Betty Freidan

When the other Law School Forum panelist steered the discussion away from the "feminine mystique," Betty Friedan closed her rheumy, almost bulldog-like eyes and half-napped for a few minutes.

The other panelist complained that women didn't aspire to the supreme Court bench, and Mrs. Friedan straightened. Tapping the table with a forefinger bearing an enormous ring and straining to make us understand, she said, "Aspire. Exactly. Adults ask little boys what they want to be when they grow up. They ask little girls where they got that pretty dress."

The Feminine Mystique was published four years ago, but Mrs. Fried en discusses "new life patterns for women" and disparages "sex-directed education" with as much fervor as ever. She claims there has been a "change inconsciousness among women since I wrote that book. Young women, college girls especially, are defining themselves in terms other than their sexual relationships with men."

Mrs. Friedan pursues the "feminine mystique" with relentless single-mindedness. She asked to be introduced to women law students before Friday night's Law School Forum, not to find out what they were thinking, but because she needed more material on young women's professional goals for her new book. while we walked to Wyeth Hall to have tea with the women, I mentioned a Harvard professor's book about seventeenth century merchants. Mrs. Friedan immediately interrupted, "Doesn't his wife collaborate on some of his stuff? She does? What her name?" Pulling out a note book, she asked if we knew any other wife-husband teams.

An enormously energetic women, Mrs. Friedan speaks in long, run-on sentences and Burins arguments in rushes of anecdotes and shibboleths. "In my generation," she began a WHRB interview, "the consciousness of what a woman's life can be came too late--and too painfully--to do anything at all." She admits she continues to direct her books at that generation, writing passionate, if somewhat untenable, perfaces about her consoeurs who "lie beside their husbands at night...afraid to ask even of themselves the silent question--'Is this all?'" She then rushes into effusions about "marvelously talented college girls who will bear children so much stabler than the neurotic children of my generation." Never tying one though to another, she hurries on: "Children of working mothers don't really care that their mothers aren't at home all day. They don't really care who runs the vacuum cleaner."

Mrs. Friedan bridles at the suggestion that she is a feminist; she switches her head and pounds her small fist on the table at the idea. "We haven't passed into a new kind of feminism," she corrected the WHRB interviewer impatiently. "Call it peopleism." She is a turnerr of pharases, a master at epigrams, but not a consistent thinker. The chapters of her book have catchy titles: "The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud," "The Functional Freeze, the Feminine Portest, and Margaret Mead," "The Sexual Sell," and "Housewifery Expands to Fill the Time Available."

Yet her thoughts amount to so many aphorisms. She sees a "new movement in women's rights tied tot he struggle for Negro rights, a kind of human revolution." The Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention of 1848, she reminds people, brought together women who were refused seats at an anti-salvery convention in London. Mrs. Friedan foresees "institutional improvements" that will "help women avoid martyr-like choices;" business firms, she insists, will adopt flexible hiring practices and working schedules so women can "retire for a few months" to have children, colleges will admit part-time graduate students, the federal government will finance reliable day-care nurseries for working mothers. She sees this glorious revolution, yet cannot cite any real "institutional improvements" that have been made and contest paradoxically, that "government will do something for women only when women themselves do something."

Mrs. Friedan says most American women are "silly," but complains that their status as "a disadvantaged majority" is unjustified. One moment she denies any specific tyranny of women by men, but then agrees with the other panelist who wants "women to organize, confront their male brethern, and continue to run the country (as they do now) under a nominal male power structure."

She wants women "to be people" and shed their "housewife mentality," but she herself is obsessed with tiresome questions of "womanliness," "fulfillment," and political power for women. She says, with some pride, that she's been "a witch of Salem for four years, since my book came out. People are still cutting me up." She conducts casual conversations like fact-finding sessions. Drinking tea with the women law students, she quizzed them, not about interests in law or their work for the Legal Defenders, but how they "managed law school and marriage." She told them she wanted to meet Charles Morgan, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Atlanta office; and talk about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but only to discuss Title VIL, Which outlaws inequitable hiring practices by employers because of sex.

Everywhere she sees men exploiting women by insinuating that to be "womanly" they must fit certain norms. Freud did it, she says, and so do the businessmen and advertising agencies who sell kitchen appliances, jonny mops, and bathroom fixtures.

Mrs. Friedan, who can never forget she is a woman, is awed by women who can. She just returned from India, where she followed Prim Minister Indira Gandhi for four weeks. "No one thinks it's remarkable that she is Prime Minister," Mrs. Friedan says, pulling at an earing. "No is raising a furor. Finance Minister Desai never attacked her because of her sex, primarily because anti-women tactics wouldn't have worked. Their criticism of her are of her political abilities." Mrs. Friedan paused and smiled. "It was so grand watching her move about with her ministers. She is Prime Minister."

Mrs. Friedan is most eloquent but no more consistent when she criticizes the advocates of "compartmentalized education for women." She disagrees with Mary Bunting that women should think of developing some competence early, retiring for a decade to bear and rear children, and then making a comeback. Women need to think of "new patterns new combinations. Babies can be left in day nurseries." She is suspicious of successful women; she claims women's college presidents, who have achieved some success, are especially jealous of their positions, regard themselves as exceptional, and assure their students that "all women are not capable of combing careers and marriages."

She is equally contemptuous of Phyllis McGinle and the "fulfillment through baking bread" clique who tell women not to feel guilty about being "just housewives." Phyllis McGinley is not a housewife," Mrs. Friedan claims. "She does more than just jot poetry on shopping lists."

Devoted professional women, then, are "jealous of their positions" and unwilling to help their sisters; but self-declared house-wives sell out, too. Mrs. Friedan cannot find any model for her "four-dimensional women." She disdains most American women because they settle for jobs as clerk-typists yet she blindly works for a millennium, a "human revolution."

She is ambivalent even about her feelings toward men. She denies a male conspiracy to keep women chained to kitchen and bed, insisting that "society is responsible." "Society, of course, is run by the male minority," she then says flatly, not realizing the self-contradiction.

Sometimes, if you listen to Mrs. Friedan, you might think all women are bound in some resistance movement to seize power from men. "Our real problem is that there are too few women in city hall--women who are sympathetic to the problems of their sisters. We need political power.' American women, she says, are treated with universal condescension. She talked with women law students as if they were new members of the Special Forces undertaking their first Vietcong reconnaissance. "It takes courage, real physical and moral courage, to aspire to full dignit," she told them. "Aspire, again," she said. "No little girl wants to be a millionaire or even an astronaut."