Betty Frieden, one of the founders of American feminism, died Feb 4th, on her 85th birthday. I was still a child when her book The Feminiine Mystique was published. I remember older friends talking about the then radical idea that a woman might need, not just want but need more than a husband and children.
I had conflicting opinions back then and after decades I still have conflicting thoughts about the whole subject. Of course women want and need more than the narrow little role of wife and mother. I have no conflict with that. But what has always troubled me is how those who rejected traditional roles denigrated and condemned and ridiculed those who chose to retain the roles or attempted to integrate a wide variety of roles. Fundamentally it was just a switch in the gender of who was telling us how to live. So we discarded the male lifestyle direction of women for female lifestyle direction and surprise! the females trying to direct our lives were as uncaring of individual women's needs and wants as their previous taskmasters! Fourty years later stay at home mums still are not respected and people still ask them "do you intend to go back to work?". Ha! Anyone who asks that should be sentenced to raise 3 young children without extra household help for a few weeks. All women work. Some do it in the home and some in a office, but they all WORK. Dont ever fool yourself about this. The most high-pressure, techically difficult project management job I ever worked on was a freaking piece of cake compared to daily care for 3 children (or more sometimes).
So back to Betty. I always liked Betty and what she had to say. My arguement was with the come-latelies like Gloria Steinem. The ones who weren't interested in giving women a choice, the ones who kicked the concepts of equality to the side. My arguement was with the All-females-are-dykes-under-the-skin radical and men are the anti-christ crowd. The ones who imposed a conventionalism on the new feminism that was as narrow and confining in its own way as that previously imposed by men. Is it better for the gulag to be guarded by them or us? We are still in the gulag.
Bye Bye Betty. You fought the good fight.
1 comment:
I tend to agree. I've truely never understood- I mean, really understood- the whole feminism issue. The reason being, I came to realise some years back, that I myself was one of the old sort. I was raised around strong women (You, Asti, Oma, Dea, Helena- no wilting flowers, that's for damn sure) and as a consequence it honestly has never really occurred to me to treat women as anything BUT equals. I understand that this is something of what the origional ideas of feminism were and that I'd agree with. What I hate are the people who believe that men are scum and women are the most perfect people on earth, that all violence is caused by men, blah blah blah. Nonsense. But the attitude has shifted in recent years, I'e noticed. Now many younger women want to hae the rights of equality, without the responcibility. They want to be treated as equals- but god forbid that if one of them punches me, I can punch them back. I've always been proud about how you and papa taught me that all people are to be treated equally with respect until they hae done something to lose that respect whether they be men, women, balck or white. That, and that just becuase osmeone has opinions differing from your own doesn't mean you can't still be friends.
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