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TRADITIONAL FEMINISM IS NO LONGER APPROPRIATE FOR LIBERATION
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- REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS ARE KEY TO WOMEN’S LIBERATION
- WOMEN’S LIBERATION DOES NOT THREATEN MEN
TRADITIONAL FEMINISM IS NO LONGER APPROPRIATE FOR LIBERATION1. TRADITIONAL FEMINISM INVITES BACKLASH Betty Friedan, Political Activist. THE SECOND STAGE, 1986, p. 39 But if we go on parroting or denouncing or defending the clichés of women’s liberation in the same old terms until they harden into a new mystique, denying the realities of our personal experience and the new problems, then we are in real danger of going back. Then we invite a real backlash of disillusioned, bitter women--and outraged, beleaguered men, who could, in confusion, blame air necessary but incomplete movement toward equality for the emotional scars of generations of pathology bred by inequality. 2. FEMINIST RHETORIC IS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE Betty Friedan, Political Activist THE SECOND STAGE, 1986, pp. 39-40 There is a danger today in feminist rhetoric, rigidified in reaction against the past, harping on the same old problems in the same old way, leaving unsaid what’s really bothering women and men m and beyond the urgencies of personal economic survival For there is a real backlash against the equality and personhood of women--in America, as in Islam and the Vatican. Dangerous reactionary forces are playing to those unadmitted fears and yearnings with the aim of wiping out the gains of equality, turning women back to the old dependence, silencing women’s new voice and stifling women’s new active energy that threatens their own power in ways we do not yet clearly understand.
We have to break out of feminist rhetoric, go beyond the assumptions of the first stage of the women’s movement and test life again--with personal truth--to turn this new corner, just as we had to break through the feminine mystique twenty years ago to begin our modern movement toward equality. The energies whereby we live and love, work and eat, which have been so subverted by power in the past, can truly be liberated in the service of life for all of us--or diverted in fruitless impotent reaction. REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS ARE KEY TO WOMEN’S LIBERATION1. CONFRONTING REPRODUCTIVITY IS NECESSARY FOR LIBERATION Betty Friedan, Political Activist IT CHANGED MY LIFE: WRITINGS ON THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT, 1985, p. 117 To enable all women, not just the exceptional few, to participate in society we must confront the fact of life--a temporary fact of most women’s lives today--that women do give birth to children. But we must challenge the idea that it is woman’s primary role to rear children. Now, and equally, man and society have to be educated to accept their responsibility for that role. 2. REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS ARE KEY TO ALL WOMEN’S RIGHTS Betty Friedan, Political Activist IT CHANGED MY LIFE: WRITINGS ON THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT, 1985, p. 124 The right of woman to control her reproductive process must be established as a basic, inalienable civil right, not to be denied or abridged by the state--just as the right of individual and religious conscience is considered an inalienable private right in both American tradition and in the American Constitution.
Am I saying that women must be liberated from motherhood? No. I am saying that motherhood will only be a joyous and responsible human act when women are free to make, with conscious choice and full human responsibility, the decisions to become mothers. Then, and only then, will they be able to embrace motherhood without conflict, when they will be able to define themselves not just as somebody’s mother, not just as servants of children, not just as breeding receptacles, but as people for whom motherhood is a freely chosen part of life, freely celebrated while it lasts, but for whom creativity as many more dimensions, as it has for men. WOMEN’S LIBERATION DOES NOT THREATEN MEN1. MOST MEN WANT WOMEN TO BE LIBERATED Betty Friedan, Political Activist IT CHANGED MY LIFE: WRITINGS ON THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT, 1985, p. 69 There is also resistance on the part of some men, but not as many as you think. I am increasingly surprised at the numbers of men who really do have a full regard for their wives as human beings, who want them to have full lives of their own, who are weary of the burden and the guilt of having to make up to a woman for all the life she misses beyond the home, for the world she has no part in. 2. MEN WILL WELCOME WOMEN’S LIBERATION Betty Friedan, Political Activist IT CHANGED MY LIFE: WRITINGS ON THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT, 1985, p. 69 I think there are some men who may resist this massive, delayed revolution because they have had too much smothering from mothers who need them for an identity, and thus feel insecure in their own ability to move as human beings in the world. They may think they need a woman as a doormat they may need someone whom they can think of as inferior so that they can feel superior. But I doubt that it is really going to solve any man’s problem for his wife to beat herself down, to project a phony inferiority. Isn’t it pretty contemptuous of man to say that his ego is so weak that he needs her to pretend to be something that she isn’t, in order to make him feel like a big boy? I happen to think men are stronger than that it might be better for both men and women if they could accept each other for what they are. It might even free men from the binds of the masculine mystique.
Betty Friedan, Political Activist. THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE, 1963, p. 85 Whenever, wherever in the world there has been an upsurge of human freedom, women have won a share of it for themselves. Sex did not fight the French Revolution, free the slaves in America, overthrow the Russian Czar, drive the British out of India; but when the idea of human freedom moves the minds of men, it also moves the minds of women.
Betty Friedan, Political Activist. THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE, 1963, p. 84 It is hardly a coincidence that the struggle to free women began in America on the heels of the Revolutionary war, and grew strong with the movement to free the slaves. Thomas Paine, the spokesman for the Revolution, was among the first to condemn in 1775 the position of women “even in countries where they may be esteemed the most happy, constrained in their desires in the disposal of their goods, robbed of freedom and will by the laws, Land] the slaves of opinion.
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