Betty Friedan

Her stride is halting, and her hearing isn’t what it used to be. But at 79, Betty Friedan still has strangers stopping her in the street to tell her, “You changed my life.”

Friedan launched the modern women’s movement with her 1963 bestseller “The Feminine Mystique,” in which she identified “the problem that has no name”: the alienation and frustration felt by a generation of women unfulfilled by their traditional roles as wives and mothers.

The book catapulted Friedan from suburban anonymity to leadership of a movement that would challenge society’s notions about relationships, sex, families, politics and work. She founded the National Organization for Women and the National Women’s Political Caucus and led fights for women’s equality through the 1960s and ‘70s.

But Friedan often clashed with other prominent feminists, such as Gloria Steinem and the late Bella Abzug. Eventually, the mother of the movement was snubbed by the groups she helped found.

In 1981, she voiced her fear that feminism had gone too far in her book “The Second Stage.” Friedan argued that the movement had created overworked “superwomen” and was turning off men. For this, she was denounced. Friedan was guilty of “yanking out the stitches in her own handiwork,” journalist Susan Faludi wrote. But Friedan kept writing books, shifting her attention to the mystique of age and women’s economic issues.

Last year, she was the subject of two new critical biographies: “Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique,” by Daniel Horowitz, and “Betty Friedan: Her Life,” by Judith Hennessee. Unwilling to let critics have the last word, Friedan came out with her own memoir last month, “Life So Far.” In it, she details her early years as a leftist labor writer and discusses her marriage to Carl Friedan, the former advertising executive.

The mother of three and grandmother of nine divides her time between an antique-filled Washington apartment and a home in Sag Harbor, N.Y. A visiting professor at Cornell University, Friedan currently directs a study on men, women and work supported by a $1-million grant from the Ford Foundation.

Her sharp edges still cut deep. On her West Coast publicity tour for her memoir, she walked out of a Bay Area radio interview because she thought the questions too simple-minded. At a bookstore event in Berkeley, she refused to answer a question she thought was stupid. Friedan stopped off in Los Angeles a few days after more than 500,000 women descended on Washington for the Million Mom March. She was interviewed at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

Question: What did you think of the march?

Answer: It was against guns, and so I thoroughly approve. And if anybody had asked me, I would have joined them.

Q: Some people say this might be the start of a significant movement, all these moms, the so-called soccer moms . . .

A: Oh, I hate those kind of terms--soccer moms. . . . I really object to your using derogatory terms to talk about women. Women whose kids play soccer, that doesn’t make them soccer moms.

Q: But was this an important display of power?

A: Certainly, it was important. I think women, and a lot of men, abhor this culture of violence, which is the other half of the culture of greed.

Q: Your first full-length memoir comes on the heels of two new biographies. Were you trying to beat them to the punch?

A: No, I think I had started writing that before they came out. Daniel Horowitz, who’s a professor at Smith, wrote quite a respectable book about me and the origin of the feminist movement. I don’t know much about the other book. . . . I have to admit that I haven’t read it, so I can’t comment on it.

Q: Horowitz suggests that you purposely hid your past as a writer for a left-wing union paper in the 1940s and ‘50s.

Elaine Woo is a staff writer for The Times.

A: It was in the McCarthy era. . . . I didn’t go around parading my left-wing background because it wouldn’t have helped in organizing the women’s movement. On the other hand, I never kept it secret.

Q: So it’s wrong to suggest you concealed your radical past in order to sell “The Feminine Mystique”?

A: I think that it was politically smart.

Q: A historian of the women’s movement, Ruth Rosen, says that your past in the labor movement makes perfect sense because your feminism had to come from somewhere.

A: But it didn’t come from there. I mean, you’re too young to know, but the left . . . had a big blind spot about women. Maybe not as bad as the right. They didn’t make an actual doctrine of, you know, church, children, kitchen, like the Nazis. But they certainly didn’t take women seriously as people. So my feminism didn’t come from my left-wing [activities]. In fact, I brought feminism to the left wing.

Q: How so?

A: Well, I was fired for being pregnant. . . . So that was what started me on my housewife years, because you couldn’t go look for a job with your belly out to here. [I was] fired from a newspaper job--with a union newspaper, at that--for being pregnant with my second child. I went to the newspaper-guild shop chairman and I said, “Nobody found any fault with my reporting or editing. I’m being fired ‘cause I’m pregnant.” And she said, “Well, it’s your fault for being pregnant again.”

Q: You couldn’t fight it?

A: It was outrageous, but we didn’t even have at that point a word for sex discrimination, much less a law.

Q: You wrote in your memoir about your 22-year marriage and how your then-husband, Carl Friedan, beat you. For the record, he denies it. He told Time magazine that your allegation was outrageous. He said, “I am the innocent victim of a drive-by shooting by a reckless driver savagely aiming at the whole male gender.”

A: I know, as the leading feminist, that it was not anti-man. So that’s ridiculous. Look, we had a 20-year, stormy marriage. We both were hot-tempered. . . . And then I began to get this unpredicted, unprecedented kind of fame. This was a time when most women didn’t even have careers. So it was threatening to him.

Q: Why was it so hard for you, a leading feminist, to get a divorce?

A: Well, it’s hard for you to get a sense of what it was like in that period. Nobody I knew personally, certainly nobody in my family, had ever been divorced. Also, I had this fear of being alone, of going in the world alone. By now [after “The Feminine Mystique” became a success], I could certainly support myself economically. And once I did get a divorce, I was fine. But, taking on the world alone--I was afraid of it.

Q: How has the revolution you started affected your children’s lives? In their relationships with their spouses, who does the laundry?

A: They have good marriages, I think.

Q: Equal split of the housework?

A: I have a feeling that my daughter and my daughters-in-law take most of the responsibility. But certainly my sons and my son-in-law share in it much more equally than men used to do. My oldest son is a theoretical physicist working on string theory. He has a McCarthy genius award. . . . He recently took charge of all the meals. My daughter-in-law is the only woman physicist in Iceland. . . . And he had a whole year of sabbatical in Iceland and that’s when he took over the meals. I think it’s sort of stayed that way.

Q: You spoke in your memoir about a chapter in “The Feminine Mystique” you wish you hadn’t written. You compared the suburbs, the bastion of traditional women in the 1950s, to a concentration camp.

A: It wasn’t so much that I wish I hadn’t written it. I think in retrospect it was a tasteless analogy, using the [idea of the] comfortable concentration camp to describe the housewife’s life. I wish I hadn’t. The thing is, I had gotten such a vivid [understanding] from Bruno Bettelheim’s work of the dynamic that kept concentration-camp prisoners from openly rebelling. The dynamic that Bettelheim analyzed struck me as so analogous to what kept women from rebelling against their narrow, rigid housewife life. [But] it wasn’t just psychodynamics [in the Nazi concentration camps]; there was also force--guns and bayonets. . . .

Q: Is there anything that you’ve done in your life that you’re ashamed of?

A: I regret certain things. I would have loved being an archeologist or anthropologist. I would have loved to go to law school. I’d be on the Supreme Court by now, maybe. I regret that I didn’t have a better marriage. But, on the other hand . . . we have three wonderful kids. And I have nine gorgeous grandchildren. . . . I always felt that my kids were the great bonus of my life.

Q: What worries you most about society today?

A: The culture of greed. The fact that there seem to be no values in our society--values more important than sheer material wealth. . . . I think we have a great need for purposes larger than ourselves. Also for a commitment to the ongoing evolution in society toward equality and freedom and human dignity for everybody. I don’t see the next challenge--certainly not the next challenge that interests me--[as involving] women alone or even women vis-a-vis men. I think that we have to evolve to real purposes for the power and the wealth of this nation, as well as for our own lives, beyond just material things.

Q: In talking to today’s youth, what is it that you would hope that they understand about you, about what you did and what you stand for?

A: Well, I thought once about what should be put on my gravestone: “She helped make women feel better about being women and therefore better able to freely and fully love men.”

Q: You still stand by that?

A: Well, yeah, as far as it goes. . . . I think that the task is by no means finished. I don’t want to make a new mystique of women’s difference from men, but I think women have a closer, a more concrete sense of the values of life. There is some research that came out of Rutgers . . . that said the addition of as few as two women to a state legislature began to change the agenda, and not just in the direction of women’s rights but in the direction of the priorities of life for the young, for the old, for children. So I think that as women more and more begin to define our purposes and policies and programs, that there will be a more vivid focus on the qualities of life.

Q: Recent polls show that Texas Gov. George W. Bush has the edge over Vice President Al Gore among women. What do you make of that?

A: Isn’t that awful?

Q: Do you think that Gore is suffering from some fallout over the Monica Lewinsky scandal?

A: What is that? I can’t stand the way you media people just trivialize everything. It’s the campaign for the president of the United States. . . . What is your concern with some little twerp named Monica? What has she got to do with the presidential election? That just disgusts me.

Q: Hillary Clinton, in her New York Senate race, also has a problem with support among women, according to recent polls.

A: In the beginning, [women] might have resented her . . . superiority in a lot of things. She had a brilliant career of her own, and she certainly threw her weight as first lady. But up to now she’s been supporting her husband’s career. I think it’s marvelous that she’s striking out on her own. I think women will identify with her. Men, too.

Q: Do you think we’re getting closer to having a woman president?

A: I hope it happens in my lifetime. *