Life So Far: A Memoir - Hardcover

Friedan, Betty

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684807890 ISBN 13: 9780684807898

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2000

Synopsis

At last Betty Friedan herself speaks about her life and career. With the same unsparing frankness that made The Feminine Mystique one of the most influential books of our era, Friedan looks back and tells us what it took -- and what it cost -- to change the world. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, started the women's movement; it sold more than four million copies and was recently named one of the one hundred most important books of the century. In Life So Far, Friedan takes us on an intimate journey through her life -- a lonely childhood in Peoria, Illinois; salvation at Smith College; her days as a labor reporter for a union newspaper in New York (from which she was dismissed when she became pregnant); unfulfilling and painful years as a suburban housewife; finding great joy as a mother; and writing The Feminine Mystique, which grew out of a survey of her Smith classmates and started it all. Friedan chronicles the secret underground of women in Washington, D.C., who drafted her in the early 1960s to spearhead an "NAACP" for women, and recounts the courage of many, including some Catholic nuns who played a brave part in those early days of NOW, the National Organization for Women. Friedan's feminist thinking, a philosophy of evolution, is reflected throughout her book. She recognized early that the women's movement would falter if institutions did not change to reflect the new realities of women's lives, and she fought to keep the movement practical and free of extremism, including "man-hating." She describes candidly the movement's political infighting that brought her to the point of legal action and resulted in a long breach with fellow leaders Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug. Friedan is frank about her twenty-two-year marriage to Carl Friedan, an advertising entrepreneur. She writes about the explosive cycle of drinking, arguing, and physical battering she endured and explores her prolonged inability to leave the marriage. (They are now friends and the grandparents of nine.) Friedan was not only pivotal in the founding of NOW, she was also the driving force behind the creation of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL), the National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC), and the First Women's Bank and Trust Company. She made history by introducing the issue of sex discrimination as an argument against the ratification of a Supreme Court nominee. She convinced the Secretary General of the United Nations to declare 1975 the International Year of the Woman. In this volume, Friedan brings to extraordinary life her bold and contentious leadership in the movement. She lectures, writes, leads think tanks, and organizes women and men to work together in political, legal, and social battles on behalf of women's rights. It is exactly this breadth of vision that makes Friedan's memoir an important and compelling work.

About this title

Review:

Betty Friedan has given us another terrific and bravely written book--this time, it's a personal memoir from a woman who changed the world. Her many professional accomplishments are detailed here, from her beginning as a labor reporter to the creation of The Feminine Mystique and the organization of NOW, as well as all the fascinating travel, marches, writings, and controversies that have become her career. Told with characteristic straightforwardness, her personal and professional lives are comfortably mixed in every chapter: the death of the ERA occurred at the same time she found her dream home, and Indira Gandhi and Friedan had a relationship that mixed political admiration with a similar fashion sense. Her messy divorce and lack of child support is detailed without bitterness, while her well-publicized differences with Phyllis Schlafly are described in an illuminating and entertaining manner. The tone is both intelligent and conversational--there are no heroes in this book, but no one is a total villain either. Personal recollections of various politicians, activists, and events offer strong opinions, such as Friedan's belief that the National Women's Conference of 1977 was nearly derailed by right-wing ERA opposition, rather than the unexpected lesbian-rights organization that presented itself so strongly during the Houston convention. Divisions within the larger force of feminism are addressed simply--Friedan is first a pragmatist, and was often at odds with the famous sexual-politic theorists of the '70s. Wise and encouraging, Life So Far is a fascinating read for feminists and fans of all varieties. --Jill Lightner

About the Author:

A founder of NOW and a vanguard leader of the women's movement, Betty Friedan is the author of The Feminine Mystique(1963), "It Changed My Life" (1976), The Second Stage(1981), The Fountain of Age(1993), and Beyond Gender(1997), a collection of essays that formed the basis of her most recent work as a Wilson fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. She has taught at Temple, Northwestern University, Yale, Harvard, and USC, and is now Distinguished Visiting Professor at Cornell University, where she directs The New Paradigm Program, supported by the Ford Foundation. She lives in Washington, D.C., and Sag Harbor, New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0684807890
• ISBN 13: 9780684807898
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400