radical past of liberal feminism: Betty Friedan and the making of the feminine mystique: The American left, the cold war, and modern feminism, The

Off Our Backs, Jul 2001 by Douglas, Carol Anne

The Radical Past of Liberal Feminism: Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique; The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism

Betty Friedan was a notable leftist whose writings focused on union women. True of false? True, if you're talking about Betty Friedan in the 1940s and early '50s, when she was Bettye Goldstein.

Yes, Betty Friedan, whose work has often been criticized for focusing on middle-class housewives and leaving out the experiences of working women and women of color, had earlier in her life focused on working women and women of color. She did not leave them out of The Feminine Mystique through unconscious classism, but deliberately, in order to attract middle-class women. That her tactic was wildly successful says as much about society in the United States (and middle-class women) as it does about Friedan.

off our backs seldom if ever reviews books by men, but Daniel Horowitz's biography of Betty Friedan is too important to the feminist movement to miss. I passed it up when it was a hardback, but I recently picked up the paperback and realized it needed a review. Horowitz is a progressive who wants to set the record straight that second wave feminism was more influenced by the Old Left than most feminists think.

Bettye Goldstein was born in 1921, the daughter of a Peoria, Illinois, jeweler. Always interested in writing, she was the editor of her high school newspaper and later of the college newspaper at Smith. A Smith professor told Bettye's mother that Bettye was the most brilliant student Smith ever had. But as a Jew, Bettye was an outsider, often socially excluded in predominantly gentile institutions.

Bettye was radicalized at Smith, where a number of professors were progressives and some were refugees from Nazi Germany. People looking back at radicals of the time often wonder whether they had ties to the Communist Party or followed the Communist Party line. Friedan did not follow any line. As a college newspaper editor, she wrote that the best way to oppose fascism in Europe was to oppose fascism in the United States. She opposed entering the war in Europe (as Communists did after the Hitler-Stalin Pact), and did not change her mind (as Communists did) after Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Only after Pearl Harbor did she support U.S. entry into the war; she feared that when the U.S. went to war, the domestic right wing would be strengthened, as there had been anti-Left actions during World War I.

Before her last year at Smith, Bettye spent several weeks at learning how to be an organizer at the progressive Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which later was important in the Civil Rights Movement. During her senior year, Bettye supported a strike by Smith's cleaning workers.

After Smith, she went to graduate school at Berkeley with the aim of becoming a psychiatrist. During that time she dated physics graduate student David Bohm, who was working on what later became the Manhattan Project producing the atomic bomb. The FBI was investigating him and other leftists in the project; he joined the Communist Party that year. Bettye's FBI report, which Horowitz has seen, says she applied to join the party that year, but was turned down because they had too many intellectuals. However, there were errors in the report and FBI reports are notoriously full of errors, Horowitz notes. In the early '50s, Bohm took the Fifth Amendment before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, was indicted for contempt, and left the country for Brazil soon afterwards to avoid further persecution.

After a year, Bettye left graduate school. She said in the '70s that it was because a boyfriend had pressured her to quit, but Horowitz disputes that and says it was because she wanted to work for a union. At any rate, she did become a reporter for Federated Press, a labor news service.

Books saying that women should not be confined in the home were popular at that time, Horowitz writes. Bettye reviewed a 1943 book by Elizabeth Hawes, Why Women Cry, or Wenches With Wrenches, which said that women needed to work in the paid labor force. Bettye opened the review with the line, "Men, there's a revolution cooking in your kitchens." Revolutions of the forgotten female, who is finally discovering that she can produce other things besides babies. So much for her claim in The Feminine Mystique that she discovered that housework was oppressive when she was a housewife in the mid- and late '50s.

Working for Federated Press, Bettye opposed discrimination against African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Japanese Americans. At the end of the war, she noted that a majority of union members were female and wrote that she hoped progressives, with women playing a central part, would prevent corporations from reversing wartime workplace gains.

But when the war was over, Bettye, like many other women, lost her job to a man. But instead of losing it to a returning soldier, she lost it to a man who had gone to prison rather than fight. Same story, slightly different. Federated Press was also worried that she was too radical, because after the war there was a great deal of pressure against the left. Anti-Communist labor leaders were purging Communists from unions, and the labor press was losing its independence. An article that Bettye wrote saying that the atom bomb should be controlled by civilians, not the military, worried men at Federated Press who were afraid of being seen as too radical.