National Organization for Women
In 1966 Friedan co-founded, and became the first president of, the National Organization for Women. She, with Pauli Murray, the first black female Episcopal priest, wrote its mission statement. Betty Friedan Biography - life, family, children, name, wife, mother, young, book, information, born, college, husband, house, year Friedan stepped down as president in 1969.
Under Friedan, NOW advocated fiercely for the legal equality of women and men. They lobbied for enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the first two major legislative victories of the movement, and forced the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to stop ignoring, and start treating with dignity and urgency, claims filed involving sex discrimination. They successfully campaigned for a 1967 Executive Order extending the same Affirmative Action granted to blacks to women and a 1968 EEOC decision ruling illegal sex-segregated help want ads, later upheld by the Supreme Court. NOW was vocal in support of the legalization of abortion, something that divided some feminists. Also divisive in the 1960s among women was the Equal Rights Amendment, which NOW fully endorsed; by the 1970s the women and labor unions opposed to ERA warmed up to it and began to fully support it. NOW also lobbied for national day-care.
In 1973, Friedan founded the First Women's Bank and Trust Company.
Women's Strike for Equality
In 1970, NOW, with Friedan leading the cause, was instrumental in bringing down the nomination of G. Harrold Carswell, who had opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act which granted women and men workplace equality, to the Supreme Court. On August 26, 1970, the 50th anniversary of the Women's Suffrage Amendment to the Constitution, Friedan organized the national Women's Strike for Equality, and led a march of 50,000 women in New York City. Unbelievably successful, the march expanded the movement widely, to Friedan's delight.
Friedan spoke about the Strike for Equality:
"All kinds of women's groups all over the country will be using this week on August 26 particularly, to point out those areas in women's life which are still not addressed. For example, a question of equality before the law; we are interested in the equal rights amendment. The question of child care centers which are totally inadequate in the society, and which women require, if they are going to assume their rightful position in terms of helping in decisions of the society. The question of a women's right to control her own reproductive processes, that is, laws prohibiting abortion in the state or putting them into criminal statutes; I think that would be a statute that we would addressing ourselves to.
"So I think individual women will react differently; some will not cook that day, some will engage in dialog with their husband, some will be out at the rallies and demonstrations that will be taking place all over the country. Others will be writing things that will help them to define where they want to go. Some will be pressuring their Senators and their Congressmen to pass legislations that affect women. I don't think you can come up with any one point, women will be doing their own thing in their own way."
National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws
Friedan founded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, renamed National Abortion Rights Action League after the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973.
Politics
In 1971 Friedan, along with countless other leading women's movement leaders, including Gloria Steinem, with whom she had a legendary rivalry, founded the National Women's Political Caucus.
In 1970 Friedan led other feminists in derailing the nomination of Supreme Court nominee G. Harold Carswell whose record of racial discrimination and antifeminism made him unacceptable and unfit to sit on the highest court in the land to many in the civil rights and feminist movements. Friedan's empassioned testimony before the Senate helped sink Carswell's nomination. Gifts of Speech - Betty Friedan
In 1972, Friedan unsuccessfully ran as a delegate to the 1972 Democratic National Convention in support of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. That year at the DNC Friedan played a very prominent role and addressed the convention, though she clashed with other women, notably Steinem, on what should be done there, and how.
Movement image and unity
One of the most influential feminists of 20th century, Friedan opposed equating feminism with lesbianism. As early as 1964, very early in the movement, and only a year after the publication of
The Feminine Mystique, Friedan appeared on television to address the fact the media was, at that point, trying to dismiss the movement as a joke and centering argument and debate around whether or not to wear bras and other issues considered ridiculous. In 1982, during the second wave, she wrote a book for the post-feminist 1980s called
The Second Stage, about family life, premised on women having conquered social and legal obstacles. Hulu - PBS Indies: Sisters of '77 - Watch the full episode now
She pushed the feminist movement to focus on economic issues, especially equality in employment and business and provision for child care and other means by which women and men could balance family and work. She tried to lessen the focus on abortion, as an issue already won, and rape and pornography, which she believed most women did not consider to be high priorities.Friedan, Betty; ed. Brigid O'Farrell.
Beyond Gender: The New Politics of Work and Family. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Ctr. Press (Woodrow Wilson Ctr. Spec. Studies ser.), cloth, (ISBN 0-943875-84-6) [1st printing?] 1997. E.g., pp. 8–9.
Related issues
Lesbian politics
When she grew up in Peoria, Ill., she knew one gay man. She said, "the whole idea of homosexuality made me profoundly uneasy."Friedan, Betty.
Life So Far: A Memoir. N.Y.: Simon & Schuster (Touchstone Book), © 2000, pbk., 1st Touchstone ed. (ISBN 0-7432-0024-1) [1st printing?] 2001. Page 221. She later acknowledged that she had been very square and was uncomfortable about homosexuality. "The women's movement was not about sex, but about equal opportunity in jobs and all the rest of it. Yes, I suppose you have to say that freedom of sexual choice is part of that, but it shouldn't be the main issue . . . ." She ignored Lesbians in the National Organization for Women (NOW) initially but objected to what she saw as demands for equal time. "'Homosexuality . . . is not, in my opinion, what the women's movement is all about.'" While opposing all repression, she wrote, she refused to wear a purple armband or self-identify as a Lesbian (although heterosexual) as an act of political solidarity, considering it not part of the mainstream issues of abortion and child care. In 1977, at the National Women's Conference, she seconded a Lesbian rights resolution "which everyone thought I would oppose" in order to "preempt any debate" and move on to other issues she believed were more important and less divisive in the effort to add the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution. She accepted Lesbian sexuality ("'Enjoy!'"), albeit not its politicization. In 1995, at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing, China, she found Chinese advice to taxi drivers that naked Lesbians would be "cavorting" in their cars and so drivers should hang sheets and that Lesbians would have AIDS and so drivers should have disinfectants to be "ridiculous", "incredibly stupid", and "insulting". In 1997, she wrote that "children . . . will ideally come from mother and father." She wrote in 2000, "I'm more relaxed about the whole issue now[.]"
Abortion choice
She supported the concept that abortion is a woman's choice, that it shouldn't be a crime or exclusively a doctor's choice, and helped form NARAL (now NARAL Pro-Choice America) at a time when Planned Parenthood wasn't yet in support. Death threats against her speaking on abortion led to two events being canceled, although subsequently one of the host institutions, Loyola College, invited her back to speak on abortion and other issues and she spoke then. Her draft of NOW's first statement of purpose included an abortion plank but NOW didn't include it until the next year. In 1980, she believed abortion should be in the context of "'the choice to have children'", a formulation supported by the Roman Catholic priest organizing Catholic participation in the White House Conference on Families of that year, although perhaps not by the bishops above him. A resolution embodying the formulation passed at the conference by 460 to 114, whereas a resolution addressing abortion, ERA, and "'sexual preference'" passed by only 292–291 and that only after 50 anti-abortion advocates had walked out and so hadn't voted on it. She disagreed with a resolution that framed abortion in more feminist terms that was introduced in the Minneapolis regional conference of the same White House Conference on Families, believing it to be more polarizing, while the drafters apparently thought Friedan's formulation too conservative. As of 2000, she wrote, referring to "NOW and the other women's organizations" as seeming to be in a "time warp", "To my mind, there is far too much focus on abortion. . . . [I]n recent years I've gotten a little uneasy about the movement's narrow focus on abortion as if it were the single, all-important issue for women when it's not" She asked, "Why don't we join forces with all who have true reverence for life, including Catholics who oppose abortion, and fight for the choice to have children?"
Pornography
She joined nearly 200 others in Feminists for Free Expression in opposing the Pornography Victims' Compensation Act. "'[T]o suppress free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong,' says Friedan. 'Even some blue-jean ads are insulting and denigrating. I'm not adverse to a boycott but I don't think they should be suppressed.'"