|
The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter
May/June, 1998, Vol. 5, Numbers 3 & 4.
Beyond Gender: The New Politics (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1997) X, 120 pp., index. by Betty Friedan (ed. Brigid O'Farrell) Reviewed by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese |
I t has become virtually impossible to write of Betty Friedan without crediting her book, "The Feminine Mystique" (1963) with having launched the second wave feminism that has decisively transformed the ideological landscape of the United States and is exercising growing influence over the rest of the world. Nor does it significantly diminish the extraordinary impact of her work to acknowledge that the revolutionary changes in American women's lives during the past three decades owed much more to a dual sexual and economic revolution than to her words. For Friedan's words crystallized the pervasive malaise of precisely those well-educated middle class women who would provide the general staff and shock troops of the new women's movement. The point is not to slight Friedan's significance, which has arguably been unique, but to evaluate it realistically: Friedan captured the psychological dynamic of a specific historical moment; she did not create the conditions that fostered it. What she helped to create - or at least to influence - was the specific language through which that moment would be understood, a language that would, in turn, influence the goals, tactics, and accomplishments of the second wave feminist movement.
By the 1980s, however, Friedan, like many other radical political leaders, had come to harbor doubts about the direction of the movement she had helped to launch. Specifically, she began to question the wisdom of pitting women against men, children, and families. In 1981, she published a corrective to her previous views in which she "proposed coming to new terms with family, with motherhood, with men, with careers, going beyond the impossible dilemma of the old paradigm, the male model or its sexual obverse." Predictably, however, this initiative did not receive a warm reception from her former "sisters," who trashed The Second Stage as a contemptible sellout to the Right. For more than a decade thereafter, Friedan played little role in feminist politics, although she demonstrably did not lose interest in the issues.
"Beyond Gender" represents Friedan's return to the fray. This slim book rests almost exclusively upon snippets from the press and from her conversations with various experts whom she consulted or invited to participate in the seminar she conducted at the Woodrow Wilson Institution in Washington, DC during the mid l990s. Friedan begins with a brief review of her own career and then turns to the evidence of polling data from the late 1980s and early 1990s, which confirmed her own sense that women, especially younger women, were turning away from a feminism that focused exclusively upon sexual and identity politics. Reflection upon this evidence eventually led her to the central conviction of this book, namely that we are now living through a "paradigm shift."
Friedan clearly understands that her use of this term might be taken as pretentious, trendy, or inaccurate, but she defends the use, arguing that our present situation indeed manifests a plethora of "anomalies" that challenge the prevailing feminist paradigm. In her view, most women's primary concerns now focus upon the challenge of negotiating the respective demands of work and family rather than upon abortion, rape, competition with men, or any of the other high profile feminist issues. What this assessment, which does grasp most women's attitudes, misses is that women's desire to find a livable balance between employment and family is not new. All that is new is some feminists' dawning recognition of it.
Men, Friedan now insists, are neither the enemy nor the main problem. The true villains are the great corporations, which are wantonly destroying the lives of countless individuals in pursuit of rising profits in the stock market. Near the beginning of "Beyond Gender", Friedan confesses that she and her early feminist allies had never paid much attention to economics, and part of her current project is to rectify that ignorance. The goal is admirable, but the route she takes to reach it throws her back into precisely the ideological biases she claims to want to transcend. Heidi Hartmann, the first expert she consults, presides over a feminist policy institute, and most of the others figure prominently either in feminist circles or in the inner sanctum of the Clinton administration. I should be the last to contest Friedan's right to concur with their views, but she is considerably less than candid in presenting those views as a nonpartisan analysis of economic realities. Heidi Hartmann's economic wisdom, to pick one example among many, includes the conviction that feminists should work to bend the tax system to their purposes, and she proposes that any church that does not fully subscribe to feminist "antipatriarchal" premises and practices be deprived of its tax exempt status.
Friedan herself does not venture onto this terrain. Her concern remains women's ability to combine their responsibilities to family with steady progress in a career, by which she clearly means progress equal to that of men of comparable education and talent. Unfortunately, she never directly confronts the meaning of "equality" in this regard, although, throughout, she favors solutions that offer equal amounts of "family time" to women and men. She does acknowledge, in passing, that women's ability to bear children embodies a prima facie inequality, but never acknowledges that it might lead many women to need or want more "parental leave" time than men. In this respect, she faithfully toes the line laid down by precisely the feminists who have refused to concede any special status or needs to motherhood. She apparently remains unswerving in her attachment to the creed that children must not interfere with the steady progress of a woman's career (unless they interfere equally with men's careers) and that husband and wife must participate in a rigidly egalitarian sharing of labor market and familial responsibilities.
Rather than explore these complexities, Friedan focuses exclusively upon the responsibilities of corporations to provide more humane working conditions, notably a shorter workweek for all employees. Nowhere in Beyond Gender, however, does she really challenge prevailing feminist pieties and goals. Thus her enthusiastic talk of a new paradigm reduces to a mere rethinking of rhetoric and tactics. The goals and most of the main players remain unchallenged: She celebrates the triumph of "family planning" at the Beijing Conference; she echoes Hillary Clinton on the importance of the "village"; she blithely assumes that women's careers will require them to work almost continuously through out their adult lives; she approves daycare as the appropriate institution to rear children; she takes abortion on demand as an uncontestable good; and, although she does not much like divorce, she lines up with those who deplore criticism of it. Friedan has every right to her views, if only she would forthrightly label them as such. Few uninitiated readers of this book, however, will have grounds to recognize that every one of Friedan's assumptions about women's needs and desires is seriously contested.
"Beyond Gender" does not pretend to be a work of scholarship, and it would be inappropriate as well as ungracious to reproach Friedan for the total absence of footnotes and hard data. It -is- unapologetically a record of her brainstorming with friends and political comrades. It does, nonetheless, seem less than gracious of her not to acknowledge the many other writers and scholars who have been publicly raising the very questions she is engaging. The persisting tension between career or work and family in women's lives has attracted considerable attention in recent years, as has the evidence of many women's alienation from feminism. Yet Friedan writes as if she alone grasps the whole picture as if Christina Hoff Sommers, Felice Schwartz, Claudia Goldin, Arlie Hochschild, Maggie Gallagher, Daphne Patai, Barbara Defoe Whitehead, or I, among many others, had written nothing that bears upon her subject.
Betty Friedan has played a unique role in the development of second wave feminism in the United States, and one may readily understand both her pain at the feminist attacks on The Second Stage and her desire to continue to influence the movement she helped to launch. But Beyond Gender is bound to make some of us wonder how much she has learned from her experience. No reader of this book can doubt that she understands - and sympathizes with - the importance that the majority of women attach to personal relations, beginning with family. Yet Friedan singularly fails to acknowledge that fidelity to those relations may confront women with unavoidable choices. Thus, she remains convinced that you should be able not only to have it all - which, over a lifetime, many of us can - but to have it all at once, which most of us, especially those with young children, cannot.