betty friedan and coretta scott king
The feminine mystique was a phony deal sold to women that left them unfulfilled, suffering from “the problem that has no name” and seeking a solution in tranquilizers and psychoanalysis. A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, ‘Who am I, and what do I want out of life?’ She mustn’t feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children.
king’s legacy
Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won you earn it and win it in every generation. I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people and I should stick to the issue of racial justice. But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Last month saw the funerals of two extraordinary women. The funerals were strikingly different. King’s funeral was a major media and political event attended by over 10,000 people, including four US presidents. Friedan’s was attended by about 300, none of whom was a US president. Yet these women both contributed to the quest for human rights with their remarkable lives and both should be thanked for their contributions.
King’s legacy is her work to keep her husband’s ideology of equality for all people at the forefront of the nation’s agenda. She goaded and pushed for more than a decade to have her husband’s birthday observed as a national holiday, then watched with pride in 1983 as President Reagan signed the bill into law.
King became a symbol of her husband’s struggle for peace and brotherhood, presiding with a quiet, steady, stoic presence over seminars and conferences on global issues. One of her crowning achievements was the creation of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta.
In contrast to Coretta Scott King’s funeral, when her husband was assassinated in 1968, Georgia’s governor, Lester Maddox, didn’t even consider allowing the Nobel Prize winner to lie in state in the capitol building. Rather, even as King’s mule-drawn funeral cortege moved through the nearby streets, he kept the state flag, with its Confederate stars and bars, flying high.
Betty Friedan is known as one of the founders of the modern feminist movement and has been central to the reshaping of American attitudes toward women’s lives and rights. Through decades of social activism, strategic thinking and powerful writing, Friedan was one of contemporary society’s most effective leaders.
Her l963 book, The Feminine Mystique, detailed the frustrating lives of countless American women who were expected to find fulfillment primarily through the achievements of husbands and children. The book made an enormous impact, triggering a period of change that continues today. Friedan was central to this evolution for women, through lectures and writing. In June, 1966, Betty Friedan and 27 other women and men founded NOW. Later that year she was elected NOW’s first president, and her fame as an author helped attract hundreds of thousands of women to the new organization.
In 1963, the year in which The Feminine Mystique was published, the civil rights movement had yet to achieve its most important national legislative goals. Southerners had added a ban on sex discrimination to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a way to mock the bill, and at first it was widely treated as a joke. A Page 1 article in The New York Times in 1965 raised the question whether executives must let a “dizzy blonde” drive a tugboat or pitch for the Mets.
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