Whatever Happened to 'Women's' Liberation?

With her 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, the woman born Bettye Goldstein produced nothing short of a total awakening of the American woman. It argued for the liberation of women from ‘occupation: housewife’, and helped forge what became known as the women’s liberation movement – that great fight for women’s legal and economic rights and freedoms.

Yet in other ways, The Feminine Mystique was a return to one of history’s great problematics: the alternating subjugation and worship of the female sex. The ancient Greeks recounted how Zeus metamorphosed into a swan and raped the cosmic grandmother Leda. Yet those from Zeus’s homeland of Crete were inclined to worship above all other deities the mother-goddess Rhea and her double-bladed axe. Eve’s impassive wantonness turned good men into sinners and Medusa’s ghastly visage turned them to stone. Yet the Virgin Mary gave us perfection of the body and spirit, and so is one of Western culture’s most venerated images; Lisa del Giocondo and Marilyn Monroe are not far behind.

Born in 1921 to Jewish immigrants in Peoria, Illinois, Bettye Goldstein, better known as Betty Friedan, was no deity and certainly no Marilyn. She was something closer to a south-side soothsayer, her hoary voice percolating with a very ethnic kind of outspokenness. According to one of her younger feminist contemporaries, Rita Mae Brown, she was also ‘a bully who had to be the centre of attention’. While we’re at it, Friedan was also criticised for her vainglory, bossiness and acid tongue. But if you had graduated from Smith College with the highest honours ever given in the history of the school, wouldn’t you be on the grandiloquent side? In the end Friedan’s summa-cum-laude intellect, harnessed in fits of flagrant passion, produced a book that by 1966 had sold three million copies, birthed the National Organisation for Women (NOW) and given rise, however improbably, to the subject of Clara Bingham’s new oral history of the women’s lib era: The Movement.

Let’s begin with an uncontroversial premise: In the decade after 1963, something happened to the American woman. But what? Women had long been aware of the magnitude of their plight. Yet it did seem that amid the postwar boom, a whole generation of middle-class American women, living lives of suburban housewifery, had seemingly had their sensitivities dulled with sunshine and cake. Friedan’s smoky snarl fixed all that. As Bobbi Gibb, a ground-breaking marathon runner, put it, ‘I read The Feminine Mystique and I said: “That’s my mother and all her friends. There’s no way I can live like this.”’