ABOUT BETTY FRIEDAN - In Memoriam

Betty Friedan died today. I wrote a few lines about this event, and I'll take this opportunity to complete this little retrospection by a piece I wrote earlier (about a year ago) about my real heroine, the woman who still symbolizes the wild essence of feminism to me to this date.



Betty Friedan was mainstream - not TOO mainstream - and bourgeois - there's no such thing as TOO bourgeois. I was not mad about her, nor about NOW, as far as ideas are concerned. She mainly popularized Simone de Beauvoir's analyses (someone had to do it) while getting rid of everything exciting about them. She was a kind of "Reader's Digest" for women.

In particular, Friedan disagreed with Beauvoir's critique of capitalism. She was a reformist, wanting women to have opportunities equal to those of men within the existing structures of power. When they met in 1975, Beauvoir said she saw Friedan's ideas for reform as "reactionary, linked to a notion that 'women are doomed to stay at home.'"

She was right. A sentence like this one, generally quoted today in a manner of compliment, is to be regarded with a good deal of distance and even coldness :

"For a great many women, choosing motherhood makes motherhood itself a liberating choice," she once said in an interview.

That kind of reformist ideas were to be later on part of the bases for backlash, by allowing the powers that be to sneakily impose motherhood, or suggest the excellence of motherhood, while still crediting "women's choice".

But Betty had no way of knowing it - other than Simone's criticisms, which she disregarded - and she must be thanked for the job she did. However, she did it without genius. Someone had to do it (the time was ripe) and she was there.

The two things I really admire about Betty Friedan were her tolerance and her solidarity. She could relate to other schools of thought, bolder and more left than NOW, she never dissed a sister and she endangered her respectability on several occasions, one of them being her support of my own heroine Valerie Solanas (who died miserably and silently in oblivion and poverty, without praise nor flowers, in 1988).

These qualities made her a real left-winger and a great human being, if not a great author, and I salute her for that.