Betty Friedan: 1921-2006

A little over five years ago, I had the privilege of meeting Betty Friedan. I was working for the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington on a cultural program allowing the elderly to enjoy a good meal and notable speaker for a reasonable price. She was one of the speakers.

Ms. Friedan was fragile, had trouble finding her bearings and, frankly, gave a horrible speech. But that mattered so very little. She was then – as she is now and always will be – a giant of the social equality movement. It was largely on her shoulders that women moved beyond suffrage and into the workplace. It was, too, on her shoulders that radicalism never became the norm for such a weighty movement.

And as it is being reported today, Ms. Friedan has passed away on her 85th birthday.

For my generation, it is difficult to grasp the world before Ms. Friedan and Gloria Steinem. The anachronistic women's textbook passages about how to always have your husband's slippers ready at the door, as you greet home clothed in nothing more than saran wrap, strike of a purely humorous note to so many of us, devoid of the inherent historical horror such texts genuinely represent. “The Feminine Mystique,” Ms. Friedan's landmark cultural book, was a big part of moving those textbooks from the shelves of ladies' classrooms to those of coeducational history classrooms.

With equal grace, though, Ms. Friedan earned a reputation for dodging radicalism in her pursuit of social equality. A year after Ms. Friedan founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), Valerie Solanas published the SCUM Manifesto (“SCUM” being an acronym for “Society for Cutting Up Men” - Ms. Solanas would go on to shoot Andy Warhol). The treatise famously observed:

The effect of fathers, in sum, has been to corrode the world with maleness. The male has a negative Midas Touch -- everything he touches turns to shit.

Ms. Friedan would have nothing to do with such hyperbole. She never burned her bra in public and everything she did was through either peaceful advocacy or her masterful command of the written word.

Some 40 years after she started NOW alongside 27 other women, Ms. Friedan has departed a world that sure looks different than the one she was brought into. She sought equality for her gender, she fought for equality for her gender and she achieved equality for her gender.

And it is for that reason I will always consider it a privilege and honor to be able to say that on one summer day in 2001, I met Ms. Friedan.