Writes Moira Donegan, in "Betty Friedan and the Movement That Outgrew Her/Friedan was indispensable to second-wave feminism. And yet she was difficult to like" (The New Yorker).
Things did not improve much when, in 1947, she married Carl Friedan, a former magician who was trying to make it as a theatre producer.... Betty drank heavily; Carl cheated on her; they yelled and threw things. Their destructive patterns accelerated after the publication of 'The Feminine Mystique,' when Betty became a sudden celebrity....
[Rachel Shteir’s new biography, “Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter”] emphasize[s] Friedan’s role in the violence of her marriage. She recounts an incident, on Fire Island, in which Betty chased Carl down the beach, brandishing a butcher knife....
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49 comments:
Women being tricked into taking the jobs of their husbands at 75 cents on the dollar pay is the greatest con in the history of punking.
Every single one of you should be ashamed of yourselves.
So the Friedans liked it spicy.
People used to keep sexuality in the closet because it wasn't germane to intellectual thought. Now we can't decide if an idea is worthy unless we first judge every inclination.
The burning bras part was nice in the 60s, then in the 70s it evolved to attending NOW meetings if you wanted to pick up chicks. Nothing changed at work. AA meetings started in the 80s.
"One of these days, one of these days. POW! Right in the kisser."
Why did the 'wifebeater' shirt enter the lexicon but not 'husbandbeater'?
I hope the biographer notes that also, in 1954, a publication came out that convinced men that by God, they work hard and come home to that ol dowdy ball and chain and they could do better.
Women were critiqued by horndogs and closeted homos bith as lazy, stupid, undersexed, petulant, did I mention undersexed? frigid harridans who made their sons gay.
Trade her in for a newer model.
Yeah the average girl couldn't win. Can't wait to read the bio.
"Betty [Friedan] was intellectually serious, politically committed, and not very pretty."
Along with another of that era, Bella Abzug,
https://media.villagepreservation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/15111441/baf.jpg
"...Friedan was indispensable to second-wave feminism. And yet she was difficult to like."
Impossible!
It's becoming increasingly clear to me that people who are obsessed with somehow transforming society to make it better are vastly more fucked up on average than people whose approach to life is to make their own lives better and letting society sort itself out.
She sounds admirably human. Outwardly advocating liberation; but inwardly still craving. Who would judge her harshly, for that - for being like most all of us.
Betty Friedan... have Any of you actually READ her book "The Feminine Mystique"??
gilbar has. And according to Betty
a) modern technology has made taking care of a home only a part time job
..i) wash day USED to take A DAY, now it consists of tossing clothes into the machine
.ii) instead of having LOTS of kids, modern women only have a few.. IF ANY
b) because of this, modern (white) women are BORED!
c) THEREFORE, society OWES (white) women a place at the workplace.. So they won't be BORED!
d) SURE! this means that jobs will be taken from men.. BUT WHO CARES?? (white) women are BORED!
e) Okay yeah; poor women have been working jobs since forever, but this is about RICH (white) women
f) black women? you mean, like the maid? who ON Earth cares about Her? This is about rich (white) women
When i read it (1988ish?) i thought that it was The Most Racist and Classist thing i'd EVER read.
Prove me wrong. That IS.. If you ACTUALLY Read her book
...not very pretty. She craved romantic devotion from men that was not forthcoming."
Devotion is a high bar, and devotion is more likely to be accompanied by crazy. Lower your expectations.
If you can't be good looking, exercise that equality and be rich and physically fit (if possible) like the dudes do.
Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream.
Rush Limbaugh
you KNOW who he was talking about
"...and not very pretty." Moira Donegan sure has a gift for litotes.
because of this, modern (white) women are BORED!
Only because Instagram had yet to be invented.
Darn, thought it was a bio. But yeah Friedan tried to keep it from turning into a lesbian free-for-all. Things got crazy. Things fell apart.
But the women lawyers won the day.
“These feminists are trying to MURDER me!”
And Gloria Steinem, whom many men respected and wanted to fuck, clung to Mort Zuckerman's ankle when he was walking out the door.
There is no perfect way of being, and it's a destructive lie to proclaim there is.
Buckwheathikes, I’ve said it before and will no doubt say it again, but if women did the same work as men for $.75 on the dollar, no man would be employed.
That’s how you know it’s a made up statistic.
Friedan seems colorful to us because she was a normal person who stumbled into advocacy. By now, we're more used to seeing advocacy carried out by eerily inhuman zealots who made it their career from the outset.
People who point out that she was unattractive overlook the fact that despite that, she successfully obtained everything that a woman was supposed to want back then: a husband and children. She wanted more because, in her view, society pressured women not to pursue a career. What does attractiveness have to do with career success, though? Was Rush saying that he got his job because he was good-looking?
Not very pretty. Thus, on the outside looking in.
I recall college in the Sixties. Various social groups. Strata, as it were. The supposed in-group had all the fun. Good looking guys. Money. Good looking girls. High-end parties. Not to be in was a killer for some folks who graduated to resentment.
See the writings of the inches, on the outside looking in.
"Betty was intellectually serious, politically committed, and not very pretty."
Hence, the feminist movement. Note that "intellectually serious" does not necessarily encompass intelligent
Looking for meaning in life in all the wrong places. How can such people be so unwise? Save your money on just another book that proves it. Pull out your Bible instead. There is hope.
To paraphrase Sailer's Law, "[t]he most heartfelt [writings] by female [activists] tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the [activist] herself will be considered hotter-looking."
The movement was born amid the sounds of the morning wash being automatically battered and dried in the laundry rooms of suburbia. The last crumbs of breakfast had been lugged away, the coffee was poured, and a scowling Miss Betty Friedan sat with the most awesome circle of women ever gathered under the roof of a modern ranch-type house. Together they deliberated, as rage feathered the linings of their bowels. The whole day yawned before them. Soon it would be back and forth, back and forth to the powder room. Coffee and housework can have that effect. These brave women were trapped with a vast expanse of desolate hours stretching out to that remote time when the kids returned from school and the idiot traipsed in with his evening paper. It was insanity, and still the internal washing machine kept vibrating in the background. Soon the maid would be emptying it and feeding it, emptying it and feeding it. There would be telephones and shopping and God knows what all. Rosa Luxemburg had been right, so had - their genitalia notwithstanding - C. Wright Mills and Norman O. Brown. It was time to hoist the black flag. Penis envy, ha!
Public Nuisances p.106
Every well-known woman author from the Thirties through the Seventies wrote plots depending on this theme - romantic love - found, not found, thrown away, lost in war, stolen, destroyed by ambition, a trick by a con man or worse. I find the sociological focus in a Betty Friedan narrow compared to the range in a series of novels by a woman like Charlotte Armstrong or Helen McInnis. They make more than one point and they imagine a variety of situations. Yes, I admit, Jane Eyre, Heathcliff, Mr. Rochester and Frankenstein are so very often there, well-disguised, be the woman writer who she may be. But the variation takes up the changing times and it is these changes that express individual lives. But it's sociological theories based on sociological books that shape policy these days and they are based on archetypes other than those that interest most women.
Snow White, who was a princess and beautiful and would inherit the responsibilities of a kingdom as her father's only child is now, I understand, to become a star real-estate salesperson after slapping in the face a handsome, wealthy man who is attracted to her.
At this point I fell into a deep trance and dreamed the following dream:
She will have a succession of seven lovers, each one inadequate (I do not mean dwarfed) and seven abortions since men are so inadequate these days. The handsome, wealthy man returns but, after surveying the situation, he decides that Snow White's defenses and neuroses which surround where her real self sleeps like a dark wood, filled with thorns surrounding a high-walled castle are too much trouble for an uncertain reward. Another slap? He returns to Blue Bayou and marries a fisher-girl he hears singing on a pier early one ordinary morning while watching a familiar sunrise. She turns out to be a princess. They live happily ever after and so do the people in their two kingdoms. Not so the people in Snow White's kingdom who are invaded, impoverished and exploited though Snow White herself (not her real self, of course) makes a killing on real estate deals with the invaders. And they live awhile after though she never wakes up and then they all die.
Think I could sell it to Disney Inc.?
Blogger Dogma and Pony Show said...
"It's becoming increasingly clear to me that people who are obsessed with somehow transforming society to make it better are vastly more fucked up on average than people whose approach to life is to make their own lives better and letting society sort itself out."
Ain't that the truth!
Blogger Dogma and Pony Show said...
"It's becoming increasingly clear to me that people who are obsessed with somehow transforming society to make it better are vastly more fucked up on average than people whose approach to life is to make their own lives better and letting society sort itself out."
We used to have a Constitution that limited how much damage the busybodies could do.
"And Gloria Steinem, whom many men respected and wanted to fuck ..."
Hmmmmm... well. I would guess that a lot of guys wanted to fuck her. She was good-looking, and that is more than enough for most of us. Weird how that works. I mean, I understand the part about how it doesn't cost a man much to get a woman pregnant, so it makes evolutionary sense for men to fuck at every opportunity. But then, what's with the aviator sunglasses? Why does it matter what's above the waist?
I just recently became aware of Kate Millett, founder of NOW. Read the last paragraph for the real goals of NOW and feminism. And see how successful they've been
This is from a QA article on her with her sister Mallory:
MT: Many people aren’t aware of feminism’s roots in cultural Marxism, but you were present at early meetings of the revolutionaries who would go on to form NOW, the National Organization for Women. Can you tell us what you witnessed behind the scenes about their true aims?
“Consciousness-raising sessions‘
MM: In 1969 I attended consciousness-raising sessions in New York City with my sister, Kate, where a group of 10-15 women sat around a long oval table and plotted the New Feminist Movement and the founding of NOW. Their template was Mao’s China and the group confessionals conducted in each village in order to “cleanse the people’s thinking.” The burning objective of Kate’s “consciousness-raising” was “the destruction of the American family,” as she deemed it “a patriarchal institution devoted to the oppression and enslavement of women and children.”
They went on to form NOW and, with that organization, achieve their stated goal of taking down the Patriarchy through a massive coordinated promotion of promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution, abortion and homosexuality.
My Sister Kate: The Destructive Feminist Legacy of Kate Millett
By Mallory Millet. Front Page Magazine.
https://catholiccritique.com/2022/08/24/my-sister-kate-the-destructive-feminist-legacy-of-kate-millett/
Yes, it is hard to find (men who love exceptional women). But I am one of them. Got it honestly - my mother was exceptional, in a long line of exceptional women, going back at least to the 1850s, when they were actively agitating for Suffrage, Temperance, and Emancipation of Slaves. My daughter is following suit. She was 1st in her class from the U of IL in 1945, and always felt her life constrained, raising 5 boys, as her duty, as part of the Greatest Generation. From my sophomore year in college to the present, I have only been seriously involved with exceptional women. I blame my mother for that. Previous GF in TX told me that she had been 2nd in her class in HS, and swore she would never face that again. I told her “So?”, then explained that that had happened to my mother too, graduating first in maybe an even bigger university. Current partner (over the last 24 years now) was a Powers Girl model through college (that she attended on a dance scholarship), who turned down their incessant demands to move her to NYC, in order to raise kids in a normal environment, and has captivated the entire staff in the Trump hotel we are living in in Las Vegas. Sometimes takes forever to get through the lobby and to the elevators, because of all the people (mostly staff) she hugs and gossips with. In the meantime she was a successful floral designer, followed by being an interior designer with multiple homes in Architectural Digest. The interiors of both of our houses are, of course, spectacular. Exceptional woman, but very different from my mother.
We were talking the other day about how well our parents would have gotten along, if they had ever met. Our fathers, definitely. But women tend to be more jealous. Her mother and the homecoming queen mother of her ex immediately hated each other. Her mother grew up on a ranch, was an excellent horsewoman, and crack shot, as a result. Taught herself to dance (including on horseback) as well as choreography. Spent decades choreographing the big shows on the Strip in Vegas. Taught dance, and her youngest two daughters had full ride dance scholarships to college. Fanatic about health food in the 1950s and 1960s. Through the 1960s, she would throw her 5 kids, along with a couple of guns, into the station wagon, to tour the Southwest, to get out of the Vegas heat. Her kids, on their own, formed a group (the Barefoot Five) to perform at the campgrounds, collecting money for admission to buy the sweets that she refused to buy for them. The clash between our two exceptional mothers would have probably been classist, but I think that both losing their favorite son at the same age (21) would have brought them together. We will never know, because shortly before I met my partner, her mother had a brain aneurysm, and then a couple years later, her father got Alzheimer's. Of our four parents, she is the only one surviving, and only tolerates her youngest, favorite, daughter. One of the reasons that we are here in Vegas is to support that sister, who has been taking care of their mother for the last 8 years.
Over at AceofSpadesHQ this past Saturday, this:
The Husband Store & The Wife Store
The Husband Store
A store that sells new husbands has opened in New York City, where a woman may go to choose a husband. Among the instructions at the entrance is a description of how the store operates:
You may visit this store ONLY ONCE! There are six floors and the value of the products increase as the shopper ascends the flights. The shopper may choose any item from a particular floor, or may choose to go up to the next floor, but cannot go back down except to exit the building!
So, a woman goes to the Husband Store to find a husband. On the first floor the sign on the door reads:
Floor 1 - These men Have Jobs.
She is intrigued, but continues to the second floor, where the sign reads:
Floor 2 - These men Have Jobs and Love Kids.
"That's nice," she thinks, "but I want more."
So she continues upward. The third floor sign reads:
Floor 3 - These men Have Jobs, Love Kids, and are Extremely Good Looking.
"Wow," she thinks, but feels compelled to keep going.
She goes to the fourth floor and the sign reads:
Floor 4 - These men Have Jobs, Love Kids, are Drop-dead Good Looking and Help With Housework.
"Oh, mercy me!" she exclaims, "I can hardly stand it!"
Still, she goes to the fifth floor and the sign reads:
Floor 5 - These men Have Jobs, Love Kids, are Drop- dead Gorgeous, Help with Housework, and Have a Strong Romantic Streak.
She is so tempted to stay, but she goes to the sixth floor, where the sign reads:
Floor 6 - You are visitor 31,456,012 to this floor. There are no men on this floor. This floor exists solely as proof that women are impossible to please. Thank you for shopping at the Husband Store.
The Wife Store
To avoid gender bias charges, the store's owner opened a New Wives store just across the street.
The first floor has wives that love sex.
The second floor has wives that love sex and have money and like beer.
The third, fourth, fifth and sixth floors have never been visited.
Not her fault, but she did have a face for radio.
We all have our crosses to bear...
I'm in agreement with Gilbar. However, she was right in that feminism took a wrong turn when it became about sexual fulfillment rather than econcomic independence.
"I’ve said it before and will no doubt say it again, but if women did the same work as men for $.75 on the dollar, no man would be employed."
I say it too.
AND women work TWICE as hard... heard it for decades.
I suggested to my wife that there must be someone, somewhere that would have opened a women only staffed business. After all twice the work for 3/4 the money? You'd own the world! At least until the rest of the suckers got wise.
And yet... and yet...
Betty Friedan... have Any of you actually READ her book "The Feminine Mystique"??
gilbar has. And according to Betty
a) modern technology has made taking care of a home only a part time job
..i) wash day USED to take A DAY, now it consists of tossing clothes into the machine
.ii) instead of having LOTS of kids, modern women only have a few.. IF ANY
b) because of this, modern (white) women are BORED!
c) THEREFORE, society OWES (white) women a place at the workplace.. So they won't be BORED!
d) SURE! this means that jobs will be taken from men.. BUT WHO CARES?? (white) women are BORED!
e) Okay yeah; poor women have been working jobs since forever, but this is about RICH (white) women
f) black women? you mean, like the maid? who ON Earth cares about Her? This is about rich (white) women
Isn't that basically the plot for "The Help?"
"Betty was intellectually serious, politically committed, and not very pretty. She craved romantic devotion from men that was not forthcoming. Her problem, one that would frustrate her for the rest of her life, was that she could not find a man who respected her as an equal and also wanted to sleep with her...."
So, is the author saying that Betty was basically the female equivalent of an incel?
I know one of her family members. He calls her "Crazy Aunt Betty."
My wife calls Gloria Steinem the mascot of the feminist movement.
tommyesq said..
Isn't that basically the plot for "The Help?"
THAT is what so infuriated me about the book. It was NOT about women needing jobs..
it was about rich (white) women, that thought it'd be 'nice' to work for awhile.
Betty LITERALLY said, that women should be able to have careers, Not because they needed the money, but because they wanted the fulfillment of having a successful career.
The PARTICULARLY irritating part was.. I'd assumed that reading the book would help me score college chix*
Instead, it made me less willing to put up with the manure coming from the lefty women in ames.
ALSO, it turned out, that NONE of them had EVER read it.
score college chix* this was about the time, that gilbar was hitting on the El Ed major that complained that 'garbage men make more money than teachers'**
'garbage men make more money than teachers'**
when i suggested the maybe she should become a garbage man, her response was:
"GROSS! i would NEVER do a job like that!!"
If you think about it, that says everything, about everything in the world..
Women want to have a prestigious, easy job.. That pays WELL
Women don't want to have to work weekends, or summers, or holidays, or after 3:30
Women do NOT want a job that smells
Women EXPECT that THEY should be paid As Much (or MORE) than men working 50 hr weeks on garbage truck
Sad state of affairs these days when you look at a photo of a woman like that and wonder if she was born a male.
Must be fairlycommon now.
---Sad state of affairs these days when you look at a photo of a woman like that and wonder if she was born a male. Must be fairlycommon now. [FullMoon]
And could also be said of the article's author, though from a slightly different angle.
Her most famous work will probably always be her list of "Shitty Media Men." So the sex aspect is a major fascination for her. An obsession? Could not access the article, a small loss.
I'd have a hard time liking someone who drank heavily and chased me with a butcher knife.
A homely feminist ! Who da thunk?
b) because of this, modern (white) women are BORED!
c) THEREFORE, society OWES (white) women a place at the workplace.. So they won't be BORED!
This was the impetus behind the Progressives the first time around. A bunch of college educated women with nothing to do decided they knew what was best for everyone and imposed Prohibition on the rest of us.
Every well-known woman author from the Thirties through the Seventies wrote plots depending on this theme - romantic love
Agatha Christie most certainly did not!
Every well-known woman author from the Thirties through the Seventies wrote plots depending on this theme - romantic love
Agatha Christie most certainly did not!
Life, as you may have heard, is unfair. Look at Sartre. Like Betty, he was intellectually serious, politically committed, and not very pretty. Still, look at all the women he got. Simone de Beauvoir even pitched in and recruited some of the girls in her classes for him. In terms of nookie, Betty got very little out of her fame and fortune whereas Jean Paul cashed in like crazy. I can see how this would drive a principled, intellectually serious woman like Betty up the wall.....But that's just the way the old mop flops and the cogs of evolution clunk. I guess some of her problems could have been remedied if she went lesbo, but even that would have been a piecemeal solution....Perhaps in another generation or two, when we work out the mechanics of sex dolls and AI, we can all settle down to domestic bliss, but until then it doesn't appear that such bliss will be the common fate of humanity.
The NOW never was about women. The early years were about getting a seat at the Maoist table, and the ordinary women who showed up (before women could get a credit card or mortgage), seeking an advocate for abandoned women with children, or battered wives, were pressured to instead "analyze" their lives -- while that hag Gloria Steyn pocketed the cash and sucked men off at the Playboy Mansion.
In fairness, there were some good state chapters, but violence against women wasn't even going to be a platform issue for the National NOW because they were so mortally afraid of being seen as racist that they would not defend white or black victims of black men, and minority victims of interpersonal violence by white partners were thin on the ground. Even today, they're officially committed to racial justice but not justice for heterosexual women.
But enough about heterosexual women. In a split second, the NOW was taken over by radical lesbians, who now mis-teach the history of the movement by claiming they just had to take the reigns because the mean hets were oppressing them.
Unsurprisingly, it's all trannies, all the time now at NOW. They are leading the fight to open women's sports and bathrooms and prisons to men who say they're women.
Gilbar: just because the NOW didn't help them doesn't mean there weren't many poor and struggling white (and black) women forced to raise children alone after being abandoned by lazy husbands who also abandoned their own kids. There were other women's organizations that did help these women.
The media just weren't interested in them.
They still exist today.
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