I was away for awhile and did not read the website when Betty Friedan passed away last month. If this is a duplicate thread then sorry. She was a great person in many ways and a negative one too. The book THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE showed how women were unfullfilled by just being mothers and wives. But it was classist and ignored poor women's lives. She was homophobic in that book and took a pseudo Freudian view on the causes of male homosexuality. When she started NOW she tried to purge all lesbians from it callling them the lavender menace. But in recent years she gave up many of those ideas apparently. I'm a male feminist and think that feminism is a good thing. I don't like the female supremacy kind anymore than I like sexism in the white male gay community. Any comments of Dr. Friedan would be welcome. Shalom.

Shalom, Elemental. I never heard of Betty until you posted this item. She may have done a lot for the cause of women, but how can someone be homophobic yet a feminist? If she is able to understand the suffering of women, why couldn't she understand the suffering of gays? I guess it is the same difficulty I have with a gay person being a racist.

If I remember what I've learned about this correctly, the feminist movement is taught as happening in 3 waves. Freidan was a part of the second wave. Many of the leaders during that time tried to seperate the feminist and gay rights movements so that those against gay rights wouldn't equate the two and also oppose women's rights. Supposedly this is much less prevalent in the current 3rd wave, but I'm sure it was always exist to some degree. These are political movements and as such there will be strategy involved. As much as we'd like for it not to be the case, a lot of people are against gays being equal so other movements could feel dragged down if they are grouped with us.

I have to admit it's been many years since I read The Feminine Mystique. I'd need to refresh to comment on the Freudian view of gays.
But as for class and race centrism, in a way that's the point. The women she was writing about were those who supposedly had "everything a woman could want"; they were white, middle class, educated, healthy, married, fairly young, mothers, nice home, plenty of consumer goods - and were bored and unhappy. They went to therapy to find out what was wrong with THEM. What Friedan pointed out was that nothing was wrong with them, what was wrong was the stultifying life of a housewife with no real intellectual or physical stimulation, boring repetitive tasks and the dependence of having no separate income. She was not really talking about all women.
And let us also remember that she wrote the book in, as I recall, 1963. A Freudian view of homosexuality was, if wrong, probably progressive at the time. And somewhat easier to forgive than the blatantly vicious contempt for women shown to this day by many gay men. Including some here who will remain nameless.
NOW had a big battle over lesbian rights (and whether socialists could be members) in the 1971 or 1972 convention. Eventually, they did become non-exclusionary on both issues and offered lesbian couples "couples rates" for membership, just as they did for hetero married couples. They were pretty far ahead of their time on that issue.
I take Friedan's book as one initial attempt to codify women's situation. Hardly the be-all-and-end-all but part of the legacy of feminism.
Unfortunately she later wrote The Second Wave, which I found to be very anti-feminist; among other things proposing that women accept part time work, working at home, etc. to accommodate motherhood (and eternal low pay) rather than demanding childcare and parental leave. And she later referred to the Empress of Iran as a "feminist" during a visit there while refusing requests to raise the issue of women political prisoners being tortured and raped in the Shah's jails.

I like to read all sorts of feminist books by authors as diverse as Mary Daly to Gloria Steinem to Rebecca Walker. I just never warmed to Dr. Friedan. She was known to have made racist remarks about Palestinian people too. I am Ashkenazy Jew and found those remarks to be morally reprehensible. Dr. Friedan suffered from several strokes over the years and I knew absolutely nothing about what had become of her until her passing.

Sexism against women by gay men is just as wrong as racism in the gay lesbian communities.