I wrote this post in March 2006, right after Betty Friedan died. That was a year and a half ago. I just felt like reposting it for anyone who might not have seen it before.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
I know I promised
not to comment on politics again, but technically this is not politics.
This is about women, our choices as women.......our lives as women.
I know,
I know, this is still a little too ‘current events’ for my normally
high tower philosophical oblivion to the masses, but I will try to make
this short. Well, at least worth the read. If nothing else, it
will be truth.
Okay, let’s clarify that too. My truth.
There was
this woman. She was a smart woman. She was a smart American woman. She
was a smart Jewish-American woman. She was born February 4, 1921 in
Peoria, Illinois. She graduated valedictorian from her middle America
high school and Summa Cum Laude from Smith College in 1942 at a time
when women were generally not encouraged or expected to do well in
school or go on to higher education.
My premise here
was to compare myself to this woman, but see, right there, as of that
last paragraph, I have to beg off and say we are nothing alike. It’s
that whole valedictorian, summa cum laude, Smith College thing. I’m not
Jewish either. And I’m a boomer, not a WWII generation woman. Well, at
least we’re both American. And female. Okay, let’s build on that.
After
college she married a man named Carl Friedan and lived in the suburbs
of New York. Hey, I got married too...well, it was after high school,
not college, but I live in the suburbs! Or at least in a split level in
a neighborhood that pretends to be the suburbs of the rural town I live
in. Close enough.
She dropped her maiden name when she got
married. I could look it up but I guess it doesn’t really matter,
right? After women got married back then they took their husbands name
and lost the name they used for all those years before that. She was
forever thus, Betty Friedan.
I always wanted to hyphenate my married
name with my maiden name when I tied the knot in May of 1972. I almost
did. My mother-in-law got offended when I brought it up though. My
husband did too. I dropped the idea and never brought it up again.
I
wanted to keep my first last name though so I dropped my middle name
and put my maiden name in place of it. My mother and my grandmother did
that too so I guess I was under the misconception that it was a long
standing tradition and lot's of women did it. Until one of my daughters
didn't want to keep our last name as her new middle name and she and
others told me that keeping your maiden name was a 'boomer' thing to
do. I tried to tell her about her grandmother and great grandmother but
it fell on deaf ears.
Well, for me anyway, that people
pleasing tendency reared it’s ugly head again and my name is definitely
not hyphenated. It hasn't been for almost 34 years. I never stopped
thinking about it though. It felt like part of me was gone.
Betty
Friedan died last month. To quote Ana Veciana-Suarez of the Miami
Herald, “the current generation has skipped out on it’s debt to
Friedan”.
I agree.
What, you say? Me, the one who
believes in God, home, family, and let James Dobson and Kevin Leman
help raise her children.................you agree that Betty Friedan was important to our
society? That we as women would have been less but for the fact that
she was here for 85 years on this earth?
Like I said, I never claimed
to be uncomplicated and I never fit well into boxes.
Don’t get
me wrong, I do not consider myself a feminist. Not in today’s version
of the word at least. I did buy Gloria Stienum's Ms. Magazine for a
while back in the seventies though and I also bought Marlo's 'Free to
be You and Me' LP. Well, I do believe that I even had Helen Reddy's
anthem to womanhood....hear me roar! I think I still have those around
somewhere.
When 1973 rolled around and the abortion issue became
part of the package, however, I had to bow out. Not that anyone missed me. I was
19 1/2, almost 20, newly married, and pregnant as all get out. Yeah, I
was never a feminist in the pro-abortion,
man-hating, homemakers are losers, definition of the word.
But
then again, neither was Betty. The co-founder of the National
Organization of Women was not a feminist in the sense of the word as we
mean it now either.
She was pro-women though. She sure was.
Her big
fight wasn’t to get women out of the home and into the workplace. It
was to give them that choice. Her great regret she said, besides her
divorce after many years of marriage, was that so many boomer “women
who had shunned marriage and family to pursue careers and equal footing
with men now blamed her for the fact that they missed opportunities and
had a sterile womb.” I don't think she meant for them to sacrifice
their desire to be a wife and mother. She just wanted them to know that
they were not limited to that. Maybe her stridency was louder than her
heart. I can identify with all of that.
A column, written by
Betty Rollin, a Betty of my generation, in an issue of AARP magazine
two years ago, alluded to this as she wrote about her own struggle to
come to terms with the choices that she made in her life. She wrote about how
she embraced the woman's movement, did not give in to the maternal
instinct, traveled the world and had all the freedom, choices and
self-awareness that she thought she always wanted. Yet, she has mourned
some of those choices as she looks at grandmothers her age, women like
me, playing with their grandchildren and envies the look in their eyes.
The relationships that she is missing out on because of the choice that
she made not to have children.
I wrote a piece in response,
telling her that I lived her alter life. That I live for that look from
my grandchildren, yet sometimes I’ve wondered, even if just for a
minute, what my life would have been like had I made other choices.
That sometimes I envied HER, with that freedom to travel, that lack of
people hanging on her all day, every day, dishes constantly piling up
in the sink, and that ability to be alone with her husband whenever she
wants to be. It was never printed and I don’t have that essay anymore
but it doesn’t really matter. The gist of it was that women have had
choices in this generation that others did not. Betty Rollin made her
choice and I made mine. For both of us it was a choice. I was handed,
on a silver platter, whatever I could achieve in life. My father made
sure of that. I still chose motherhood over all the rest. Professional
motherhood. Betty Friedan, for better and for worse, had a lot to do
with the fact that this was a choice for me and not a forced sentence,
and for Betty Rollin having the option to get self-aware.
To
quote her book, The Feminine Mystique, “a century earlier women had
fought for higher education, now girls went to college to get a
husband” That was in 1963. I remember girls in 1971, when I was going
off to college, saying that they were only going to get their M.R.S.
degree. I always was something of a social misfit. M.R.S.? What’s that?
When
they told me I was literally floored. In my family of five girls
college was a given....and we weren't told to find a husband there. We
were told to study, to do our best and to have a career. If my Dad had
anything to say about it we were going to go to college, "come hell or
high water". I guess for a Nixon Republican he was pretty liberal for
his time. Or maybe he just saw through the haze of the rhetorical,
semantical society that we were growing up in and knew that girls,
especially his five girls, were just as bright and capable as anyone else and
he was going to give us every opportunity to prove it. I don't know
that I always did my father proud but it wasn't for lack of trying on
either side. Yeah, my parents gave in and didn't force me to finish
college when I wanted to marry at 19, but plan A was always for the
degree and I never heard anything about getting a husband there. Not
anything.
I live in a community with a high percentage of
Christians. I have actually heard fathers, even in the last ten years,
tell their extremely bright daughters “girls don’t need a college
education”. Wait a minute, in what century are we living? Where does
this thinking come from?
This same man's daughter graduated in
three years from high school on the National Honor Society. That was
over five years ago. She has done no more than a year of community
college and a year of Bible College. Last I heard she is a secretary at
the school making less than minimum wage. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not
denigrating secretarial work. I just think this girl, with her high
science and math skills should be doing something more than typing
someone elses letters for wages less than a bag boy in a supermarket
makes. You can say this was her choice and to a certain degree it was,
but I still think that her father, who didn’t think girls NEED to go to
college, had a lot to do with it. It’s not like she is married even
now. This is a lack of guidance and support on the parent’s part. I
don’t understand it. Isn’t this what Betty fought for? Not that we HAD
to go to college, but that we could…..and that we should...especially if we can.
The
irony about ol’ Betty is that, like me with the conservative Christians
I live around, she never fit in with her liberals either. According to
Susan Brownmiller of the Associated Press, to the more radical and
lesbian feminists Friedan was viewed as “hopelessly bourgeois”.
Betty
told a college audience in 1970, “Don’t get into the bra-burning,
anti-man, politics of orgasm, school”. I'm sure that irked some of
those ardent women libbers out there with their bra in hand and the
fire stoked, didn't it? In the 1990’s she said, “For a great many
women, CHOOSING motherhood makes motherhood itself a liberating
choice”.
Gosh, thanks, Betty. I agree. I was always all about making my own
choices even if I made the wrong ones. I believe I made the right
choice for myself, but my choice to leave my teaching degree behind for
motherhood, was my choice. Society did not decide for me and neither
did my parents. It did make it liberating, Betty. It did.
Betty
and I were born into two different generations. Mine is the one she
hoped to reach. Isn't it ironic that she reached such a one as me, the
common little Christian housewife, with her traditional marriage and
nine kids and missed some of the ones who more readily would have
listened.
I asked my 20-something son this morning, before he left for
school, if he had ever heard of Betty Friedan. He thought I was talking
about some woman I knew from town. Oops, my bad. Maybe all of our bad.
This generation doesn't even know who she was and she hasn't even been
dead a month.
Betty and I are from two completely different educational
backgrounds, and she was Jewish. I am decidedly not. She was
politically active and I, for the most part, shun even the dialogue of
that. She believed in the womans right to choose in the area of
abortion and I believe that right is flat-out murder. She was
well-known all over the world, and I am well-known solely in my tiny
little town.
But ol’ Betty and me, I think we have one big thing
in common. We are both for women. We are FOR women. We both respect our sisters. We both believe that choice is good. I will beg off on the
choice to murder our offspring, but other than that, choice is very
good.
Even in the abortion debate though, I would back my words up with
action and help that woman through her pregnancy and if she doesn't
want to keep the child I would help her find a good home. When it comes
to babies though, it is my contention that nine months is not a long
time to 'inconvenience' oneself for the good of another human being.
For God's sake, I have taken in difficult foster children longer than
that.
For good and for bad, God gives us free will. What is
that if not choice? As much as I like to counsel my children to make
wise decisions, I still allow them choice.
One of my teenage
girls has her heart set on working at Wal-Mart in the CD department.
She has wanted this all the years I have known her. School is hard for
her and she doesn't want to go to college, even community college, after
graduation. I will not force her. Yet, I see that she has a gift with
children and would make a great paraprofessional in the school so I
make her take Early Childhood and Development at the Vo-Pro program
half a day and I am looking into a full-year, half day internship with
the elementary school for her senior year. While she admits to liking
to work with kindergarteners, and apparently they think the world of
her, she still has her heart set on Wal-Mart. Okay, work at Wal-Mart.
Far be it from me to tell you otherwise, but I am still going to insist
on getting as much, especially free, training that you can get in other
areas, just in case you ever change your mind. Just in case you want to
make another choice.
It’s all about that. Betty and I both
believe that women should be treated the same as men in the workplace.
I bet, if I could talk to her right now, that we would also agree that
the current obsession teenage girls have with obtaining the perfect
body has become a serious problem that needs to be addressed in a
louder voice than it is. All the wannabe Britney Spears, Jessica
Simpsons, Paris Hiltons out there. I guess it never ends. As long as
men look, women will do whatever they can to catch the gaze. They are
the antithesis of the women’s movement, not me.
I think that
Betty and I would agree on this whole obsession with sex at the middle
and high school level and that it needs to be dealt with differently
than ever before and that condoms don’t work. At last count, two out of
three sexually active teen girls are walking around with an undiagnosed
STD. They don’t, or won't, go to the doctor because they are “afraid”
and “don’t think that anything bad could happen to them”. And they are
still afraid to tell their parents. Lot's of teenagers tell me stuff,
more than my own kids will. People tell me that it's because I am so
open...but I think it's human nature ....or something....not to be able
to talk to your parents when your 15. There's always the exception, but
it's a far and wide exception. How have we changed from when I was
raised in the fifties and sixties? I think it's a vicious cycle that
may never change.
Maybe Betty's and my answers to the problems
would be different, maybe our dialogue would be fraught with loud
debate, as I have read that she, in turn, could be brusque and
engaging, just like me, but I agree with her original contention, put
forth in her book way back in 1963, “a baked potato is not as big as
the world, and vacuuming the living room floor~with or without
makeup~is not work that takes enough thought or energy to challenge any
woman’s full capacity”.
Just think, me and the valedictorian who went
to Smith College. Me and one of the celebrated women of NOW, standing
together, locking arms, for women.
Well, far be it from me to
deprecate the role I have chosen for my life, but I’m with ya Betty,
ol’ gal. Not only do I agree with that, but I contend that Jesus does
too. But that’s another post.
|
