writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

Although Friedan had a later evolution as a thinker, abandoning some rigid positions, she had
always kept a liberal and reformist conscience, far from any revolutionary “un‐American” perspective
whose risk was the balance alteration of the consolidated power system. 26 Beyond the debate
around Friedan’s political vision, it’s undeniable the ability the liberal feminist had in interpreting
through The Feminine Mystique the needs of a big number of American women, reached out to
galvanize their consciousness. The book became an instant best‐seller, discussed in all the leading
women’s magazines. Soon younger liberal women would organize that movement, which would
move well beyond Friedan’s call for self‐realization. The new feminists would demand access to
professional occupations and skilled jobs, protest low wages, and work for pay equity. They would
reject the double standard that had plagued their mothers and would claim their rights to
reproductive choice and legal abortion.
In a 2006 article appeared on The Nation on the occasion of the death of Betty Friedan, the
American critic Katha Pollit after asserting The Feminine Mystique had no changed her life compared
to Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics, reminded the work with these concise words:
The far‐right magazine Human Events knew what it was doing when it put The
Feminine Mystique on its list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries. It might not have been as profound as The Second Sex or as radical
as the stream of articles and pamphlets that a few years later would pour from the
mimeograph machines of the women's liberation movement. But for millions of American
women it was as profound and as radical as it needed to be. 27
Keywords: Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, American liberal feminism, Power
dynamics & public rhetoric, National Organization for Women (NOW)
Carolina TOPINI
University of Bologna (IT),
Paris Diderot – Paris 7 University (FR)
carolina.topini@studio.unibo.it
carolina.topini@etu.univ‐paris‐diderot.fr
Notes
2
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Penguin Books, 2010 [Norton, 1963]).
2
Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique. The American Left, the Cold War
and Modern Feminism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).
3
Betty Friedan, Life so far. A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2000).
4 Although they were mainly included on sectors of light industry, often confined to low specialized tasks, and
remunerated by halved salaries compared with those of men. cf. Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty. A History of
Women in America (New York: The Free Press, 1989), 219‐225; L.K. Kerber, A. Kessler‐Harris, K. Kish Shlar (ed.),
U.S. History as Women’s History. New Feminist Essays (London: Chapel Hill,1995).
5
Elisabetta Vezzosi, Mosaico americano. Società e cultura negli USA contemporanei (Roma: Carocci, 2005), 21.
6
Raffaella Baritono, “La mistica della femminilità e il modello democratico americano negli anni della guerra
fredda”, Scienza & Politica 26 (2002): 83‐100.
7
L. Kerber, Women of The Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, 1980).
8
E. Tyler May, Homeward Bound. American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic books, 1998).
9
Bini Elisabetta, “Donne e consumi nei suburbs americani degli anni Cinquanta”, Italia Contemporeanea 224
(2001).
10
“Young Wives with Brains: Babies, Yes – But What Else?”, Newsweek, March 7, 1960, 57‐60.
11
S. Evans, Personal Politics. The Roots of Women’s Liberation in The Civil Rights Movement & The New Left
289