Camp of Good Hope by prisonerofhope

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.

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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.