{"id":1978,"date":"2026-09-14T07:49:33","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T07:49:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=1978"},"modified":"2026-09-14T07:49:33","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T07:49:33","slug":"betty-friedans-warning-what-she-understood-and-what-we-got-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=1978","title":{"rendered":"Betty Friedan\u2019s Warning: What She Understood\u2014and What We Got Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In the early 1980s, when I was in graduate school and living in Boston, my wife Rachel and I drove out to my sister-in-law\u2019s graduation from Smith College. We were newlyweds. I was raised in a working-class family, and Rachel and my sister-in-law were the daughters of the theologian Ronald Goetz. How Rachel and I met, and the effect Professor Goetz had on me, is a subject for another day. But during my first year or so at Harvard, I was astounded by the tremendous wealth and privilege that I could never have conceived of while growing up in a working-class family in Chicago.<\/p>\n

Read more The Lindsay Clancy Jurors and the Perversion of Justice<\/a><\/p>\n

As astounded as I was by the wealth in Cambridge, Massachusetts, what I encountered at Smith College was beyond my comprehension. Many of the young women who attended the college seemed stinking rich. My sister-in-law Rebecca was the exception. She was admitted without the sort of money or connections I assumed were necessary to get someone into a place like that. The ostentatious wealth of the place\u2014where the students ate on china\u2014was matched only by the radicalism of the politics. I remember green ribbons because the Atlanta child murders were still very much in the news. There were signs and slogans everywhere, and a lot of chubby coeds in Indian-print skirts, which contrasted with the more formal dress of the parents who attended. My mother-in-law, who was sitting next to me, whispered in my ear that to my right was Gloria Steinem. I had heard the name before but knew almost nothing about her. To my amazement, she was attractive.<\/p>\n

The commencement speaker was not quite the beauty that Ms. Steinem was. But she was equally famous. Her name was Betty Friedan. There was excitement in the air as she was the idol of many of the young women in the audience.<\/p>\n

I settled into my chair, unaware of what I was about to hear. I was incredibly na\u00efve about feminism in those days, but what I had been exposed to I did not like. For me, it largely consisted of incredibly privileged female coeds snarling at me because I had a penis. I wasn\u2019t impressed.<\/p>\n

I had grown up with three brothers in a traditional Greek family. My father struggled financially his whole life, my mother was ill, and our childhood was stormy. Still, we were a close family and traditionally Greek Orthodox. I knew all about female discontent and complaining about men because, after all, I had female Greek relatives. Complaining about your spouse is a kind of sport for Greek men and women, and it does not really matter if the spouse is within earshot. My mother and my aunts would talk about my father as if he were not in the room because, after all, the fact that he woke up at 3:30 every morning for a job that sapped his spirit every day was apparently not enough.<\/p>\n

Still, this was pretty standard. With rare exception, my aunts and uncles loved one another, loved their children, and loved their nieces and nephews. There was disagreement on virtually everything, from politics to what Father Bill had preached about on Sunday, but not a great deal of lasting bitterness.<\/p>\n

So when I heard that the maestro of feminism was about to deliver the commencement address, surrounded by the equivalent of female radical jihadists, I did not know what to expect. What I actually heard astounded me. Betty Friedan\u2014the arch-feminist\u2014with Gloria Steinem sitting only a few yards away, effectively called bullshit on an important part of what feminism was becoming.<\/p>\n

Friedan told the graduates that feminism had reached a crossroads. Women had fought their way into colleges, professions, and public life, but that had not solved everything. Instead, many women were now expected to hold down a demanding job, compete in a workplace organized around male personalities, raise the children, and keep the household running. Friedan called this the \u201csuperwoman\u201d trap. It was not liberation. It was two full-time jobs instead of one.<\/p>\n

She argued that the next stage of feminism had to make room for marriage, children, and family life instead of treating them as obstacles to female freedom. Men had to do their share at home, and employers had to stop pretending that workers had no children, parents, or personal responsibilities. She also warned feminists against treating men and the family as the enemy. Her point was simple: women should not have to choose between having a life of their own and having a family, and equality would mean very little if women ended up exhausted, alone, and trying to do everything themselves.<\/p>\n

I am no unwavering fan of Betty Friedan, for reasons I will get into. But I have to be fair. The woman went directly into the beehive and told the movement that its direction was unsustainable. She did not literally tell women to abandon their careers and \u201cgo back to the family.\u201d Her argument was more complicated than that. She said that the future of men and women depended upon reorganizing work and family life so that equality did not require women to deny motherhood or imitate men. Before writing this essay, I went back and listened to the speech again to confirm that what I remembered hearing was what she actually said. It was.<\/p>\n

It is also clear that the feminist movement did not listen to a damn thing she said.<\/p>\n

By then, Friedan\u2019s marriage had failed, and she never remarried. She and Carl Friedan had divorced in 1969 after a bitter and troubled marriage. They had three children. It is also clear that her experience of raising children while working as a journalist affected her thinking. I did not know Ms. Friedan personally, but I probably would have gotten along fine with her. People who know me understand that many of my closest friends have sharply different political views from mine. I sharply disagree with her assessment of American life as portrayed in The Feminine Mystique<\/em>, and I find abortion repulsive. But I have to give credit where credit is due. On that day in Northampton, Ms. Friedan got something very important right.<\/p>\n

The years of our lives as baby boomers have brought astonishing changes, great world leaders, and some not-so-great ones. I often wonder what would have happened if Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.\u2014who preached forgiveness and moving forward, and beside whom Greek Orthodox Archbishop Iakovos famously marched in Selma\u2014had lived. I even wonder what would have happened if Malcolm X had lived. Although Malcolm was more radical than King, I have difficulty believing that either man would be thrilled with the ditch into which leaders like Al Sharpton helped drive black America. I wonder what Dr. King would say about the continuing black-on-black violence in Chicago, the state of the schools, and the political culture that continually teaches people to understand themselves as permanent victims. That is not the Dr. King I remember.<\/p>\n

Ms. Friedan died of congestive heart failure on February 4, 2006\u2014her 85th birthday\u2014just a month after we brought our daughter Lucy home from China. She lived long enough to see feminism develop many of the tendencies she had criticized: hostility toward men, suspicion of marriage and motherhood, and the unrealistic expectation that women should prove themselves by adopting a relentlessly career-centered life. She continued to advocate women\u2019s equality, but she did not accept the proposition that liberation required women to become imitation men. She hoped men could become more involved and nurturing fathers. That part of her hope, at least, has borne fruit. But she also saw tendencies within the movement that worried her, and at Smith she warned that her generation had reached a precarious point.<\/p>\n

She did not live to see feminism in its present social media form, today\u2019s gender identity battles, or the current intensity of political polarization. I do not know whether the political current would have swept her along as it did with Jesse Jackson, who began his public career as a deeply religious pastor opposed to abortion and later became a strong abortion supporter. All I know is that much of the warning she gave that day has come true. Men and women are increasingly polarized. Marriage rates have fallen. Family formation has been delayed or abandoned. Too many women and men have been taught to treat children as an impediment to the life they are entitled to have, while social media invites them to pursue attention and shiny objects. The Betty Friedan I saw that afternoon would have said that this was not what she fought for. The woman I saw that day\u2014deeply concerned about the future\u2014did not hate men.<\/p>\n

Read more In Defense of Karen and Not Minding Your Own Business<\/a><\/p>\n

And just so you know this is still me, here is where I deviate from Ms. Friedan\u2014apart from abortion, which I have consistently opposed.<\/p>\n

Perhaps my larger objection is not solely to Friedan but to the way her work was turned into a universal history of American women. We have to begin with her own experience. Ms. Friedan belonged to a remarkably privileged sliver of the American population. She attended Smith College, and the inquiry that became The Feminine Mystique<\/em>\u00a0began in part with a survey of women from her Smith graduating class. But that was the wrong place to start if you intended to assess the condition of American women generally in the 1950s. Smith graduates were no more representative of American women than Harvard graduates were of American men: highly privileged, frequently spoiled to a fault, and often lacking real self-awareness.<\/p>\n

It is true that these were intelligent women who did not enjoy all the opportunities available to similarly affluent men at the time.\u00a0But it is time for reality to seep in: 99 percent of American men did not share the opportunities of Harvard graduates either.<\/em><\/p>\n

Mad Men<\/em> was not a documentary, and Americans were not all living in Don Draper\u2019s tony neighborhood in Westchester County. Ninety-nine percent of men were not highly paid, morally reprehensible advertising executives trying desperately to build a consumer culture. The median family income in 1950 was about $3,300 a year, and millions of families lived on considerably less. Census data counted roughly 4.6 million families with annual incomes under $1,000. Much of America was working class or poor.<\/p>\n

Postwar families were acquiring refrigerators, washing machines, automobiles, and other appliances in rapidly growing numbers. But these things were not trivial luxuries. They were game changers. A washing machine or refrigerator offered genuine relief from the arduous 19th-century way of doing things. Still, owning one did not turn a working family into the Drapers.<\/p>\n

There were\u00a0not\u00a0millions of sad, lonely housewives lounging around and pining for careers. Betty Draper was a fictional character. For the vast majority of women, while her husband was away tightening bolts on an assembly line, unloading freight as my dad did, driving a truck, digging coal, or laying bricks, she was home caring for children and managing a budget with no margin for error. My mother calculated the family budget down to the penny, and we were always broke. Women cooked far more meals from scratch, washed and ironed clothes, cleaned, shopped, and commonly cared for more children than families do today. In many rural families, women also gardened, preserved food, tended animals, or worked in a family business. American housewives were not painting their toenails, looking for something to do while watching Bravo.<\/p>\n

And despite the false caricature,\u00a0more than one-third of American women were already in the labor force. In 1950, the participation rate for women 16 and older was 33.9 percent\u2014about one woman in three.<\/em>\u00a0Today it is roughly 57 percent, not because nearly all women work, but because women\u2019s employment has become far more common across marital and parental categories. The women who worked in 1950 were generally not preoccupied with the glass ceiling. They were working difficult and often poorly paid jobs, just as many men were. They were secretaries, teachers, nurses, sales clerks, telephone operators, waitresses, domestic workers, and factory operatives.<\/p>\n

Betty Friedan was limited by her insulated upbringing and elevated social world. She was not entirely unaware of working-class life\u2014before becoming famous, she had worked as a labor journalist\u2014but The Feminine Mystique<\/em>\u00a0centered on the educated, suburban, middle-class housewife. A working-class woman might not have regarded the opportunity to avoid a miserable paid job as a trap. Many would have jumped at the chance to leave the assembly line or stop taking in laundry.\u00a0The working-class woman of the 1950s, as my mother did, could see the opportunity to stay home as an achievement rather than a disaster.<\/em> My mother had no desire to work outside the home. My father never prevented her from doing so or stood in her way. Most men would have welcomed the extra income. But if the opportunity presented itself to stay home with their children, why would they leave them to go work for some asshole?<\/p>\n

The more accurate statement is that college-educated women encountered a much narrower range of acceptable careers. <\/em>Some colleges excluded women, and many professional schools limited them through quotas, discriminatory admissions practices, or simple hostility. Employers openly classified jobs by sex and often assumed a woman would leave when she married or became pregnant. These barriers were real, and breaking them down was an achievement.<\/p>\n

But the idea that American women generally were forbidden to attend college is false. Women had attended American colleges for generations. Smith, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, Barnard, and many public and coeducational institutions existed because women pursued higher education. In 1950, only about 5 percent of women aged 25 and older had completed four years of college; the number for men was only modestly higher, and only about 6 percent of all adults had completed four or more years of college. College was the exception for nearly everyone.\u00a0 Class, cost, geography, and academic preparation restricted men as well as women.<\/em><\/p>\n

Friedan and others helped break down that wall. By 1981, however, she believed it was time to get back to the harder business of building families, communities, and workplaces that did not turn male classmates, husbands, wives, or children into enemies. Her warning was not heeded. There is no question that she labored relentlessly to create opportunities for women, especially educated women seeking professional lives. But unlike many of her disciples\u2014and disciples always seem to get it wrong\u2014she saw the danger around the corner. That accounted for the hesitant, foreboding quality of her speech that day.<\/p>\n

The great feminist sleight of hand was persuading American women that happiness in marriage and motherhood was suspect. It made a woman who found joy there feel less human, less important, and less consequential than the woman working for Bob the asshole at IBM. Friedan could see that one prescribed female identity was being replaced by another. And, as so often happens, the voice of a very small and privileged class was again dictating to all American women how they were supposed to live.<\/p>\n

Betty Friedan, for the record, did not believe that children were a burden, that marriage was simply a trap, or that men were evil. Despite a stormy marriage, she did not hate men. She supported abortion, helped found an organization that became NARAL, and therefore differs from me profoundly on that question. I cannot honestly claim to know what she would say about every slogan, TikTok spectacle, or notorious criminal case of our time. None of us can put words into the mouth of a woman who has been dead for 20 years.<\/p>\n

But I do know what I heard in Northampton in 1981. I heard one of the architects of modern feminism warn that a movement can win its original battles and still lose its way. I heard her say that women could not be liberated by treating men, marriage, children, and the family as enemies. And I heard, perhaps for the first time, a feminist leader admit that knocking down a wall does not tell you what to build after it falls.<\/p>\n

Read more The Madness of the Anti-AI Crowd<\/a><\/p>\n

She saw the crossroads. And I think she would believe we took the wrong road.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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