Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Betty Friedan: Exit Stage Right" In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 177-182). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
First Published: Freedom Socialist, Summer 1982
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
The Second Stage, by Betty Friedan. New York: Summit Books, 1981. $14.95
Nothing more starkly symbolizes the decline and fall of the respectable, middleclass wing of feminism than the latest bilge from founding mother Betty Friedan.
The Second Stage is a horrifying but highly revealing example of a mother devouring her young. Friedan gazed at what she had created and found it bad. She rested, and then she ate it all up.
This was fated to happen. The turbulent movement erupting from her 1963 blockbuster, The Feminine Mystique, went further than she could or would, as movements are wont to do.
Women’s Liberation spawned an instant radical wing as well as a fusion with a sector of the Left, and Friedan was swiftly recognized as outflanked by predecessor theoreticians who were braver and more knowledgeable — de Beauvoir, Engels, Susan B. Anthony, Emma Goldman, and a host of revolutionaries.
This was bad enough, but an even greater shock was in store.
The women of the ’60s and ’70s who evaded Karl Marx became “radical feminists,” à la Shulamith Firestone, Robin “Sisterhood is Powerful” Morgan, and others. Their credo held that biology, in the form of the male’s superior strength and exemption from childbearing, was the source of women’s hapless destiny. Men were structurally and naturally no damn good, no matter what social system they lived in or espoused. Hence, a glandular sort of “real” revolution would have to transform homo sapiens before sex equality could happen. Meanwhile, personal separatism would prevail as doctrine, if not practice.
Thus battered about by the horrifying Bolshies, man-haters, and bull dykes, and getting richer by the second from her writings, Friedan flipped. While women hotly debated whether to sautee males or capitalism, Friedan and NOW — the organization she founded — denounced both sides.
Neither is the enemy, they intoned. Men and the private profit system are both just dandy.
In The Second Stage, Friedan acknowledges a few bugs in the system. Women in her world do suffer stress juggling high-powered careers, domestic chores, and the search for emotional attachments. But to a disapproving Friedan, the biggest problem is that many “best and brightest” women remain childless.
Why is this so terrible? Because the family is the “nutrient matrix of our personhood.” Whatever that means.
What she means is that women aren’t fully human unless they are mothers. And the feminist movement has denied them their birthright — the “power and the glory” of maternity. Male chauvinism, she charges, is now superseded by female machismo, and women have turned into men.
What has really happened is that Friedan has gone full circle and come home to Sigmund.
The new harried mommas will need help. Who will supply it? Would you believe the poppas and the bosses?!
Once women stop trying to do it all alone, Friedan assures us, men will share parenting and housework. It is women’s fault, she says, that men don’t do this now: women’s self-worth depends on unilateral control of home and family affairs!
Alright. The men are now great fathers and housecleaners. But what about the 89% of households that don’t fit the old pattern of a working father, a housewife, and kids?
Enter General Motors to the rescue. Friedan insists corporations are already changing, because it is in their interest to admit that most women have to work, husbands or no husbands. After all, cars, condos, and Cuisinarts cost megabucks. The workplace, therefore, will provide flextime, parttime, and show-and-tell time.
Friedan is shameless in her paeans to corporate progressiveness. It escaped her notice that workplace reforms cost money which would come from profits, which business will never lower to ease the lives of female workers.
Friedan tries to be a realist. To influence the powers-that-be to do right, she declares, women must switch strategies.
“Why,” she demands, “should we let the radical right Mau-Mau us into a costly, divisive battle to the death on their terms?” Why, indeed, when we can simply accept their terms and join ’em. We can forge a new pro-family alliance with the right wing.
Hallelujah, sisters, a savior is born. Now, to keep our new-found buddies, feminists must abandon “incendiary sexual issues” like abortion, gay oppression, rape, and pornography. Friedan thinks it was these controversial subjects that stalled the “first stage” of feminism.
Moreover, she avers, such a focus is caused by women’s secret masochism; rape isn’t men’s fault anyway (rapists were denied some “tender loving mother’s touch”); abortion is “selfish” and bespeaks “licentiousness”; lesbians are “exhibitionists.” And everybody is too radical.
No wonder a backlash erupted, she whines; we created a monster.
Friedan is a great tactician. Don’t organize — mourn. Don’t resist — surrender. And love your enemy — love, love, love, love, love. Barf.
Nowhere does Friedan display sensitivity to the persecution of women of color by the very right wing she embraces. Her vision of a new coalition is impossible, immoral, unprincipled, fatal, and racist to the core.
She has always been “irritated,” she writes, at the criticism that
... there was something wrong with the women’s movement because it spoke to the condition of “white, middleclass women. “ That was its strength, of course, in a country where all women (and men) — except for the Marxist daughters and sons of the rich — would like to think of themselves as, at least, middle-class, certainly not poor (even if they are), and, if they are a minority, would like at least the chance to enjoy what the majority take for granted.
This is evasion and doubletalk. Any movement that doesn’t address the special oppression of people of color — as well as capitalist exploitation of the working class, the basic matrix of this society — will not long endure. Obviously: the color-blind, class-blind sector of feminism has long been part of the problem for minorities and women workers.
The one fascinating section in the book is “drawn extensively” from Dolores Hayden’s The Grand Domestic Revolution (MIT Press, 1981). Hayden unearthed intriguing data about early 20th Century feminist attempts to communalize domestic work, and the movement’s methodical destruction by corporate powers who feared the influence of the Russian Revolution.
Friedan ignores Hayden’s socialism. And she slanders the Bolsheviks for not seriously trying to create “new socialized housekeeping structures …”
The fledgling Soviet state, beset by famine, civil war, capitalist sabotage, economic collapse, and 21 invading foreign armies, still found time to legalize divorce, abortion, and homosexuality; to establish communal kitchens, childcare, and laundries; to draw women into politics and to launch a far-flung and expensive campaign to liberate them from feudal bondage and to educate men. This was feminism’s shining hour! Betty Friedan is a liar.
Her cynical rewrite of history excises the socialist alternative, leaving her free to invent “flexibility” for capitalism.
She wants to ask the support of the wealthy to help end entrenched patriarchy. And she wants to keep her own class privileges. So, with desperate polemical surgery, she tries to separate capitalism from patriarchy. But she falls flat on her sociological face.
Sexism and class society share the same vital organs; separated, they will die only seconds apart.
The Second Stage expresses Friedan’s Second Childhood. Or Second Coming, if you prefer. But her pages of gibberish are less sinister than her politics, which are crassly imperialist and implicitly proto-fascist.
Not content with degenerating into the Eldridge Cleaver of feminism, she has also become the Phyllis Schlafly of the Democratic Party. She is not in retreat, but in rout. She has fewer solutions than Nancy Reagan to unemployment, inflation, poverty, the wholesale annihilation of social welfare programs, political repression, war, race and sex bigotry, and all the crimes of the plutocrats.
She’s even opposed to government-funded benefits, and espouses “passionate volunteerism” to cajole Big Business into private grants for childcare.
And she “feels safer” because of the coed cadets at West Point who are “sensitive and tender,” yet, to humanistic values!
The turncoat Friedans of this world shrivel and shatter when the backlash comes. Yearning for popularity, conventional success, and freedom from conflict, these summer-soldier liberals turn into super-patriots for all seasons, and do witchhunting for the rulers.
The women’s movement is much better off without them, freer to develop its innate revolutionary nature.
The lesson here is clear: turn left or turn right. In the period of the death agony of capitalism, the middle is a myth.
Bye, bye, Betty. Thanks for turning us on, but now you can go to hell. See you on the barricades — or, rather, across them.