Fashion and Wardrobe
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Betty Friedan Woke Women From Mystique of Sleep
of her temperament myself when I helped her produce a forum in Sag Harbor. My job was to do the scut work. The job paid an hourly salary and I needed the money. She screamed instructions at me over the phone. I would tape record them and try to make sense later of what I was supposed to do. After a couple of months--maybe only weeks but it seemed much longer--of her high-decibel shouting, I quit and was replaced by another, and then another, and another, and another. The great feminist could also be caught catering to men. Never a beauty, she used her star power to flirt with men. Unless you were really famous yourself, she was more likely to remember your husband"s name than yours. But then, she never said to throw out the husband with the housework. Despite all this, the redeeming qualities seemed to more than even out the score. Friedan might have been exasperating to some, rude to others, but she was still: Betty Friedan, the mother of the movement, the woman who wrote that book, the sparkplug of feminism"s second wave. No personal foible could diminish her achievement. She was unquestionably one of the most important figures of the 20th century. In the Women"s Hall of Fame, she ranks right up there with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Dear Betty, thank you for everything. We did overcome. You changed America and, in doing so, you made the life I wanted possible. Not all the work is done yet, in many ways we"re still fighting for true equality, but we"re much farther along the road than before you woke us up. Lorraine Dusky"s most recent book is "Still Unequal: The Shameful Truth about Women and Justice in America," published in 1996. It carries a blurb by Ms. Friedan on the back cover. [----------] Women"s eNews welcomes your comments. E-mail us at editors@womensenews.org.Pages: 1 [2]