The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  She was born Bettye Naomi Goldstein in 1921, a year after women were given the vote, and grew up in Peoria, Illinois, where her family lived in a three-story redbrick house in the best part of town. Though the Goldsteins were assimilated, they could not join the restricted Peoria Country Club, and socialized mainly with other Jews. Betty’s mother, Miriam, liked to entertain and to fuss with her appearance; her father, Harry, who owned a jewelry store, enjoyed challenging his children intellectually. “He would pose math problems, which Betty solved in an instant, and discuss the political issues of the day,” Hennessee writes. Betty had inherited her father’s temper, and she fought with her critical, perfectionist mother over issues of grooming (“Miriam thought Betty deliberately made herself look like a frump”) and personal style (“where Miriam was diplomatic, Betty was blunt; where Miriam was gracious, Betty could barely accept a compliment”). In high school, Betty was passed over for a sorority, and she attributed that to the subtle workings of anti-Semitism rather than to her overbearing personality or her unconventional way of leading with her intellect. Hennessee writes, “The idea of hiding her brains, or at least not featuring them so prominently—of deferring to boys—did not occur to her.”

  Hennessee somewhat leadenly tries to link Friedan’s future difficulties with her early experiences. The trouble Friedan had maintaining her leadership of the movement and, especially, her disdainful treatment of other women are viewed as reenactments of her conflicts with her mother, her rivalries with her younger and prettier sister, Amy, and her sense of herself as an unappreciated outsider. Still, Friedan went off to Smith with no more than the standard allotment of insecurities for a brainy but somewhat homely young girl. Her anxieties manifested themselves mainly in asthma attacks that began to appear in her freshman year, but for the most part she had an abundance of energy and ambition. She majored in psychology and took a lot of writing courses, eventually running the college paper and starting a literary magazine. It was also at Smith that she developed an unsubversive, mink-coat brand of left-leaning politics, which would later be sniffed at by her more radical sisters; she immersed herself in Marxist texts and ran sympathetic stories on behalf of Peoria factory workers and the Smith maids, who went on strike in her senior year.

  In 1942, Friedan graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, with a yearlong fellowship to study under the renowned psychologist Erik Erikson at Berkeley. The following spring, she received another fellowship—“the most coveted prize in her field”—which would have enabled her to pursue a PhD. She turned it down, in the ancient (and, I daresay, still flourishing) female belief that the single-minded pursuit of achievement would cut her off from what she described in The Feminine Mystique as “the warm center of life”—from marriage and children. In later interviews, she blamed a boyfriend: “He said, ‘You can take that fellowship, but you know I’ll never get one like it. You know what it will do to us.’” The account may well have been a convenient reconstruction of a more general sense of conflict, but the message she had received was clear: as a woman, you couldn’t have both personal and professional fulfillment. Nothing she saw around her—not the friends from college who “just wanted a rich marriage,” or the lives of the spinster librarians from her hometown, or the largely unmarried professors at Smith—suggested that it could be otherwise.

  Shortly thereafter, Friedan moved to New York and began writing for the Federated Press, a left-wing news agency. She was both eager to “prove herself with men” and sexually forthcoming in her quest for romance. In the spring of 1946, she went on a blind date with Carl Friedan, who was recently out of the army; two months later, Carl moved in with her, and in June 1947 they married. The first of their three children was born in the fall of the following year, and by 1951 Betty Friedan had transformed herself into one of those suburban housewives whose chains she would rattle a decade later with the revelations of The Feminine Mystique.

  Lured by a co-op nursery and more space, she and Carl, who worked in advertising, moved from a roach-infested Manhattan apartment to Parkway Village in Queens, a garden-apartment development that had been built to house United Nations employees. The Friedans lived a version of the American dream: “They grilled hamburgers on charcoal barbecue grills and dipped their potato chips into the universal dip of the 1950s, sour cream mixed with dried Lipton’s Onion Soup. Betty made salad dressing and supervised a maid who cooked.” At the same time, both Betty and Carl drank to excess, and their marriage—which persisted for twenty-two years—was tempestuous to the point of physical violence. (Friedan was late to one of the first sit-ins that she organized—in 1969, in the Oak Room of the Plaza hotel, where women were excluded from noon to three—because her bruised face had to be heavily made up before she could appear in public.) She was what would nowadays be called a battered wife, except that she never called herself one and she gave as good as she got.

  The trajectory that propelled Friedan from a homebound freelance-writing career—she wrote for Charm, Parents, and Redbook, among other publications—to the front ranks of “women’s lib” is, as often proves to be the case, a story of self-emancipation. The reader senses somewhere between the lines of The Feminine Mystique that Friedan is hacking a trail back to the stellar student she once was—the ambitious young woman about to make a bright future in a profession she loved, only to renounce it in favor of a lower-profile, more “female” presence. The glorification of domesticity—shiny floors, insistent married “togetherness,” and an overconscientious style of mothering—and the fear of “masculinization” through intellectual development: these were pressures she had struggled against and sometimes yielded to. Her book makes for provocative reading even now, thirty-six years after it was first published. In spite of the far-reaching changes that have taken place, the psychological barriers to women’s self-fulfillment that she described continue to exist.

  * * *

  The Feminine Mystique has obvious weaknesses: it is something of a hodgepodge, it owes more to Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex than it concedes, and its style is frequently overheated. (For example, women who adapt to the “housewife state” are likened to concentration camp victims.) It’s also, unquestionably, an artifact of its time and place. Some of Friedan’s terminology (“the servant problem”) and attitudes (she refers to “the homosexuality that is spreading like a murky smog over the American scene”) suggest that part of her had remained back in Peoria, at one of her mother’s afternoon bridge parties. And although she vehemently attacked the way the media encouraged women to dust, iron, bake, and vacuum away their best years—“Occupation: Housewife” was her derisive term—it was unclear whom she had in mind to take care of the “details of life” when evolved women stopped attending to them, unless it was less evolved women. (Friedan’s cavalier disregard for the “minutiae of housework” seems to have informed her own life: Carl Friedan claimed that his wife had “never washed one hundred dishes during twenty years of marriage.”) I might add that no one has ever come up with an answer to this problem, and one might wonder whether the busy-hands-at-home empire of Martha Stewart isn’t a more insidious and time-consuming version of what The Feminine Mystique was railing against.

  Whatever the book’s limitations, I find it silly to fault its author, as some people do, for not speaking to women of all classes, sexual predilections, and races: ironically, this sort of “inclusive” rhetoric is in part to blame for pushing the women’s movement off the main road and into the byways. (In Marcia Cohen’s 1988 account The Sisterhood, the journalist Susan Brownmiller recalls the days when “the only person who could get up and say something and not be shouted down was a black lesbian single mother on welfare.”) Friedan was assuredly writing from and for a particular perspective: the middle-class, white, and heterosexual reader of McCall’s, who sensed that something was missing but couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She knew her audience—“the modern American housewife that I myself was helping to create, writing for the women�
��s magazines”—and she tempered her politics and her ideology to fit its needs. Although many of her convictions arose from her leftism and her early journalistic involvement with labor organizations, it strikes me as an exaggeration to see her, as Daniel Horowitz does in his recent book, Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique,” as a closet Marxist who played down her sympathies to avoid the searchlight of McCarthyism and to gain a place in the mainstream.

  Friedan’s abiding sense of realpolitik was both her weakness and her strength: rather than overturning the patriarchal order—on Capitol Hill or in the Oak Room—she sought to reposition women within it. “Betty thought attention to such issues as Vietnam and welfare would interfere with the main goal, which was electing women,” Hennessee writes. “Her basic issues remained … equal pay and equal rights and the situation of ordinary working women.” She was never a theoretician, like Kate Millett (whose Sexual Politics gave the movement serious intellectual credentials), or a loony purist, like Ti-Grace Atkinson (whom Friedan pushed out of the presidency of New York NOW after she spoke to the press in support of Valerie Solanas, who had just shot Andy Warhol), or an inflammatory anarchist, like Robin Morgan (who had founded WITCH—Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell—before going on to become an editor at Ms.). As the climate of protest heated up in the 1970s, she kept her sights firmly on the center, even while it failed to hold.

  In fact one could argue that Friedan’s unwavering commitment to a populist constituency in the face of growing pressure from more radical groups—especially militant lesbians, whom she referred to as “the lavender menace”—is what did her in. “Betty had no patience with the lesbians,” Jacqui Ceballos, an early supporter, recalls. “She covered her face with her hands and said, ‘I don’t want to hear what people do in bed.’” Was this simply provincialism? Or did Friedan foresee that as the movement tried to corral the disenfranchised women at the margins—not just lesbians, but black women—it would alienate the middle-of-the-road Jane Doe she hoped to reach, and feminism would lose its crowd appeal?

  There were also personal factors that loosened her grip on power. Friedan yelled when she didn’t get her way, and her hunger for publicity was insatiable. “Among those who were disillusioned with her,” Hennessee writes, “the standard view of Betty was that of a microphone hog.” She displayed “a breathtaking incivility for which she was fiercely resented” and had little patience for the navel-gazing turn that the movement took, scornfully dismissing consciousness-raising as “mental masturbation.” She lacked as well Steinem’s knack for snappy sound bites that dissed men or marriage. (“We are becoming the men we wanted to marry,” and so on.) Nor, being short and chubby and frazzled, did she cut a telegenic figure. The leggy, serenely beautiful interloper who stole Friedan’s show—Friedan called her simply “The Hair”—was everything that she wasn’t: placating, impersonal to the point of remoteness, a soft touch for underdog causes. Steinem had, as a fellow activist recalled, “this bubble of untouchability around her,” and rather than overtly aspiring to leadership, she arranged to have it thrust upon her. Steinem won the position of spokeswoman for the National Women’s Political Caucus, the job Friedan had coveted, even though she “said she did not want it and had deliberately stayed away from the meeting.”

  Of course, even if Friedan had been Miss Congeniality, she would have lost out to Steinem, who was the trophy feminist best able to shill for the movement. For one thing, Steinem had an ability to communicate the movement’s concerns with a casual note, as though they were no more threatening than T-shirt slogans; for another, men responded to her, no matter what those slogans were. Friedan attacked Steinem in public and in private, accusing her as early as 1972 of “ripping off the movement for personal profit” and continuing to discuss Steinem’s “perceived hypocrisy,” as Hennessee puts it, more than twenty years later. “Here is someone who always dressed beautifully, chic-ly, and all that,” Friedan complained, “and told other women they didn’t have to bother to wear makeup or shave their legs.”

  Hennessee’s account, in its determination to be fair, in true sisterly fashion, to all sides, sacrifices a chance to offer a trenchant analysis of the movement’s gradual implosion. Friedan’s rapid rise and fall suggests a larger, seemingly inevitable pattern, whereby the visionary founder, scripting the future, must in time be cast off as an old fogy, captive to the past. So the integrationists of the civil rights era—the James Farmers and John Lewises—would be elbowed aside by their Black Power successors, the Stokely Carmichaels and Huey Newtons. And Friedan, once the rampaging polemicist of the picket-fence set, would soon find herself scorned by the burn-the-house-down types—the Redstockings, New York Radical Women, and all the rest. She was easily caricatured by a newer and angrier generation as a kind of Joan Crawford of feminism, the aging star pouting in her trailer. Revolutions, rightly or wrongly, devour their old.

  Hennessee steps gingerly around these troublesome points; she’s the proverbial peacemaker, smiling now at the girl with the golden tresses, who is popular with the boys, and now at the plainer, smarter girl, whose obvious need to dominate her peers ensures her rejection. One comes away from her book with a sense of too many prima donnas (and their attendant groupies) battling each other for center stage. Meanwhile, the maw of the media grinds busily behind this story, hungry for marketable products, chewing up and spitting out both icons and issues. Friedan was an improbable media product from the start, and Steinem was finally the one who endured, her image resistant to overexposure or criticism. The stature of the movement itself turned out to be more precarious: Steinem’s attempts to correct Friedan’s bourgeois biases and court the clamorously disenfranchised would prove too radical for the mainstream, too mainstream for the radicals. Hennessee’s book nonetheless makes for fairly absorbing reading—not least because it reveals the rancorous underside of sisterhood. The amount of envy and hostility that percolated just beneath the utopian hopes and high-minded principles will not come as a shock to any woman who’s ever made it through high school, but all the infighting does give one pause concerning the fairer sex’s vaunted reputation for making nice.

  * * *

  It would be convenient, at least when it comes to the writing of cultural history, if the private lives of public figures matched their onstage selves: saintly idealists would invariably be kind to their children; female firebrands would assert themselves at the dinner table; and revolutionaries would be above petty snobberies. Of course, a great part of the allure of reading biographies lies in this very discrepancy between image and reality. “The persona she had developed had taken over the person,” Hennessee observes of Friedan. “It protected her from competition, but it also demanded constant care and feeding, separating her from what she truly craved—love and intimacy.”

  Which brings us to men, who Friedan always insisted were not the enemy but simply part of the equation. Male companionship—a “gentleman friend,” in her somewhat quaint phrase—continued to be important to Friedan after her divorce. In The Second Stage, published in 1981, she placed men near “the cutting edge” of the next phase of feminism and indicted the first stage of the movement for being too selfish—all of which led some critics to suggest that she was retreating from much of what she’d said in The Feminine Mystique. In fact, the notion that men needed to be reeducated, freed from their own mystique, was one she had long advocated.

  Still, despite Robert Bly, Sam Keen, and others, the world in its vastness is resistant to change, and now that men have given women greater parity, they seem as leery of female power as ever. The political assuredly isn’t personal: at best, the struggle for equality brings about higher wages; at worst, it leaves women stranded without alimony. It sometimes seems that we have merely exchanged one costume for another, aprons for suits, and the results have not always approximated the dream of liberation. Indeed, they often look like the old curses of loneliness and overwork in new guise. To be sure, women are
freer to choose who they are and how they wish to connect to others. But a political or social movement that can accommodate the vagaries of personal fulfillment, which are always idiosyncratic and unheeding of the party line, has yet to exist. “People didn’t trust her to speak for the group,” Steinem complained of Friedan. “She always spoke for herself.” It was meant as a reproach, but it could also be read as a tribute to Friedan’s irrepressible individuality—and to the elusive nature of female desire. What do women want? Try asking them one at a time.

  VI

  THE MATING GAME

  LIFE ON A DARE

  (SCOTT AND ZELDA FITZGERALD)

  1980

  In the archives of literary history the files on Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald must be crammed to bursting. His drinking and her madness have become the stuff of legend, of Art colliding with Life, yet we watch wide-eyed as the reel unwinds once again: see the golden-haired couple frolic and then scorch themselves playing too close to the sun. Scott and Zelda intrigue because the scale of their lives was more grand, their triumphs more dazzling, their failures more replete than most of ours will ever be. They created the kind of splash that only the reckless of the race create: Bonnie and Clyde, life on a dare, ending in the Fitzgeralds’ case not in bloodshed but in subtle, lingering damage. It is, in a way, incidental that Scott—and Zelda—were writers. He might have painted or fought bulls, except that his occupation gave Scott a chance to document, over and over again, both the “romantic readiness” that Jay Gatsby personified and its gradual erosion. What the author noted most consistently in his characters—“there was something gorgeous about him,” he observed of Gatsby, “some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life”—was what he had observed most truly in himself.