"When, in the late sixties, the emergent radical-feminist movement began to advance a critique of heterosexuality, [Betty] Friedan found the focus on sexuality both crude and a bit naïve."

"'Young women only need a little more experience to understand that the gut issues of this revolution involve employment and education . . . not sexual fantasy,' she wrote in a memo.... 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...."

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).

"What remains enthralling, though, are Millett’s close readings, her exposés of the naked emperors of the literary left."

"'After receiving his servant’s congratulations on his dazzling performance, Rojack proceeds calmly to the next floor and throws his wife’s body out of the window,' is Millett’s deadpan description of the aftermath of the hero’s sodomization of a maid in Mailer’s An American Dream. Millett then observes, 'The reader is given to understand that by murdering one woman and buggering another, Rojack became a "man."'"

Writes Judith Shulevitz in "Kate Millett: ‘Sexual Politics’ & Family Values" (New York Review of Books):

For a glorious moment, this very bookish literary critic was the face of American feminism. The New York Times called her the “high priestess.” After “Prisoner of Sex” became the talk of the town—and the revered Harper’s editor Willie Morris was fired for publishing it—Mailer organized a riotous debate known as “Town Bloody Hall,” which was filmed by Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker and is now streamable. It was a circus, and it was Millett who set it in motion, even though she refused to show up. Mailer aimed a torrent of insults at the feminists who did agree to take the stage or appear in the audience, among them Greer, Diana Trilling, Susan Sontag, Betty Friedan, and Cynthia Ozick. They rolled their eyes and gave as good as they got—much better, in most cases—and the crowd roared with delight. Try to imagine a public clash of ideas being so joyously gladiatorial today.

Here it is:



ADDED: The word "bugger" (for anal sex) is rare these days. Did you know the word is related to "Bulgarian"? From the Online Etymology Dictionary:

bugger (n.) "sodomite," 1550s, earlier "heretic" (mid-14c.), from Medieval Latin Bulgarus "a Bulgarian" (see Bulgaria), so called from bigoted notions of the sex lives of Eastern Orthodox Christians or of the sect of heretics that was prominent there 11c. Compare Old French bougre "Bulgarian," also "heretic; sodomite."

bugger (v.) "to commit buggery with," 1590s, from bugger (n.)...

The earliest use of "bugger" to express "annoyance, hatred, dismissal, etc.," is, according to the OED, in the diary John Adams, in 1779: "Dr. W[inship] told me of Tuckers rough tarry Speech, about me at the Navy Board.—I did not say much to him at first, but damn and buger my Eyes, I found him after a while as sociable as any Marble-head man."

AND: Here's a William Safire column (from 1995) on the word "bugger," written after some Congressman said "We're here to nail the little bugger down" (and the "little bugger" was Bill Clinton). How disrespectful was it?

The yearning, stirring passions of the suburban white woman.

New York Magazine has this, by Rebecca Traister, "Can the New Activist Passion of Suburban White Women Change American Politics?":

To visit Georgia’s sixth in the days before the runoff is to land on a planet populated by politically impassioned women, talking as if they have just walked off the set of Thelma & Louise, using a language of awakening, liberation, and political fury that should indeed discomfit their conservative neighbors, and — if it is a harbinger of what’s to come — should shake conservative America more broadly....

Women speak with the youthful fever of having found new friends, or new love — of politics and each other....

“I tell people that I am fresh out of fucks,” says Tamara Brooking [a 50-year-old research assistant to a novelist]. “Seriously. I’m done. I’m done pretending that your hateful rhetoric is okay. I’m done pretending that people like us must be quiet to make you feel comfortable.”

I know you love seeming "youthful," but no one over 22 — and really no one — should be using no-fucks-left-to-give rhetoric. And by the time you're 50, Ms. Brooking, the stock prejudice is that it's the utterly mundane consequence of aging for you to have "no fucks."

In their nascent activism there are echoes of another American moment in which middle-class white women snapped to political consciousness. When describing their past inertia and isolation, these activists often sound more than a little bit like Betty Friedan, who wrote in the first paragraph of The Feminist Mystique, about the “strange stirring,” and “sense of dissatisfaction [and] yearning” that “each suburban wife struggled with …alone.”...

Apparently novelists have research assistants but New York Magazine doesn't have editors. The book is called "The Feminine Mystique," not "The Feminist Mystique."

And that book is about individual women wanting individual fulfillment in life by getting out of the house and into careers. It wasn't about collective action in politics!

And all that yearning, stirring passion is for a 30-year-old man. 

"'I’d like to burn you at the stake!' growled Betty Friedan at Phyllis Schlafly during a public debate over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) at Illinois State University in 1973."

"Friedan and other feminists were unnerved by Schlafly. She was as sophisticated and accomplished as they were, but profoundly antifeminist. They tried everything to pass ERA and defeat Schlafly, from bribing state legislators to using witchcraft, but to no avail."

Did Friedan really growl or was that humorous hyperbole? I need the video or at least the whole context, which I can't get from the New York Times either, where I first saw this burning-at-the-stake business:

On the left, Betty Friedan, the feminist leader and author, compared her to a religious heretic, telling her in a debate that she should burn at the stake for opposing the Equal Rights Amendment. Ms. Friedan called Mrs. Schlafly an “Aunt Tom.”

I'm reading that today because Phyllis Schlafly has died — after a long public life and at the age of 92. Let's keep reading:

Mrs. Schlafly became a forceful conservative voice in the 1950s, when she joined the right-wing crusade against international Communism. In the 1960s, with her popular self-published book “A Choice Not an Echo” (it sold more than three million copies) and a growing legion of followers, she gave critical support to the presidential ambitions of Senator Barry Goldwater, the hard-right Arizonan who went on to lead the Republican Party to electoral disaster in 1964, but who planted the seeds of a conservative revival that would flower with the rise of Ronald Reagan....

Many saw her ability to mobilize that citizens’ army as her greatest accomplishment. Angered by the cultural transformations of the 1960s, beginning with the 1962 Supreme Court ruling prohibiting state-sponsored prayer in public schools, her “little old ladies in tennis shoes,” as some called them, went from ringing doorbells for Goldwater to serving as foot soldiers for the “Reagan revolution.” 

Little old ladies in tennis shoes... that really was a standard expression, the contempt of the time for the little people, who were openly called little. Back when older women could be frankly minimized as "old ladies." But we still sort out women according to their shoes. And it's less meaningful to be caught wearing sneakers.

According to William Safire's "Political Dictionary," the term "little old ladies in tennis shoes" was "coined in 1961 by Stanley Mosk, then the Democratic Attorney General of California, in a report on right-wing activity." It was then used to attack supporters of Barry Goldwater, specifically the "resolute, intensely dedicated women's group — Western (or at least not Eastern urban), unsophisticated, often white-haired and wearing rimless eyeglasses. They were called 'the little old ladies in tennis shoes' with considerable disdain." Safire tells us that that in 1966, when Reagan was campaigning for governor in California, he recognized the "sexism and ageism" in the phrase and flipped it into a joke, addressing crowds with "Gentlemen — and 'little ladies in tennis shoes.'"

Anyway, goodbye to Phyllis Schlafly. I wasn't on her side in most of this, but I respect the hard work and the strong voice throughout so many decades in the ongoing debate about the kind of America we want.

"My guess is that many women my age brokered a series of compromises, shaving our legs (but only when people would see them)..."

"... performing oral sex like porn stars but insisting on reciprocity (because Betty Friedan would have wanted it that way). We’d drink shots in short skirts, but we’d come up with a series of code words and signals so that our girlfriends could steer us safely home; we’d go teetering down the streets in our cutest, highest heels but clutching cellphones and a bristling fistful of keys as we walked; trying to have it all, do it all, be it all, sometimes without even figuring out which parts of it felt good or right or authentically pleasurable."

Just one paragraph from "Longing for the Innocence of Playboy," by Jennifer Weiner.

"In the spectacular Christmas 1956 issue of Life, devoted in full to the 'new' American woman..."

"...  we see, not as women’s-magazine villain, but as documentary fact, the typical 'career woman — that fatal error that feminism propagated' — seeking 'help' from a psychiatrist."

She is bright, well-educated, ambitious, attractive; she makes about the same money as her husband; but she is pictured here as “frustrated,” so “masculinized” by her career that her castrated, impotent, passive husband is indifferent to her sexually. He refuses to take responsibility and drowns his destroyed masculinity in alcoholism.

From Betty Friedan's "Feminine Mystique," found this morning as I search my Kindle collection of books for the word "Christmas."

"It’s hard to grasp now just how intoxicating it was as a young girl to hear Gloria Steinem tell us we could be anything we wanted to be."

"Or to read, during freshman year at my surprisingly progressive all-girls Catholic school, Betty Friedan’s 'The Feminine Mystique,' eight years after it was published, saying we could find meaning outside the home."

All this seemed possible because the pill had just become widely available, and for the first time women had control over whether and when they had a child. (I will never forget finding that oddly shaped, Pez-like dispenser in my mother’s bedroom right after the birth of my youngest sister; my mother called her “That’s It” for weeks before giving her a name.)

From a long WaPo article by Elsa Walsh titled "Why women should embrace a ‘good enough’ life." The quoted part describes the author's mindset, which later changed. I chose to quote that because: 1. Her mother sounds so cold, calling an infant "That's It." (A child called "It"!) and 2. The author makes her college age self sound like a nitwit. She says she was 15 when Roe v. Wade came out, so I figure she was born in 1958. I was born in 1951, and I always thought the Gloria Steinem presentation of women's liberation was a women's magazine pep talk. Friedan's book begins as a rant about the bullshit in women's magazines. If you had a brain at the time, you didn't take this stuff at face value. I don't accept Walsh's assertion that oh, if you were only there back then in the 1970s, you'd have been thoroughly intoxicated.

There were other feminist writers back then, and there were plenty of readers interested in feminism who didn't like Steinem and who didn't bother going all the way back to Freidan. When I went to college (circa 1970), the new books young women get excited about where "Sexual Politics" and "The Female Eunuch," and the older book we went back to was "The Second Sex." These books had some critical edge and were not simply cheerleading women about having a conventional middle-class life modernized with the addition of a great career and planned, delayed reproduction.

Walsh is working off a false premise about what life was like back then. She has a book to promote, and I can understand the urge to write a book that acts like it's discovered something new. But, really, the problem with the idea that you can't really "have it all" has been well-known all along.

"She presumed that all her suburban-housewife sisters felt as imprisoned as she did and that the gratification she found in her work was attainable for all."

"That was never true, of course; the revolution that [Betty] Friedan helped to spark both liberated women and allowed countless numbers of them to experience financial pressure and the profound dissatisfactions of the workaday grind. More women than ever earn some or all of the money their family lives on. But today, in the tumultuous 21st-century economy, depending on a career as a path to self-actualization can seem like a sucker’s bet."

From Lisa Miller's "The Retro Wife: Feminists who say they’re having it all—by choosing to stay home," a long article in New York Magazine. Worth clicking if only for the photo-illustration.

"Was the problem that had no name possibly the lack of Wi-Fi?"

Noreen Malone gets a grip on what Betty Friedan — on behalf of suburban women in general — was bellyaching about in "The Feminine Mystique." She's responding to a piece by Emily Bazelon, which we talked about in a long comments thread yesterday. Malone says:

I grew up with a whip-smart mom who stayed at home with us, and so I always approach discussions like these with a bit of a chip on my shoulder, alert to any slights whatsoever against the choices and life mission of someone I so love and admire — even if I don’t plan to make precisely the same ones. But more of it is probably generational. For recession-scarred twentysomethings, staying at home or taking menial jobs is involuntary, but not because social mores dictate that women can’t achieve: It’s because so few of us, regardless of gender, have gotten hired at jobs Friedan might consider fulfilling...

I’m sure Betty wouldn’t be happy to see all the expensively educated young women of Brooklyn, where I live, spending their free time taking floral-arranging classes and knitting and fussily setting up their living rooms just so....

What's so wrong about paying close attention to the details of the beauty of your environment? Fussy... there's a word. When is intense, attentive work deemed fussy? This is a word that has long been used against women and against gay men. Is a person supposed to be interested in something other than what he or she finds interesting? Why? Who says what the proper foci of interest are in this world? Some people are more sensitive to the visual specifics of their environment. It's not as if the people who aren't spend their lives plumbing the meaning of the universe. Perhaps the interior decorator is closer to the core of what truly matters than the corporate lawyer. 

"My name is Emily Bazelon. I’m a feminist. I’ve never read Betty Friedan’s book—until now."

Says Emily Bazelon (on the occasion of the 50-year anniversary of "The Feminine Mystique").

I'd never read the book myself until recently. My reason for not reading it was that I'd regarded it as something that addressed the troubles of my parents' generation. I went to college in 1969, when everyone was reading "Sexual Politics" and "The Female Eunuch." "The Feminine Mystique" seemed really old fashioned — about June Cleaver and her cohort.

Here's Bazelon:

[W]hat hit me was Betty’s howl of frustration. It’s primal, and you feel its desperate force on almost every page. God, did she feel trapped among the slipcovers of the suburbs and in the pages of the women’s magazines she wrote for, where big ideas and questions were entirely unwelcome. The only way to escape was to pulverize the image of the Happy Housewife Heroine who is the title of Chapter 2. Betty’s fiercest critique in this book is of the “mistaken choice” she thinks traditional gender roles forced middle-class women and their husbands to make....

What made me dislike the book — when I finally read it — was that Freidan was not in the role of the housewives she purported to understand so well. She was in the role of writing for women's magazines. She didn't like the limited topics that were the stuff of that kind of magazine. She makes an assumption that women who buy a magazine are only interested in the topics covered by that magazine. But that's absurd! If you bought a magazine about cooking/childcare/fashion, that wouldn't mean you aren't interested in politics or science or whatever else is supposed to be more important. You might have other magazines — or books — for that.

Why the assumption? It might be frustrating for a journalist who's interested in politics to crank out material about topics she doesn't care about, but it was wrong to project those frustrations onto the unknown women who bought the magazines for their own purposes and used the information in those magazines in their individual private lives — perhaps to make a nice dinner efficiently so there would be time to read a good book in the extra time one can make in a day when you don't have a job. The notion that A Job belongs at the center of everyone's life is a huge scam, and the blithe rejection of the 1-earner marriage was an amazing, tragic shift in American culture. The equality of women — the ambition and the fulfilment of women — did not demand that we all get a job.

"Telling young people that some jobs are 'menial' is a huge disservice to them and to the whole society."

"Subsidizing them in idleness while they wait for 'meaningful work' is just asking for trouble, both for them and for all those around them."

Also: "The college-for-all crusade has outlived its usefulness. Time to ditch it. Like the crusade to make all Americans homeowners, it's now doing more harm than good."

ADDED: This idea of working when and only when it is meaningful relates to the women's movement. We were told that staying home with the children was unfulfilling and satisfaction was to be found in the workplace. (I've been reading the old feminist classic "The Feminine Mystique" recently.) If women are free to choose — that's what they keep telling us — and it's all about what fulfills us, then of course, work must be meaningful.

Is "liberation" an outdated word?

Yesterday, I wrote "Wouldn't it be a kick in the head if it turned out feminism served, above all, the interests of commerce and not individual liberation?"

In the comments, Leslyn said:

I don't give a flying fuck if it does. I care that it serves my individual "liberation." An outdated word. Young women (and men) are past the time of needing liberation. We have moved into empowerment.

If that also serves commercial interests (which it does), that's a nice side-effect.

I found that sad and strange for reasons that Palladian expressed a bit later:

What a bunch of grim comments. We were given our incredibly brief, beautiful lives above the soil, and what have we done with them? Worried about careers and taxes and other meaningless nonsense.

Tomorrow isn't promised to us. Death is eternal. What matters is love, and beauty, and survival.

I dream of this edifice of falsehood crashing to rubble at our happy feet.

Do what you need to survive, so that you can live in love and beauty as long as you can. Nothing else matters at all.

Let's think about liberation. What happened to that word over the years? Around 1970, everyone said "women's liberation" or "women's liberation movement," and then "liberation" was dropped. Why?

The Oxford English Dictionary has as its "1b" definition: "Freedom from restrictive or discriminatory social conventions and attitudes." The history of "liberation," used this way, goes back to 1798:

1798 Analyt. Rev. July 35 The consequences from the liberation of women reasonably to be expected, are, such as seldom fail to ensue, when any individuals, or societies, or classes of mankind are restored to their natural rights.

1888 Rep. Internat. Council Women 441 You can obtain the complete liberation of women only by working for the liberation of humanity.

1911 A. G. Chater tr. E. Key Love & Marriage vi. 203 Real liberation for women is thus impossible; the only thing possible is a new division of the burdens.

1971 Black Scholar Jan. 58/1 Those in the struggle have to deal with black separatists because they stand today as a potent obstacle to full black liberation.

1976 Listener 8 Jan. 4/2 Sexual repression and totalitarianism, on one side, and sexual liberation and revolution, on the other.

1984 A. Maupin Babycakes ix. 40 It was no longer a question of butch vs. femme, liberation vs. oppression.

2001 Genre May 37/1 Gay activists in this country and around the world were using the pink triangle as a symbol of activism and liberation. 

Isn't it interesting that the quotes are all about women until 1971, when you get "black liberation"? Did women flee from the word when black people moved in? Did "liberation" begin to sound too radical? Did the OED 1b meaning, upon encountering race, merge uncomfortably with the 2a meaning — "The action of freeing a region or its people from an oppressor or enemy force; the result of this"?

Did burgeoning sexual connotations undermine the word's usefulness? This isn't liberation in the sense of sexual liberation, the women's liberation movement wanted men to know: This isn't about sex (you're not getting more); this is about money (we're getting more). Was it something about gay people moving into the feminist territory and the women needing to draw a distinction? Women's movement leaders openly fought off what they called "the lavender menace":

[Betty] Friedan, and some other straight feminists as well, worried that the association [with lesbianism] would hamstring feminists' ability to achieve serious political change, and that stereotypes of "mannish" and "man-hating" lesbians would provide an easy way to dismiss the movement. Under her direction, NOW attempted to distance itself from lesbian causes – including omitting the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis from the list of sponsors of the First Congress to Unite Women in November 1969. 

Get the sex out... get the left-wing revolutionary connotations out. Let's not say "liberation" anymore. If you think the word is outdated, that in itself is significant. Why don't you want to talk about whether the individual is escaping from restrictive or discriminatory social conventions and attitudes? Don't be afraid. I want to talk about whether we are liberated or whether we've followed a path of enslavement — serving the interests of commerce.

As I said in yesterday's post: It was right when we were questioning devoting our lives to commerce — when "turn on, tune in, drop out" was fascinating — that a movement came along and injected women — half the population — with highly commercial ambition. That fed the gigantic engine of the economy for the next 4 decades. And now, the professional, highly organized, intensely busy woman is celebrated in our culture, and the hippie is a figure of fun.  And yet... what matters is love, and beauty, and survival. Live in love and beauty as long as you can.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade said:

Fear of flying fuck.

Goodbye to Adrienne Rich and Earl Scruggs.

She was 82. He was 88. Famous people die in 3s — it has been noted — but who could complete the triad that begins with Rich and Scruggs?

He was the ultimate banjo player...

... best known for performing alongside the guitar-playing Lester Flatt with the Foggy Mountain Boys. Among their signature songs were “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” which was used as the getaway music in the 1967 film “Bonnie and Clyde,” and “The Ballad of Jed Clampett,” the theme song of the 1960s television sitcom “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

For TV and movie watchers of the 60s, this was the sound of freedom — Jed moves away from there, there being wherever it was that the poor mountaineer "lived," and Bonnie, she follows Clyde, who said to her:

You're different.... You know, you're like me. You want different things. You got somethin' better than bein' a waitress. You and me travelin' together, we could cut a path clean across this state and Kansas and Missouri and Oklahoma and everybody'd know about it. You listen to me, Miss Bonnie Parker. You listen to me.

And later, she says: "You know what, when we started out, I thought we was really goin' somewhere. This is it. We're just goin', huh?"

That's what poured into our ears back in the 60s, lubricated by banjo music. Adrienne Rich got her cultural foothold in the 60s:

Once mastered, poetry’s formalist rigors gave Ms. Rich something to rebel against, and by her third collection, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” published by Harper & Row, she had pretty well exploded them. That volume appeared in 1963, a watershed moment in women’s letters: “The Feminine Mystique” was also published that year.

In the collection’s title poem, Ms. Rich chronicles the pulverizing onus of traditional married life.....

I'm going to pulverize your onus, baby. The funny thing though: Rich was a lesbian. And yet she married a man:

In 1953 Ms. Rich had married a Harvard economist, Alfred Haskell Conrad, and by the time she was 30 she was the mother of three small boys....

By 1970, partly because she had begun, inwardly, to acknowledge her erotic love of women, Ms. Rich and her husband had grown estranged. That autumn, he died of a gunshot wound to the head; the death was ruled a suicide. To the end of her life, Ms. Rich rarely spoke of it.

I think I once bought one of her books. It seemed like something in the spirit of the times that one should partake of, but I never read it. I find most poetry annoying, and hers was no exception. I did read that essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," which all the radical feminists were taking terribly seriously circa 1990. It was the assigned text in one of the law school radical feminist reading groups I participated back in those days. There were all these earnest, intelligent, heterosexual women who studied that text and gabbed about it until they genuinely got their minds around the amazing realization that they should not be heterosexual. Not that they should be having sex with women, but in some other, conceptual way. I'd tell you what the concept was but my mind is not longer around that particular realization, and I don't have the time right now to redo all that hard intellectual work that I did amongst the feminists in 1990/1991.

I'm sure it was all about freedom, but I'm free of that now. Since I'm quoting Bob Dylan today:

A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Santorum on women in combat: What "other types of emotions" was he talking about?

Jennifer Rubin thinks he may get in trouble for saying:

"I want to create every opportunity for women to be able to serve this country... but I do have concerns about women in front-line combat.

"I think that could be a very compromising situation, where people naturally may do things that may not be in the interest of the mission because of other types of emotions that are involved. It already happens, of course, with the camaraderie of men in combat, but I think it would be even more unique if women were in combat... And I think that’s not in the best interests of men, women or the mission."

What "other types of emotions"? I'm guessing that Rubin is worried that he's stuck on some stereotype about women — they're too "emotional" — but I think he's referring to an argument about the way men feel — that is, an urge to protect women that would skew decisionmaking and performance.

Rubin quotes something Santorum said in 2005 the crux of which is: "The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness." Rubin exclaims "Yikes" and pronounces the statement "badly off-key." Is Rubin succumbing to the kind of emotional reasoning that is so typical of... journalists?

Feminism succeeded dramatically in making women feel that life outside of the workplace is stultifying. (Read "The Feminine Mystique," the 1963 rant about how horrifyingly small life is for a homemaker.) Here's the book Santorum was promoting when he called the "radical" feminists to account: "It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good." I'm going to read it, as I've been reading "The Feminine Mystique" lately, and it's worth understanding what happened in American culture. You can care about equality without jumping to the conclusion that everyone needs a job! What's so wonderful about a job? If 2 adults can found the economic and emotional unit we call the family, they are most free if they realize that there are many different ways to structure their lives and find happiness together.

I read Santorum's 2005 quote as saying no more than that: You don't need to buy into dogma about "professional accomplishments" as "the key to happiness." What's "yikes"-worthy about that? Is it that women will flip out if you say anything that even sounds like you'd deny them full access to the workplace? Ironically, that thought is the stereotype that women are emotional to the point of irrationality.

ADDED: Here's the passage in Santorum's book about feminism (and the only place in the book were the word "feminism" appears [though the word "feminist/s" appears quite a few times, but I'll leave that to another post]):

"The Top 100 Influential Figures in American History."

I'm going to click through all this, beginning with Herman Melville at #100 — he's "the American Shakespeare." Come with me. #99 is Nixon! Why's Nixon only 99? I know. He's ugly. And we hate him. Have to click to 86 to get to the first woman. It's Mary Baker Eddy, who, of course, influenced health care reform. Another lady at 81. It's Margaret Mead, famous for being had by 3d world pranksters. Nothing more American than that. A woman at 77: Betty Friedan. I never read her book. I thought it was for my parents' generation. My — my my my — generation transcended sex roles. We were star dust, we were golden.

Frank Lloyd Wright is 76. Architects may come and architects may go, and never change your point of view. Not Frank. He'd sock you in the head with a low-hanging roof as soon as look at you. He was from Wisconsin. That's important. So was Georgia O'Keeffe, who might be on this list. She's a woman, you know. 20 bonus points for being a woman? Here's Jane Addams at 64. Another woman. And I, your humble female blogger, would like to register a complaint against my high school speech teacher who rejected my proposal to do a speech on the topic of Jane Addams. He said she wasn't important enough. I used to want to be a social worker.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. is 53. The only judge so far. Another woman at 51: Margaret Sanger. (A "thoroughgoing racist" says Jonah Goldberg.) Not too many Presidents. After Nixon, you have to wait until #44 for another President. It's Lyndon Johnson. I call him "LBJ." Works better in rhyming chants. LOL! It's Eleanor Roosevelt at #42. "She used the first lady’s office and the mass media to become 'first lady of the world.'" Women playing the media to focus attention on themselves. Yeah, I guess that's a big deal in American culture. She's responsible for that? All right then. 

Harriet Beecher Stowe. #41. The power of novels. Rachel Carson is #39. She saved the eagles... and the mosquitoes. Susan B. Anthony is 38. Elizabeth Cady Stanton is #30. Women's rights. Earl Warren is 29. A second judge. Eisenhower is 28. A third President. Eli Whitney deserves to be 27: "His gin made cotton king and sustained an empire for slavery."

John Adams at 25? Come on? Is HBO/David McCullough the arbiter of history? But yeah, he was President. Truman is 21. A 5th President. Man, get a David McCullough biography about you to cement your historical importance. Andrew Jackson is 18. A 6th President. Reagan's 17. That's 7. Theodore Roosevelt is 15. The 8th Prez on the list, and the 2d of what I predict will be 3 Roosevelts. James Madison is 13. The 9th President, a Founding Father. Ulysses S. Grant gets to be 12. A 10th Prez. And he won the war. Woodrow Wilson is #10 and the 11th President on the list. Martin Luther King Jr. is only #8. John Marshall is #7, the 3d judge. Ben Franklin is 6, deservedly. Another Founder at 5: Alexander Hamilton. FDR snags #4 and is the 12th President on the list. Jefferson is #3, so you know who ##1 and 2 are. And Lincoln beats Washington for the top spot. A total of 15 Presidents.

The final count for women was 10. 10 out of 100. (I think.) Fair enough. I'm not going to say there should have been more. If they'd counted femaleness as a plus factor, they'd have had to "plus-factor" a lot of other groups, and they didn't. Not one Native American?! That's politically incorrect.

ADDED: Actually there were a couple more Presidents, Polk and John Quincy Adams. I'm noticing this leaning over Meade's shoulder as he clicks through. Sorry. My effort was studiously haphazard.

Two great faces, gone.

Goodbye to Betty Friedan and Al Lewis:



They kind of look alike, don't they? I remember the first time we saw Officer Leo Schnauzer on "Car 54, Where Are You?" Al Lewis looked and sounded hilarious from that first second. He didn't have a big role on the show, and we always whooped with glee when he showed up in a scene. Later, he played Grandpa on "The Munsters." But that was so long ago. He was an old man back in the 60s, it seemed, but he was only 83 when he died, so he was only in his 40s then. Thanks for all the laughs, Al.

Betty Friedan, I must say, I didn't follow. I never read "The Feminine Mystique." It was a little before my time. I could have read it as a classic, of course, but it always seemed to me to be addressed to the women of the 1950s, and I was a child in the 1950s. The women my age all read Kate Millett's "Sexual Politics" and Germaine Greer's "The Female Eunuch." (Those were the first two books I bought in hardback.) For a feminist classic, it was "The Second Sex," by Simone de Beauvoir. And then women avoided Friedan's book, for reasons described in the obit that I won't belabor. I'll just call attention to this paragraph:

"That great head, the hooded eyes, the broad features of a woman the French might describe as une jolie-laide , which refers to a magnificent kind of ugliness that can be attractive, even beautiful," wrote Washington Post reporter Megan Rosenfeld in 1995. "The head, looking sometimes like a snapping turtle and at others like a lion with a white mane, sits atop a surprisingly short body, out of which comes the voice of a foghorn in heat. She is always carefully dressed in a New Yorky, nouveau-Bohemian style, with lots of interesting jewelry and spunky little shoes."

Yes, a truly "magnificent kind of ugliness." The world needs more grand faces like that.