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Betty Friedan: Feminist, Equal Pay Pioneer—Trade Unionist |
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Betty Friedan, who died Feb. 4, is rightly being eulogized as the force who helped pave the way for U.S. women to gain a foothold in an economic world shaped and run by men.
Her landmark book, The Feminine Mystique, came out at a time in the early 1960s when a page-one New York Times article wondered whether outlawing sex discrimination on the job would force executives to let a “dizzy blonde” drive a tugboat or pitch for the Mets.*
Less well known is what led Friedan to make her crucial shift from individualist to champion of women’s equality. In the late 1940s, after working for The Federated Press, a news association for labor and progressives, Freidan became a reporter for the United Electrical Workers (UE, a union that exists today). It was while covering a strike at a New Jersey plant, where nearly all the workers were women, that Friedan suddenly realized what it meant to be a low-paid working woman.
In her autobiography, Life So Far, Friedan writes:
I discovered, with a strange sense of recognition…that the women were getting paid much less than the men for that job. I interviewed the women and wrote such an unexpected story about their lives and the conditions they were working under that Julius Emspak, the head of the United Electrical Workers, had me turn it into a leaflet about the union fighting for women workers. There was nothing I had studied, at economics class at Smith or in the classes on radical economics I now took…that explained or even described the special exploitation of women.
And in characteristically candid fashion, Friedan goes on to say:
To be honest, I was a snob, an intellectual snob, certainly, probably the other kind too. Though I truly disdained the jargons and pretensions of pseudo-intellectuals and the emptiness and painful prejudices of country club snobbery, a part of me still wanted to be asked to join the country club and thus be truly free to disdain it. I probably would have been much happier as a society reporter on the women’s page of The New York Times than covering workers’ strikes for the U.E. News. But I learned a lot.
And thanks to you, Betty Friedan, so did the world.
*Thanks to Anthony Lewis for noting this item in his review of At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68, in the Feb. 5 The New York Times.
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