KS

She’s such a hard figure to make sense of, isn’t she? In many ways, you’re right. I did use her as a touchstone, because she’s a familiar figure. But I also wanted to use her as a way of talking about the misremembering.

Friedan stuck her finger in so many pies and had links to so many of the concerns that I wanted to highlight. The end of her story in the book is a bit of personal pique, a bit of generational conflict as Friedan feels herself on the outs of a movement that she saw herself starting. Really essential questions about lesbian rights were coming to the fore, and she was never particularly comfortable with those.

She wrote this odd book called The Second Stage, in which she essentially attacks the movement for failing to deal with the family. She buys into the rhetoric that Phyllis Schlafly and the conservative anti-feminist movement had been articulating about what feminists did and repeats it in slightly shocking fashion. I assume this had to do with her own prickly, demanding temperament, and her own reading of what was dominating the movement.

And Friedan’s misremembering may also be because the cumulative total of what I described in the book was hard to make visible to anyone in that moment. It really was a kind of revelation for me to see these elements of feminist activism in the sixties and seventies come together. Historians and participants in the movement all know that pieces of this work happened. They’ve all gestured at it. But I was coming at it from a whole other perspective, because I was writing about the history of working motherhood and asked the obvious question, “Well, what did feminists have to say about working motherhood?”

And I started writing, and it went on and on and on and on. So, I think I asked the question from a different angle that brought things to the fore, and together in a way that it’s not clear to me that even participants in the movement would have experienced it in that way.

The people I find most interesting in this transition period of the early 1980s, just as Friedan publishes her disavowal of the movement, are people like Donna Lenhoff, who is one of the leaders behind the passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (1978) and the Family and Medical Leave Act (1993). Somewhere between 1978 and 1985, there is a group of feminists who regroup, who remain active inside Washington, inside this increasingly formalized women’s and feminist policy network, who keep pushing when they can, even in the Republican era, on these issues, without going the direction that Betty Friedan goes. There is much they don’t win, of course, but they begin making ground across the second half of the eighties.