In noting the passing of Betty Friedan, I can’t help but look back at my childhood and marvel at the miracle this woman performed in changing the consciousness of our entire planet and persuading people to believe that women were entitled to civil rights. When I was a little girl in the 1960s, (Friedan’s “Feminine Mystique” was published in 1963), women couldn’t even charge a lipstick without their husband’s signature, much less contemplate a car loan or a mortgage. Major corporations had a stated policy of “We only hire men for any job but secretary, which lasted just until a woman got married, when she was summarily fired.
I experienced this personally at my first professional job in a 90% male Fortune 500 company that was federally required to hire qualified women, as a consequence of lawsuits filed by NOW, founded by Betty Friedan). One of the most subtle but profound changes instigated by Ms. Friedan, was in creating the term Ms. as an alternative to the prefix Mrs., which is an abbreviation of the word Master’s, reflecting a woman’s status under the law as the legal possession and chattel of her husband, the Mr. or Master, at the turn of the century. While many women use the term Mrs. today, it is their choice and not forced upon them by law.
With the intractability of dictators and the oppression of increasing numbers of women today in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, we can see what a debt of gratitude the world owes to this bold little daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants from Peoria. One can only hope that someone like her comes along to succeed in another bloodless revolution, and stop George Bush and the NSA from their unconstitutional surveillance of our e-mails, phone calls, Internet and library reading and to achieve a civil rights revolution for all of us.
Anne Hoffman