tv Rachel Shteir Betty Friedan CSPAN November 23, 2023 12:09am-12:54am EST
12:09 am
live sunday december 3, new eastern a book to be on c-span2. ♪♪ >> weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual piece. every saturday american history tv documenting american stories and sunday school tv brings the latest nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 comes from these television companies and more including charter communications. ♪♪ >> charter are to be recognized as one of the best internet providers and we're just getting started building 100,000 miles of new infrastructure to reach those who need it most. >> charter communications along with these television companies supports c-span2 is a public service. >> rachel is the author of four books and three articles, essays
12:10 am
and reviews. friedan and magnifit disruptor. she teaches at the theater school at depaul university and our moderator is. gioia diliberto the author of seven books, three historical novels and four biographies and a play. her writing, which focuses on women's, has been praised for combining rich storytelling and literary grace with deep research to provide to bring alive worlds as varied as jazz, age, paris and century chicago ballet epic paris and disco manhattan. her books have been translated into several languages and. she has been a judge for prominent literary contests as a journalist, georgia has written for many publications, including new york times, the wall street journal, the chicago tribune, the los angeles times, the smithsonian and town and country and excuse me, rachel's book be available for purchase outside the black curtains afterward. and we will have a signing right
12:11 am
behind us. so turn the rest of the program over to you. thank you. can everybody hear me? thank you for coming? betty friedan, as you probably know, is a monumental figure in the history of feminism. her bestselling book, the feminine mystique, was widely credited with sparking a second wave feminism when it was in 1963 and sold more than a million copies, she, the national for women and national women's caucus, but she was also difficult person within personality and in her life time she was a very controversial figure her life after the feminist battles of the 1970s is less well known, but she continued to for women's causes until the end of her. rachel's book is the first betty
12:12 am
friedan biographer in 25 years, and it's based on rachel's intense exhaustive research in archives and more. 80 interviews. it will be officially published on tuesday and all of the pre-publication reviews have been raves. so i think i'd like to start with, rachel, reading a little bit from the book to give you a taste of what it's what it's about. julia, thank you so much for introduction and introduction to betty. the section that i'm going to from as joy i mentioned betty was one of the co-founders of the national organization for women is, the largest organization in america. also and still exists today and
12:13 am
also is one that tried to unite women from diverse backgrounds. and that was betty's and other people's for it and so this a scene at in washington dc at at a conference where betty was actually she wasn't attending the conference as a participant it was a conference for women who worked for women's rights also were were part of the government. but betty was there as a journalist covering this conference and this is the story of the founding of now. and this is in 1966 at the washington between june 28th and 30/30. this conference targets for
12:14 am
action aimed continue the work done by the presidents on the status of women under jfk. but the first day discouraged the female delegates and friedan whom kath catherine east, coauthor of the commission report, had invited as a journalist late in the afternoon. it started to rain. so the group convened in the east room instead of the rose garden standing next to lady bird johnson began by addressing the distinguished and, very attractive delegates. he took credit for title seven recommended that women expanded their volunteerism and joked about his wife's interest in the grass in the rose garden he listed accomplished ments of the commission as if women's equality had been achieved and figuratively patted our heads. friedan recalled. the next day the national women's party alice paul's
12:15 am
organization, tried to introduce a resolution to bring the equal rights amendment under consider. they were refused shirley irritated friedan invited pauli murray and a group of women to her room at the washington hilton. that night, marie joined, as did dorothy hanner and carolyn davis, the women's department of the united autoworkers. friedan had met while researching her still uncompleted second book. there was also catherine k clarion, back head of the wisconsin commission on the status of women, mary eastwood and catherine conroy, who worked for the communications union. conroy and clarence beck wanted to work through existing channels by introducing a motion condemning the employment opportunity commission. murray, armed with a yellow legal pad, sided with friedan's activist approach at around 11 p.m., nancy, a young dean at the university of wisconsin, sitting on the floor, dared to wonder if
12:16 am
the needed a new women's organization. friedan shouted who invited you get out? get out! this is my room and my liquor. thank you, rachel. so can you can see why people not very often did not like betty friedan and found her difficult and rachel, why should we care about? betty friedan today? well, so as you anouma stated in your introduction, betty wrote the feminine mystique, which is one of the most important feminist books of the 20th century, if the most important one it the the feminine was yes. as you noted, a huge, huge bestseller. but what it did was it established women as a category
12:17 am
which at time simply did exist. so you could say that betty really threw the first shot right at that, which many other people then up. so that's thing number one is the feminine mystique. and thing number two, the national organization for women as. i said this is an it was an amazing organization. nothing like existed. and the goal to combine again to to unite women as a category and have women be able to agitate for equality of pay, equality of representation and other things like that and then also betty went in the rest of her life to found many other organizations devoted to women and women's rights, including the national women's political caucus, which
12:18 am
was solely devoted to getting women into government. but she also then founded a women's bank, a women's think tank, a women's i mean, she just was tireless in her pursuit of women's rights and trying to get equality for women and it's it's so i think we need she's important because we need to remember how long the struggle for women's rights has been going on in this country and some of the rights that betty fought are being turned back and and it's it's also important because i think she what what people pay attention to most of all is her temper. and not the things that she achieved, the ideas that she had. do you do you find that young women that you meet and your don't think about her don't? yes. some cases have not even heard of. yes. so i find in general, betty is
12:19 am
much less read the feminine mystique much less read in universities now than ten years ago. the feminine mystique. well, was written in 63, as you said, it's 60 years old this year but many women and gender studies programs do not teach it or. they teach one chapter of it. and it's taught in history programs. but then it's really it's often taught. i've talked to a lot of historians about this. and it's often taught in conjunction with some later book as a corrective so to show what betty did that was wrong, you know, and as i said to me the most important thing is she she she showed to amass how women's rights were. so what do the current gender
12:20 am
studies people think she wrong and did wrong and what did object to about the feminine mystique. yeah well so many, many, many i mean, most of all though i would say the lack of the feminine mystique was really a book about housewives. right? it was about the suburbs and, how women felt existentially in the suburbs. so there have been a number of books and, you know, famous books and famous essays correctives, talking about, you know, betty, should have been more inclusive in her, you know, in her construction of of women. but, of course, she was writing in this book in the late fifties is one thing. and pre-civil rights and i would say that i mean, my my i don't
12:21 am
want to say defense, but my response to the critics is that no one was writing about race and class in that way, in the way that we now consider basically normal. so so one thing is, is her lack of about race and also her she didn't really talk about poor women. she thought that revolution of women had to start in the middle class. that was her argument. and then another problem with the book that a lot of critics have pointed out is that it also, you could argue, could say that homophobic it takes there's passages of it that take a very fifties freudian approach to gay men's specific weekly and that that really that criticism really dogged her so you think that that gender studies crowd
12:22 am
are engendering a disrespect for yes and and that is that a that's a dangerous thing. well in, my opinion it is i mean, i don't think we can use the standard of today to judge a work that was written, as i said, priests, civil rights, priest, sexual revolution, stonewall. i mean, that's why i say betty really threw the first shot. she she she and that extraordinarily difficult to do and you know i mean i think you can tell i read this passage and it's funny. right. but she i believe that she acted in this way. she was really intent on getting people to hear message. and she felt that the only way do that was to yell or scream or to something. i mean. right. that's just that's that's that's what she believed i think she she had a kind of righteousness to her about this. and she was just not going to back down and she was not going
12:23 am
to be polite. she was not going to be civil. she was not going to obey robert's rules in a meeting, you know, but i think she felt that she could not do that. she could not. so a lot of young women today owe a lot to. yes, absolutely. i mean, i think when you think about 60 years ago and the things that women didn't have women couldn't open a bank account by themselves, i mean, there's a whole long list there was discrimination in job hiring. there was widespread sexism in office culture and culture. so betty was, constantly just fighting this idea, oh, women don't really even need to be equal. why do you even need that? why you even want that? she would go on these talk shows in the early sixties. it was the advent of television and and announcers would just would just her and humiliate her, you know, so terrible.
12:24 am
yeah. so all the writing about betty went before your book. what was tone of it? and how is your book a different take on betty? well, so i really tried to. i think the main thing is the other two major biographies were written in the 1990s. there was one written by a journalist and then there was one written by a scholar and the one written by the scholar of them are quite critical of her. these ways that i'm describing and what i try to do is just be fair to her. i would say that they were writing. i want to sort of backtrack they were writing in the 1990s when she was still alive. and so they had to interview her and. as anybody who's ever written a biography knows, that's a sort of mixed blessing. if the subject is still alive. and so i think of them had, you know, they both interview her and they both had sort of struggled. she had a clear idea about how
12:25 am
she wanted to be remembered and what legacy was. and if you did not fall into line with that she would just you know, she would really give it to you. i mean, i've read these transcripts, these these previous biographers, several then after these biographies gave up writing biographies about because she was so difficult, so okay, so are they men in the biographies. one was a man and some of the others were women. so they were they both genders. and but so the main thing that i really tried hard do in the book was just be fair to and to not judge her. her outbursts. she had these outbursts and and i tried write about those and i tried to understand them as opposed to judge them, which what i think the job of a biographer is did she respond very badly to what was written about her after she'd cooperated? the biographers. yeah, that's what scared away i mean. yeah, she had different
12:26 am
responses to the two biographies because they're very different biography by the scholar, which is very detailed, very particular. but he had a specific about her, which is that suppressed her, you know -- when she was writing the feminine mystique, she, she called herself a housewife. she wasn't writing about other people, also called herself a housewife. the problem that had no name, that's what she called this anomie that middle class women had. but she also she she described herself as having this problem. and this biographer claimed that she exactly the extent to which she was a housewife. he pointed out she had been a radical journalist, the forties. she had been a writer for women's magazines in the fifties. and so he he according to him, she covered up her career order
12:27 am
to exaggerate her identity as a housewife. and she went she did not like that at all. she did not care for that at all. and she tried to sue him she's tried to stop the book. she did not succeed. and, you know, the book came out and became she became worried about her legacy and she published a memoir which was terrible, really bad. it's not a great memoir. it's not insightful in the n way you want a memoir to be but the main think about the purpose for her was to show this liability had gotten it wrong about her. she was a housewife. the biography right, she was a medical journalist and a writer for women's magazines and active. however, she felt like a housewife and was living in upstate new york rockland county
12:28 am
and she had three children and an anonymous house and her husband went to the city so despite the fact that she had a somewhat active career she was asked to be a housewife so she felt trapped. >> she understood them and placed what they were peeling. the reason the book was a hit was because the women read the first paragraph describing what it was like to wrap peanut butter sandwiches and send your kids to school and how mindnumbing that is lasting just you are not alonene and women rd
12:29 am
that and they felt seen. >> what is the phrase the problem has no name come from? >> she claimed it, i don't know -- she had a gift for that kindth of snappy thing. >> do you think her brand of feminism is so valid today? and why do you think it is? >> the things she fought for like equality and pay and equality in political representation and -- universal federally funded child care and reproductive rights, these are all things we didn't have. to me she had it right, although she was not a saint, she had this idea that women were equal and deserved equal everything
12:30 am
and we still don't have that. >> what was her relationship with gloria stein. >> gloria is still around. >> did you speak with gloria? >> gloria does not want to participate in the book the reason being granted not speak after 1972. what happened was after the national organization for women was founded, it quickly became radicalized and younger women flooded in and they were very interested in what we would call now identity politics. ...
12:31 am
not support that. she thought that it would weaken the women's movement. this was around 1969 where gloria and a lot of other younger feminists did support that so she found herself on the other side in a more conservative i guess i would say place. >> with the housewives wrapping peanut butter sandwiches. >> exactly. >> was there a blowup and can you tell us a little bit about the blowup? >> there were a number of
12:32 am
things. one of her less attractive sides is she would speak to the media disparagingly about other people including gloria and this began to happen in 1971 and 1972 so betty was on the record saying gloria steinem has new ideas. she's a phony, that kind of thing, and she didn't like that. she never responded. she took the high road i would say. obviously they couldn't work together as allies so gloria never denounced betty. >> betty denounced gloria and that sortt of boomerang onto betty. >> can you tell use ot about sof the other controversies that
12:33 am
betty was involved with? >> probably the two that are the best known and lively, the one that i mentioned about women that erupted in 1969 when betty used the phrase lavender menace at a national organization for women t and other words she thought women that wanted to be counted equally or wanted their identity to be brought more to the forefront of the organization for women she thought, she called the' the lavender menace. i'm laughing i know it's not funny in the sense that it's not very nice but what she was concerned about was the women's movement being weekend and the other controversy was erupted when she did later apologize for the lavender menace but the other controversy was in 1972
12:34 am
when she was working as a delegate for shirley chisholm and she wrote a press release in which she told everybody that they were going to have a traveling feastst in harlem and this leaked to the media and of course it was a disaster because it's terrible that she would say that but those are two of the horrifying things that she did. >> how did you get involved in skwriting this book? >> it was a commission. they asked me to do it. how i got involved in it is on the 50th anniversary i wrote an article for the higher education which is a newspaper for
12:35 am
scholars and the article was about -- because i'd never read the feminine mystique as a student and so i read it for the first time then and at the time there were a number of books coming out that one of them was the end of men and there was another one by naomi wolf. i read these books and felt they took from betty's ideas or refuted without ever mentioning betty's name and then i read the feminine mystique and i was blown away by its gorgeously written although as i said it has these problems but it's so i wantedritten to write something about that and how betty has kind of been erased despite having written this powerful book and people really liked the essay so they asked me to write for the series
12:36 am
this book and that's how it happened. >> what was your idea of betty when you wrote the book and how didov it evolve? >> of course i read the other biographies and i was frustrated by themat and at the first thing that happened is i started to interview people and everybody had a negative story to tell. i felt a little bit defensive of her because people held grudges that were 60-years-old so i was very interested in this. she had this what do i want to call it, a knack for -- >> making people angry. f >> making people upset, yes just a knack for upsetting people.
12:37 am
getting her own way or whatever and so those stories accumulated and then as i went into the archives i saw another side of her. there was a generous side she could be extraordinarily generous especially to younger women whose shehe thought she hd some women who were surrogate daughters she helped in many ways. she could be very generous and very kind so as i began to get this picture of her and someone who was very uncomfortable with other people although she was in the public eye all the time i don't think she liked being in the public eye. she was asked to be the first president of now and said she had a riders temperament and
12:38 am
didn't want to do it. many of the women who were trying to kind of get the women and things started wanted her to dobu it because she was a huge name but she really hesitated. >> she thought of herself as a writer.su >> a writer and a journalist, yeah. >> what was her relationship like with her own family, her husband and children? >> so, her marriage was very tempestuous, also violent, tempestuous and violent. she married to someone who i would say was not her intellectual equal. she was a brilliant person. i can't stress that enough. when she was in school she won all of the awards, she was a dazzlingad intellect. she went to berkeley to get a
12:39 am
phd and then dropped out to become a radical journalist but in those days she was like 25 or something and you had to get married. so she married this guy with kindd of i don't know it wasn'ta good match. but theya fought all the time d drink a lot. everyone then drink of course so it was violent and everyone knew that. it was a sort of tragic thing about her she worried that this would come out, that people would learn of the violence in hern' marriage ended but discret the women's movement. >> when you say it was violent did he beat her up? >> he hit her and she had him it went bothes ways. there's stories about this in the media going back to 1970.
12:40 am
so it was known. he would see something dropped and the people wouldn't really talk about it. one time there was a protest at the room in new york and she had a black eyes so she was late and finally she had a friend help her with her makeup and she got there and was late and terrified people would see it and she would be discredited and everything they worked so hard for would fall apart but their marriage was tempestuous and it was painful to her that it failed. she got divorced in 1971. she had several lovers but she never married anybody. >> what was her relationship like with her children? >> she had three children and they all are very successful i will say that.
12:41 am
there were certain things and this is true for she and her husband carl, theyth were fightg you have to put that in the backdrop but also there were certain ways that they were amazing parents. they would go out into the backyard and look at sputnik and thee kind of thing like they wee intellectually curious parents and always reading to their children but then other ways she was a terrible mother by many standards like she sent the kids toto school in a taxi as one famous story she would never take them to school. when she was writing she would close the t door and they would knock on the door and she wouldn't answer because she was of thing.hat kind but i don't want to paint her as a terrible mother because therealso were these amazingan s and she allowed them to kind of
12:42 am
be themselves, via their own people inn a way that was not n fashion then add all and i think each of them reflects that now. >> did she have a good relationship with them when they grew up? >> later. it was difficult because in the early years it was so, they ate a lot of tv dinners, that kind of thing. >> it's a great thing. [laughter] i love it. one is a very successful physicist. one isys a macarthur genius physicist and one is an engineer and architect and another is a doctor sofu they are all successfully and have their own children. >> and did they cooperate with you on this biography?
12:43 am
>> i interviewed them so they did. they had their own like the children of many well-known people they have their own ideas about what should be told and what should not be told. >> do they help you in your thinking? >> it got to a point i knew more than they did. i'm not trying to be arrogant but the knowledge is circumscribed by t the fact they were her children and that was always at the forefront. >> have they written a book yet? >> hei don't know. >> it would be interesting to know if you changed their view of their mother. so much has happened recently. what would betty think of all this? >> at the end of her life she
12:44 am
was upset because there was so much work to be done and she knew it. she died in 2006 so there had been these big setbacks in the '90s during the bush and reagan years and she was very upset about that so i cannot help but feel she would be very upset now and not a day goes by these days where i don't read something like i just read about five female professors at college for gender discrimination or the un report about how we will not have gender equality by 2030, not a day goes by where i don't read something that proves we have not done it, we have failed. >> did she continue writing to the end ofye her life? >> yes. >> what was the nature of her writing at the end of her life?
12:45 am
>> in the 70s she wrote a collection called it changed my life which a lot ofdn people didn't like because they felt she hogged credit for the women's movement and then she wrote something in 1982 called the second stage, which is about how the women's movement has to becomemo humanism. shewa thought the women's movemt as it was was too radical and she wanted it to partner with men and wanted it to be more economically based and so on and people often didn't like that book. it got a pam in "the new york times" book review. people called her a neocon and stuff. then she wrote a big book in 1993 about aging and she really wanted that book to be a paradigm change or like the feminine mystique.
12:46 am
i have very mixed feelings about that book. it's very gigantic for one thing and for another it has some amazing things like it points out that one of the things that's really changed his people living longer and that changes the gender dynamic and others certain sections of the book she talks about people having third acts in their lives if they live long enough and are in good health. it was okay received but not tremendously celebrated or endorsed and there's a number of reasons for that. she had accumulated all of this baggage so it would be impossible for a known quantity like that to have a second success but also by that time she herself was not in good health. she had a number of different
12:47 am
health problems and as that book was coming out it was ironic this book on aging and how you could have a third act and all that and she was struggling. she had like a heart valve replacement. >> did she soften her views on radical feminists at all? >> in 1977 she apologized forr the phrase the lavender menace but i think until the end of her life she believed that identity politics wasn't the way to go for women and that there should be more economic based feminism that would be the correct thing to do. i do know people who knew her or had to deal with her after the open heart surgery and did say
12:48 am
she was nicer after the valve surgery. she had to valve replacements, not just one. one i think was a teenage boy so after that according to some people she changed her personality quite a bit. >> became interested in playing video games? [laughter] >> she became nicer some people said. a >> are there young feminists today who do celebrate and embrace her and her brand of feminism and writing? >> i have met a few people who are reading the book thee feminine mystique for one reason or another who are very excited about it. they tend to not be in the academy. they are journalists or were jut ordinary peoplee so, yes, i thik people read the feminine
12:49 am
mystique and get excited by the language, the strength of the book and stuff like that. but i don't feel like i don't know if it is a widespread movement. you seemed to be very welcoming and inviting and that is very different from betty's personality. >> she kind of invites herself and she was part to blame for some of the things that happened because as a journalist she had donete what editors wanted to narrow some of her stories so they would appeal to housewives, that sort of things that she putsit herself at the center oft and that strategy makes it very inviting.
12:50 am
where do you think it is today are people using obviously there is a movement the term itself, the phrase feminism. >> i think it is mixed. i am not sure. sometimesth i feel like that phrase is in disrepute. some people don't want to be characterized as feminist and then other times i feel like there are feminists and they are talkingin about feminism but i don't feel like it's a strong the way i read about betty in the 60s and 70s i thought that was, i don't feel like it's
12:51 am
12:52 am
discussion. what propelled her as a writer and clicked with readers and this might be out of the left field, but there is a kind of growing the literature in american suburbia at the time and the gentlemen's agreement and revolutionary road taking on suburbia. >> you mean in the 1950s in general not just for women that there was this general idea that there was this place we had to escape it to be individuals. she was influenced by a lot of those people. she was very influenced by hiroshima for example, and she
12:53 am
wanted theos feminine mystique o be this very granular account of how women were suffering because of this existential problem. that was one of her models. theha feminine mystique is a strange book because it has that side of it to the critique of suburbia but then also a more memoir self-help side of it is so sometimes the two sides seem in opposition. >> great question we have run out of time, but rachel would be
12:54 am
delighted to sign your book and they are for sale outside on the table there andnd she will be at the table right there to sign for you.o >> thank you so much. at spark light it's our home to and right now we are all facing our greatest challenge that's why we are working around the clock to keep you connected to doing our part so it's a little easier to do yours. >> along with these television companies supporting c-span2 as a pub
46 Views
IN COLLECTIONS
CSPAN2 Television Archive Television Archive News Search ServiceUploaded by TV Archive on