully. For example, in the draft of an article on a cooperative community in South Norwalk, Connecticut, she talked of how the group that founded the community rejected restrictive covenants that would prevent non-whites or Jews from owning land in the development. Indeed, Friedan made clear that several African-American families, a Japanese-American teacher and a Chinese woman were among the residents. |
A sea of whiteness erased these issues from the printed version. In other words, through her work as a freelancer, Friedan was learning that to sell articles and develop a middle-class audience it was necessary to whiten the world, tone down feminism and minimize her radical analysis. This was an important lesson that shaped her 1963 book. |
<I>The Feminine Mystique</I>: what early drafts reveal
An examination of early drafts of The Feminine Mystique itself gives us a richer sense of what the book might have been. Her research notes reveal how familiar she was with Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, the most important feminist book of the 1950s. As she researched material for her book, she also read Friedrich Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, the classic statement of Marxist feminism. Friedan took down what Engels had to say about the liberation of women coming only when they entered the productive workforce. To which she added three words of her own: "along with men." |
Early drafts also included information on how in the 1950s the left-wing press treated women in its pages as badly as did the middle-class women's magazines. Early on, she also drafted an extensive discussion of how successfully women in the suburbs, including herself, were breaking through the feminine mystique. Indeed, she drafted but did not include in the book a whole chapter on how her Smith classmates, whom she surveyed in 1957, were living rich and full, albeit realistically frustrated, lives. |
Why have we not known these stories before, stories that make Friedan's life into a complex, deep, even heroic one? Stories that also turn Friedan from a frustrated suburban housewife into a missing link in the history of American feminism, by providing concrete examples of her engagement, well before she began to work on her book, with women's issues in the labor movement. |
The answer has to do partly with McCarthyism. To illustrate the stakes, let me go back to her year at Berkeley, 1942-3. It was a brief but important period, for it connected her to people central to the Red Scare. In saying what I am about to say, I am not arguing that she was guilty of any sin. Rather, the conditions of the Red Scare, I argue, made it prudent for her to hide key elements of her past. If there is a moral to the story I tell in my book, it is that the Red Scare killed feminism |
Key figures from Friedan's Berkeley year were targets of McCarthyite attacks. I could mention a number of them, but let me focus on her peer David Bohm, with whom Friedan had been romantically and politically involved during her year at Berkeley. During that year, Bohm was a member of the Communist Party, and he worked on the atomic bomb under the supervision of J. Robert Oppenheimer. In September 1949, HUAC held hearings, with Richard M. Nixon asking Bohm key questions. Bohm exercised his constitutional right and took the Fifth Amendment. Congress then cited him for contempt and Princeton decided not to reappoint him to his position in the physics department and barred him from the university's campus. |
Although Bohm was acquitted, and recent evidence indicates he was not involved in espionage, his academic career in the US was over. He went into exile, eventually having a distinguished career as a philosopher of science in England. |
Around the time of the executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, in 1953, Friedan drafted a scenario for a play about the Rosenberg case. Her words were raw, passionate and intense. Friedan imagined herself in the jail while she tried to find some way the Rosenbergs' lives could be spared. |
Friedan's shift in position: therapy and other influences
In addition to McCarthyism, other factors explain why Friedan distanced herself from her past. For a whole range of reasons, including proving a point to her husband, she was eager for her book to succeed financially. She was well aware that male authors such as Vance Packard, William Whyte and David Riesman had reached a wide audience with critiques of middle-class life in the suburbs. The story she told of her own life made it possible for white suburban women readers to identify with its author and thereby enhanced the book's appeal. |
Some of the changes in her story may also have to do with shifts in her political position, and with her disillusionment with the sexism she knew existed in men on the left who were supposedly committed to an egalitarian society. In addition, Friedan's experience with therapy in the early 1950s caused her to re-evaluate her decade-long experience as a radical labor journalist, something she came to see as not representing her authentic self. In writing the book, she came to realize at what costs she had given up her college interest in psychology. |
Over a longer period of time, other influences intensified her commitment to her story. In response to the emergence of radical feminism in the 1970s, she cast her role in the women's movement as someone whose experience in Peoria and the suburbs gave her the authority to speak for the average middle-class woman. Eventually she came to believe in the stories she told, with memory playing its usual tricks. |
What I have said restores a sense of connectedness to Friedan's life and the history of American feminism. Her life makes clear how important World War II, unions, issues of the 1940s, and those who fought in that period for rights for women and African-Americans were in setting the stage for the re-emergence of protests in the 1960s. |
Friedan has now begun to acknowledge her radical past, something that until now she had done, in public, only in the mid-1970s. However, to the best of my knowledge she still maintains that her radical activity in the 1940s had no connection to her 1960s feminism and that, therefore, there is a sharp separation between the parts of her life, with the break coming in the mid-1950s. On the other hand, I see continuity, stretching from the late 1930s until the present, with important origins of her feminism in the 1940s. |
Rethinking <I>The Feminine Mystique</I>: reactions from left and right
As an author, I did not have to resort to what Edmund Morris did in Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan--placing my fictitious self in the narrative, inventing documents--all because I could not fathom the person about whom I was writing. I am sure I got the key element of the story right, especially what is for me the bottom line. What the documents make clear is how what Friedan knew of women's issues in the 1940s helped shape her book and her feminism. |
Yet there remains the complex problem of memory, narrative, counter-narrative that dogs the writer of someone else's life. And it is this issue on which so many reviews have focused. In some ways, reviews have followed predictable lines. Generally speaking, people on the right have welcomed the news of the origins of Friedan's feminism in the Old Left and used such knowledge to attack Friedan, especially for hiding vital information. Writing in First Things, an anonymous reviewer said, "With devastating detail, Horowitz has blown the lid off the Friedan mystique." |
Usually conservatives have used the book to congratulate me and lambaste Friedan. In contrast, David Horowitz (no relation), the 1960s radical who has made such a sharp rightward turn, used his review in Salon entitled "Feminist Fibber" to attack us both. Me, for being "so slavish in his ideological loyalty one might reasonably describe him as a 'fellow-traveler'" who "bends over backward throughout his book to sanitize the true dimensions of Friedan's past"; and Friedan, for both having and hiding that past, which he saw as that of "a Stalinist Marxist (or a fellow traveler thereof)" and a "professional propagandist for the Communist left for nearly thirty years." |
In contrast, those on the left, especially socialist feminists whose lives were shaped so profoundly by the women's movement of the 1950s, appreciate my book and the new version of Friedan's life. They appreciate the revelations of links between Old and New Left, especially on women's issues, and they celebrate a feminism that, in the words of Linda Kerber, "has been healthiest when linked to the full range of issues of social justice." As Ruth Rosen has written in Dissent, my book answered the "inchoate thought" she had in the late 1960s when she joined the women's movement, "that something was missing, buried, just out of our sight." |
"The continuity between women of the Old and New Left," she remarks, "is a missing link in twentieth-century political and social history, with my book showing how the legacy of one generation of women of the American left ended up influencing the shaping of a generation of New Left women." |
Writing in the Women's Review of Books, the historical sociologist Ruth Milkman remarked that "Perhaps now, in the aftermath of the Cold War, [Friedan] has lost all fear of reiterating her commitments to social justice and to organized labor as a vehicle for securing it and can acknowledge at last the threads that united progressive social movements across the generations." |
Responses from Friedan and those who know her
Those who knew Friedan have responded in divergent ways. In a June 1999 letter Carl Friedan, her ex-husband, wrote me to say, "Your book on Betty seems to me to be quite accurate. Amazingly so. As I told her, better this Daniel Horowitz breaking the left wing news rather than David Horowitz." In contrast, writing in early 1999, Betty Friedan's older sister, Amy Goldstein Adams, said that I failed to fathom my subject. "I believe that you have attempted to explain--factually, logically, intellectually--an act of creativity which can to a certain extent be explained but it is, in its essence, irreducible." |
Betty Friedan, though largely silent, on several occasions has spoken publicly about my work. In a speech in November of 1996 she remarked, "Some historian recently wrote some attack on me in which he claimed that I was only pretending to be a suburban housewife, that I was supposed to be an agent and was only pretending to be a suburban housewife." More recently, speaking at Cornell University, Friedan remarked that her feminism drew no inspiration from her years as a labor radical and Old Leftie. How, she asked, could she learn any feminism from a social movement so infected with sexism? |
Several issues are at stake in the divergence between how Friedan and others see Friedan's life and how I interpret her place in history. First, there is the difference between the biographer and the historian. The biographer is interested in the distinctiveness of a life. In contrast, as a historian, I am interested in what Friedan's life shares with those of others-Eleanor Flexner, Gerda Lerner and even Bella Abzug: the shaping of political consciousness in the cauldron of the Old Left and McCarthyism. Where they see atypicality I see typicality and what one life tells us about an age. |
Second, the people I mention privilege psychological subjectivity--specifically, how Friedan saw her life, both in 1963 and now. In contrast, relying on the written record, I want to emphasize the power of documents to illuminate the past and of people's engagement with ideas at an early point in their lives to shape their outlook later in life. Thirdly, critics such as Judith Shulevitz and Amy Adams (and probably Friedan herself) want to emphasize the freedom of the individual to shape a life, and not, as I do, the nature of the interaction between social and economic forces and individual development. |
In the end, I stand by my interpretation of the historical evidence: documents that make clear that what Friedan learned in the 1940s shaped what she wrote in the 1960s; that at the point of writing The Feminine Mystique, her subjectivity and self-identity were fluid. I find it hard to believe that for a woman as passionate as Friedan was in her twenties there was on women's issues no moment of a click, no resonance. |
The truth about the women's movement: how it can save feminism
What is at stake in the new understanding of the origins of feminism is considerable. This is not the story of how one woman came to consciousness of women's issues; rather, it is the story of how a social movement, driven by both nationally recognized leaders and by less well known, grassroots followers, worked, beginning in the 1940s, to focus on issues of critical importance to women. As Laura Shapiro said in her essay on my book in Newsweek, "The real roots of modern feminism" lie in "familiar issues of pay and child care raised half a century ago." |
In contrast, in its June 29, 1998, feature story on feminism, with Friedan's picture on the cover, Time magazine disparaged the women's movement by saying that 1960s feminism "didn't start in the factory. It started in wood-paneled salons," and then spread to suburban living rooms, and only later "eventually ended up with Norma Rae." Time here referred to the hero of a 1979 movie about a woman, played by Sally Field, who despite overwhelming odds organizes her co-workers in a Southern factory into a union. "That trajectory," Time concluded, emphasizing the middle-class origins of the modern women's movement, "is feminism's biggest problem today." |
The work of a series of historians enables us to reverse that mythological trajectory and understand how feminism of the 1960s originated in the factories of the 1940s--through the writings of middle-class observers such as Betty Friedan who were in turn inspired by the passion of working-class union women involved in labor insurgency in the years during and right after World War II. McCarthyism attempted to snuff out those flames, driving a thriving feminism of the 1940s underground. |
However, the feminism shaped in the cauldron of the 1940s was too strong to die. And so it re-emerged in the 1960s. For Friedan, labor union activity of the 1940s and early 1950s provided the bridge over which she moved from the working class to women as the repository of her hopes as well as much of the material from which she would fashion her feminism in The Feminine Mystique. |
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