Betty Friedan Interview
Transcript of Betty Friedan Interview
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BETTY FRIEDAN: The bookMiddletown had [an] enormous impact on me. It was really crucial to my intellectual awakening.
Because Middletown [Muncie, Indiana] was very like Peoria, almost the same size, and so on. And I suddenly saw all these things that
I hadn't been aware of before, the class division, for instance. We lived on what was called "the west bluff," [a] hill. And below the hill
were, I suppose, what you would call the working-class people and the poor, but you never saw them. And so when I read
Middletown, it kind of opened my eyes.
QUESTION: You were saying that you later came to realize that there was this class division in Peoria between the people on
the bluff and the working class. Was there also some discrimination against Jews in Peoria at that time?
BETTY FRIEDAN: My adolescence was quite miserable, when I look back on it, at least my early part of my adolescence. Becausethere was anti-Semitism in Peoria, and I didn't feel that when I was in elementary school. But once we got into high school, there were
sororities and fraternities. And being Jewish, you didn't get into a sorority. So I really was much more outgoing and gregarious. I
really didn't want to spend an Emily Dickinson adolescence reading poetry on gravestones, which I did. I would have much rather
been in the jalopy with the kids, going to Hunt's for hamburgers. But, when I entered high school, all my friends got into sororities and
fraternities and I didn't.
QUESTION: Why did you decide to go from what you describe as a sort of a professional hick town to this very elite women's
college? Tell us about going to Smith.
BETTY FRIEDAN: Well, I went to Smith in Northhampton. It was the biggest women's college and the best. And my mother had
wanted to go to Smith, but she had to stay home and go to a college at home, which was Bradley. So she put it in my mind to go to
Smith. I applied [to] and was admitted to all the good women's colleges - Smith, Vassar, Wellesley, Radcliffe.
QUESTION: December 7th, 1941, America's in the war. What happens in a women's college at that point?
BETTY FRIEDAN: Well, I remember that I was my junior year at Smith [in] '41. And I was on a weekend in New York, at the
Philharmonic on a Sunday afternoon. And someone came out in the middle of the concert to announce that America had been attacked
at Pearl Harbor and we were at war. So I realized that I had to get back to Smith, because I was editor of the paper, and I have to react
to this. And when I got back to college, the whole college had been called to an assembly by the president.
And I had been a pacifist. You know, "I hate war and so does Eleanor," "Johnny wants a job, not a gun," all that. But then when we
had to stand up to show our support of the war effort. And I'd been a pacifist, and I hesitated, and then I thought, "No, I have to
support the war effort," so I stood up.
QUESTION: So it might be fair to say that Smith graduates before the war were thinking about getting married and having
children, getting these so-called "MRS degrees." But now they're graduating in 1942, right in the middle of the war. And this
is a time when lots of were pouring into the labor force, because so many of the guys were in the army. Things are different
now, right?
BETTY FRIEDAN: Well, at Smith we certainly were not geared [toward] having careers. You were going to get married, you were
going to have kids and you'd be a leader, a community leader, a leader of the volunteer effort. If you were very bright and you became
head of a department, as I did, of the psychology department, you were encouraged to go on to graduate work. But as a women you
didn't even think about discrimination. Nobody asked you, "What do you want to be when you grow up, little girl?" but, "Oh, you're a
pretty little girl; you'll be a mommy like mommy," blah, blah, blah. Well, I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like
mommy. And I understood somehow my mother's frustration. And that it was no good not only for her, but for her children or her
husband, that she didn't have a real use of her ability.
QUESTION: Yet, you know, all during this time, during the 1920s and the 1930s, the percentage of women going into thelabor force is gradually going up. Women are getting more schooling. Fertility rates are coming down, not up. So it seems to
me that the unrest you felt about your mother was in the process of gradual remedy. Perhaps moving in the right direction,
but too slowly?
BETTY FRIEDAN: Well, I don't know. When I was in high school, even in college, I didn't have any real image of a career woman
or a professional woman. Now, in the Depression, there was a whole bunch of spinsters bred, because married women couldn't get
jobs as teachers; and [when] women got jobs as teachers and they didn't marry. But there was one woman [lawyer] in our town, and
she was sort of a freak. She wore trousers. I didn't have any role model.
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QUESTION: What did you do after graduation?
BETTY FRIEDAN: I did a year's graduate work at Berkeley. I had a fellowship in psychology. And then I won a really big
fellowship to go straight on to get my Ph.D. for the next three or four years. And I went through agonies of indecision, and then I
decided not to accept it. I just decided I didn't want to be an academic.
I didn't want to be in a situation where I was broader than the boys, which I was, in the academic world. I'm not claiming that I was
brighter than anybody in psychology, [because] at that time, [most of the] the men were at war really. I just decided that I didn't want
to be in the academic world, because it was [really] too easy for me at the top. But also it wasn't active enough for me. While I had
been, I guess, quite brilliant, academically, in my college years, I also had been editor of the paper, and I loved that. And, that was amuch more active thing. And I missed it when I was doing graduate work.
So I turned down the fellowship. And I left California and went to New York, where a lot of my college friends were. And we had an
apartment with some of my college friends in the Village, like in the novel, The Group. And I got different jobs in journalism, which I
loved.
And that continued for four or five years. And then I got married and I took maternity leave, but continued to work.
QUESTION: When did you get married?
BETTY FRIEDAN: I got married in 1947, I think. And I was about twenty-five, twenty-six. And then when I had two years of
maternity leave, when my first child was born. But three and a half years later, when I got pregnant again - when everybody knew I'd
take another maternity leave - I got fired.
QUESTION: Where were you working when you got fired?
BETTY FRIEDAN: I think that I was working for an outfit called "Trade Union Service" that edited newspapers for labor unions.
QUESTION: So you had two children, then you had a third child, is that right?
BETTY FRIEDAN: Yes, that was when I had my second child. So I had two boys and four years later I had Emily, my youngest.
QUESTION: And by then you were living where?
BETTY FRIEDAN: When the children were little, we lived in a wonderful garden apartment community that actually had been built
for the U.N. But they didn't need all the apartments for the U.N. so you could be eligible for that. And so that was a lovely community
garden apartment, Parkway Village, it was in Queens. And then when I was about to have my third child, the apartment wasn't big
enough, it was just a two-bedroom apartment. And the whole move to suburbia had begun. And I didn't like the suburbs, but I sort of
liked the country. And we moved to Rockland County, which was on the other side of the Hudson from Westchester, and was a little
more country-ish, and exurban, not suburban.
QUESTION: And that's where your children grew up?
BETTY FRIEDAN: So my children, yes, they grew up in Rockland County, and I wrote my book, The Feminine Mystique. And after
I was fired for being pregnant, I was technically a housewife. And it was the era that I later analyzed, the "feminine mystique" era,
[when] "career woman" was a dirty word. And so I didn't want a career anymore. [But] I had to do something. So I started freelancing
for women's magazines.
And then I was asked to do a questionnaire of the alumni reunion at Smith, 15 years after we graduated, so this would have been 1957.
And I, after all, had had some training with questionnaires [as a] psychologist, and as a reporter. But I put entirely too much work in
this questionnaire, [and] I decided I'd make an article. I wrote for the women's magazine and [for] McCall's, Redbook, Ladies Home
Journal.
There had been a book out called Modern Woman, the Lost Sex, which said [that] too much education was making American women
frustrated in their roles as women, and they would readjust to their role as women. But I believed in education for women so I thought
I'd disprove this with my questionnaire. But, of course, my questionnaire didn't disprove that. But it showed that with all the
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education, American women were frustrated in just the role of housewife - but they also managed to enlarge it. And they weren't just
housewives, they were community leaders, at least the Smith graduates were. But whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the
editors of the women's magazines. So after I had about four versions of it turned down, I said, "Hey, what's going on here?" Because I
had never had an article turned down. And I realized that what I was saying was threatening, somehow, to the editors of these women's
magazines. That it threatened the very world they were trying to paint, what I then called the "feminine mystique." And I would have
to write it as a book, because I wasn't going to get it in a magazine. And the rest is history.
QUESTION: Let me ask you a question. When you were raising your children, did you regard that as fulfilling work as a
human being?
BETTY FRIEDAN: Oh, I wouldn't even have asked a question like that. I I loved my kids. And I loved my house, and I loved a lot of
things about my life in the 1950s. But there were a lot like me in that era, very overeducated housewives.
QUESTION: What I was trying to ask is this: Isn't the role of child rearing, be it by most typically, a woman, or by a man,
isn't it of and in itself quite a creative task?
BETTY FRIEDAN: There were many parts of the accepted role of women at that time that were genuinely satisfying. Certainly little
kids are, in raising them. Cooking can be okay. [As can] messing around with the dcor of your house and so on and so forth. But for
my generation and those that followed us, of educated women, you could be plenty busy as a housewife, mother, when your kids were
little, but it's not enough. When [the] life span of America women is approaching eighty years, as ours was, having kids is not going to
take it up.
QUESTION: So what was the reaction to the book?
BETTY FRIEDAN: The book, it took me five years [to write]. It always takes longer, at least for me, than you think it's going to.
And it came out in 1963. And it was quite fantastic the effect it had, it was like I put into words what a lot of women had been feeling
and thinking, that they were freaks and they were the only ones. And I called my first chapter "The Problem That Had No Name."
And, I mean, I still meet women all these years later and they say, "You changed my life or it changed my life," meaning the book.
And then that book certainly helped fuel, or give a conceptual rationalization for, the new movement of women outside the home into
professions, jobs, careers.
QUESTION: And you became an activist in that cause?
BETTY FRIEDAN: Well, there was no activism in that cause when I wrote The Feminine Mystique. But I realized that it was notenough just to write a book. There had to be social change. And I remember somewhere in that period coming off an airplane [and]
some guy was carrying a sign. This was [when the] student movement was happening and all that. It said, "The first step in revolution
is consciousness." Well, I did the consciousness with The Feminine Mystique. But then there had to be organization and there had to
be a movement. And I helped organize NOW, the National Organization for Women and the National Women's Political Caucus and
NARAL, the abortion rights [organization] in the next few years.
QUESTION: And who were your colleagues in that founding generation of the women's movement?
BETTY FRIEDAN: Well, as I say, this was before there were really career women. So there would be a few women lawyers, but not
many. They would have been leaders of the League of Women Voters or somewhere, some from the labor movement, some working
in Washington. And Eleanor Roosevelt was behind the first commissions on the status of women, both federally and in the states. And
so these were women leaders of the women's organizations put on these commissions on the status of women, and studying the
question of what was happening to women.
QUESTION: Now, did the women's movement, after it began - we're talking the late 1960s to early 1970s - did it go through a
period that was anti-male, when there was all the bra burning and -
BETTY FRIEDAN: Nobody ever burned a bra. I mean, I would have known about it, and nobody ever burned a bra. The anti-bra or
anti-girdle style was the work of male designers, but it certainly fit the ethos of the period. There was, when we immediately began to
break through the feminine mystique and rebel against it, there were some radical versions of it that, you know, don't wear makeup,
don't shave your legs, stuff like that. But my part of it, you know, the mainstream, what I thought it was all about was simply equal
opportunity.
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QUESTION: But was there a part of the movement - and I know you were not part of it - that was well publicized and really
became known as being anti-male?
BETTY FRIEDAN: Well, there was that. I mean, there [were] many currents, as in any movement. There was one distortion of
sexual politics, which tried to make what I considered an erroneous, literal analogy of the situation of women and men [based] on the
model of class warfare, and, oh, even racial rebellion against repression. But the situation of women and men is not comparable to
worker-boss or black and white, you know.
QUESTION: This tendency within the women's movement to engage in sexual politics has been blamed in some part for the
rise in the divorce rate and for the erosion of the family. What do you think about that?
BETTY FRIEDAN: No, it really infuriates me the way women are blamed, or women's movement [is] blamed, for all sorts of thing
that research shows is simply not true. For thirty years they've been trying to do research showing that it was harmful [to] children for
mothers to work outside the home, and it isn't. It isn't. There is absolutely no evidence that it is harmful to children if their mother's
health, well-being and autonomy and control of her own destiny is maximized by work outside the home.
QUESTION: At the time of the explosion of the women's movement, there was also a rise in the divorce rate.
BETTY FRIEDAN: Oh, God. I mean, this idea that you get. I'm so tired of it. That the employment of women, the movement of
women outside the home into the work world, and their demand for equality is somehow responsible for increasing juvenile
delinquency or the increase in divorce rate, and it is just so much bullshit.
No, seriously, [what really caused] the increase in the divorce rate in the United States were the 1950s marriages, were the marriages
of the feminine mystique era. Where [the] man was the breadwinner; he went out in the world and the woman was the housewife. That
didn't make for such great lasting marriages, especially in the winds of change that began in the 1960s.
Those 1950s marriages began the 50 percent divorce rate. Not the marriages, which were somewhat later, of women that had careers
all along, and were on the road to equality, and the husbands were a part of that.
QUESTION: As you look at your life, what are you most profoundly pleased with: your family or your professional activity?
BETTY FRIEDAN: It's not really either/or. I mean, you say, "Well, do you get more thrill out of the books you've written, or your
kids?" You can't compare, can't compare. I wouldn't give up at all, ever, the experience of having my kids and the joy they've given
me and now the grandkids. That's a great part of life, very satisfying. But so is the fact that I have written several books that had an
impact on my life and times, you know, the life of my time, as you might say. And there's a great satisfaction in whenever I take timeto think about it, which is almost never. To have used my life in a way that opened up possibilities of life for those that came after me.
So I feel good about that.
QUESTION: I hear a lot of young women these days saying they really want to leave the labor force when they have their
children. They're not by any means saying they don't want to have a career, but that there is sort of a new post -feminist
appreciation of having and raising children. Do you find that to be true?
BETTY FRIEDAN: Well, I think you would be wrong in somehow postulating the joys of having kids as if it's either that or career.
That was the way it might have seemed fifty years ago. But part of the result of the women's movement - as I helped conceptualize it,
give it vision, and lead it - is an end to such a no-win, either/or choice. Women today have choices and demand choices, choices to
have kids or not and the reproductive technology thereto. And it is a fact [that] most women continue to chose to have children. They
know it's a choice now. But they don't choose to have too many, and they don't choose it as either/or, career or children.
There is a new focus on really adequate parental leave, and flexible working hours, that it's taking into account [the] reality [that] most
of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.
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