No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays

Peace in Our Time? The Greening of Betty Friedan

Peace in Our Time? The Greening of Betty Friedan he classic blind spot of liberals is their faith that all social conflicts can be settled by peaceful compromise. However bitter the différences, whatever the imbalance of power between opposing parties, one need only apply ingenuity and good will, reject "extremists on both sides," and the lion will sit down with the lamb. No matter how many lambs get eaten, liberalsnever learn. Faced with an enemy who won't playbytheir rules, who responds to alltheir placating gestures with more bidsforpower, they get irrational. Either they keep ceding more and more ground, or they proclaim that the battle is irrelevant and the real issues lie elsewhere, or both. The response of liberal feminists to the relentless right-wing assault on women's rights isadepressing example.A couple of years ago, NOW president Eleanor Smeal set up a meeting between feminists and leaders of the right-to-life movement to discuss how the two groups might defuse the "polarization" over abortion and work together to advance their common interests. Work together, indeed: the right-to-lifers used the meeting to get some dramatic publicity by bringing in two dead fetuses and denouncing "baby-killers." Now Betty Friedan, in her new state-of-the-movement manifesto, The Second Stage, lauds this humiliating event as a model of how feminists and traditionalists can transcend their differences and march hand in hand into the new age. The Second Stage is a case study in the crisisof liberal feminism. Its outstanding characteristicis incoherence. At first the unwary reader may imagine that the icon of us all,who has made a careerof defending "responsible" feminism against those bra-burning, man-hating, dyke-loving radicals, has undergone asudden conversion to the cause of social revolution. Friedan begins byobserving, accurately enough, that women's increased opportunity to pursue careers and maintain T Peace in Our Time? 57 independent identities has not brought genuine liberation. Rather, in the absence of changes in the structure of work, family life, and child rearing, women are faced with a series of no-win "choices" between two sets of needs—work and autonomy on the one hand, love and children on the other. Neither the successful professional woman who finds herself unwillingly alone and childless, nor the traditional wife and mother who finds herself divorced and without marketable skills, nor the superwoman who drives herself crazy trying to "have it all," can rightly be described as free. Furthermore, women who gain political power within the present systemcannot be trusted to support women's interests, and career women intent on beating the competition are disinclined to let sisterhood stand in their way. Friedan believes this situation has led to a widespread disillusionment with feminism, and is responsible for the movement's current malaise.The solution, she argues, isto launch a"second stage" movement whose aim is to "restructure institutions," "create new forms of family," come to "new terms with love and with work." Friedan, who has never lacked for chutzpah, presents these ideas as her own, the product of painful soul-searching. In fact, they are a reductive and vulgarized rehash of arguments radical feministshave been making since the '6os, when the women's liberation movement first suggested—to the dismayof Friedan and her fellow responsibles —that careerism and room-at-the-top liberal integrationist politics were a dead end. The radicalcritique of malesupremacypaidparticular attention to the family and the need to transform domestic life. As we saw it, women's traditional familial role as wife, mother, and allpurpose selfless nurturer not only deprived them of an independent life outside the home, but stifled their sexual and emotional needs. Equality in sex and love, we argued, was every bit as important as equality on the job. And neither could be achievedwithout the equal sharing of housework and child care. Is Friedan then ready to admit, if only tacitly, that the radicals were right? That we saw something she didn't? On the contrary, radical feminism (which is equated with the most extreme versions of separatism; Friedan has the impression that all radical feminists live in basements on a diet of male babies) is, as usual, the main target of her polemic. It was the radicals' anti-male,anti-marriage- N O M O R E N I C E G I R L S 5 8 and-motherhood propaganda, she contends, that led...