Exposing Betty Friedan's shameful secret

By Judith Sherven, Ph.D. & James Sniechowski, Ph.D. We need to expose the psychological and sociological backgrounds of the bitter and rageful feminists. A shameful hypocrisy

1995 - In the April issue of Playboy, in an article entitled, "Why Men Die Young," Betty Friedan writes about her own childhood (page 151): "All I remember is the sound of their fighting, arguing behind the closed door of their bedroom every night. Rarely did we see a sign of tenderness or affection between them. Nothing he did, nothing we the children did, was ever enough for her. And it got worse during the depression when the business didn't make enough to feed her fantasies. We were drawn by our mother into a conspiracy against him, not to let him know if she spent money on a new outfit for her or us. Besides, he worked late every night and all day Saturdays. On Sunday he was really tired, her mysterious painful ailment (colitis, I believe) got better when his heart disease required her to run the business. And so, he died in his early 60's and she lived until 90." And then Ms. Friedan spends her feminist career slashing away at men (her wonderful book, The Second Stage , notwithstanding). What arrogance! What malevolence! What an outrage! And then she publishes her secret in Playboy! God, what hypocrisy! Furthermore, on the same page, in the immediately preceding paragraph, she complains that her mother, as the wife of a businessman, did not work and: "...she never found enough to do with her energy. Bridge, shopping, tennis, golf - she did it all and did it well. Perfect dinners ringing the dinner bell for the maid, running the woman's division of the Community Chest one year, Sunday school the next, taking up eurythmics, even gambling her "allowance" on the stock market." Clearly, Betty's mother was overwhelmed by the patriarchy and her patriarchal father was having a wonderful time at work! Yes, it's true that married women at that time seldom worked. It was considered low class for a wife to work. But is that grounds to vilify men indiscriminately? What about her mother's fantasies that could never be satisfied - by him or by her own children? Were her children in collusion with the Patriarchy? Could her mother's fantasies have had some bearing on what Ms. Friedan spent her adult years doing? We need to expose more information about the psychological and sociological backgrounds of these women, bitter and rageful, as they are, that dominate the women's movement and deign to speak for the` plight of "all women." Their personal agendas, often warped by projective reasoning, self-righteously accusing men as the problem rather than their very disturbed mothers who have remained sacrosanct, protected behind the "innocence of motherhood" and the wall and wail of feminist rhetoric.