Daniel J. Flynn

Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, is often credited with launching the modern feminist movement in America. Claiming that too many women lived unfulfilling lives trapped as housewives, Friedan called for women to seek opportunities outside the home. One reader humorously wrote to Friedan, "To arms, sisters! You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners." Her book eventually sold millions of copies and is currently required reading in hundreds of college courses worldwide. Friedan would later play a leading role in founding the National Organization for Women and other groups promoting "women’s liberation" and feminism.

Central to the appeal of The Feminine Mystique was the idea that the author was writing from experience. American women purchased the book in droves because the author presented herself as just an average housewife. But as Smith College Professor Daniel Horowitz demonstrates in Betty Friedan and the Making of ‘The Feminine Mystique,’ the self-image Friedan painted was far different from her real life’s history.

If the home was a "comfortable concentration camp," as Friedan claimed in The Feminine Mystique, this is not something she knew from experience. In the years following her marriage, she worked full-time as a journalist for communist-controlled labor publications and later worked out of her home as a freelance writer. Living in a lavish mansion, she was freed from housework by the services of a full-time maid. Her husband earned a large salary and supported Friedan and the children. The parents of her children’s playmates even ejected Friedan from their car pooling arrangement when they learned that Friedan sent their children to school in a taxi rather than driving them herself. The locked-up, middle-class homemaker that Friedan styled herself to be was an embroidered tale.

As far back as her student days at Smith College, the future feminist leader traveled in a world inhabited by those on the fringes of the Left. Guest lecturers, professors, required readings, and fellow students on the Northhampton, Massachusetts campus all pushed her in the direction of a near full acceptance of the Soviet line. While Friedan was at Smith, "people committed to liberal and left-wing positions dominated campus-wide public discussions," notes Horowitz with approval. "Smith hosted a steady stream of progressive speakers," the author recognizes, a group that included Soviet propagandists Corliss Lamont and Anna Louise Strong. Horowitz credits such an atmosphere with informing the ideology of Friedan, who for more than a decade served the cause of international Marxism in various capacities.

While pursuing a post-graduate degree at Berkeley, Friedan dated David Bohm, a Communist working under Oppenheimer on the atomic bomb project. Her social world included many Party members and her writings reflected a line directed from Moscow. Friedan’s FBI file—labeled "a document of problematic reliability but nonetheless one that has to be reckoned with" by Horowitz—claims that she sought to formally join the Communist Party while at Berkeley. "In 1944 an informant told the FBI that [Friedan] went to a party office in the East Bay area, announced that she was already a member of the [Young Communist League], and sought entrance to the party itself, as well as a job writing for its paper, The People’s World." Friedan was refused entry, and was reportedly told that she could serve the Soviet cause better from outside of the official party.

In 1943, Friedan began nine years of work as a journalist in the labor movement. The publications she wrote for—the Federated Press and the UE News—were ostensibly "union" publications, but in reality were Communist fronts. "In the 1940s," Horowitz notes, "according to historian Ronald Schatz, the UE was ‘the largest Communist-led institution of any kind in the United States.’ In his authoritative book on the CIO, the historian Robert Zieger states that UE was ‘the only effectively led large pro-Soviet affiliate’ of the CIO in the postwar years." Friedan even wrote articles for the Daily Worker, New Masses, and Jewish Life: A Progressive Monthly, a publication that served as an apologist for Stalin’s anti-Semitism.

Horowitz claims that the fear of "McCarthyism" (a word that curiously graces the book’s pages on more than 100 occasions) continues to prevent Friedan from telling the truth about her activities during the 1940s and ‘50s. But there is another possibility as to why she chooses to hide her years within the Communist orbit that the author fails to explore. Perhaps Friedan lied about the time she spent within the Red fold because she recognizes that she led a shameful life promoting an ideology that claimed millions of lives. Just as a former enthusiast for Nazism might likely attempt to shield his past views in pursuit of public approval, those who cheered on Mao, Stalin, and their countless minor league impersonators might likely attempt to hide their past in order to gain mainstream acceptance.

"Once Friedan became famous," Horowitz complains, "journalists, authors of standard reference works, and historians simply repeated the narrative of her life offered in The Feminine Mystique and elsewhere." Because those writing about Friedan so often sympathized with her views, they didn’t bother to investigate her past and instead relied on her word. The author himself questioned whether it was appropriate to make public the inconvenient information he discovered. Horowitz claims that we live in "a world where Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchanan, and the Christian Coalition [are] powerful, if not consistently ascendant. So I worried that I might be revealing elements of Friedan’s past that conservatives could use to discredit not only Friedan but the entire women’s movement."

Unfortunately, Betty Friedan and the ‘Making of the Feminist Mystique’ raises more questions than it answers. As she has done throughout her life, Friedan continues to spin a tale about her history that has little to do with reality. She denied the author permission to quote from her unpublished work and implied legal action if he did so. She refused requests for interviews. Her complete papers are hidden from the public at Radcliffe College, kept under lock and key until decades into the new century. Horowitz has recently come under attack as a tool of the Right, despite the fact that he clearly celebrates and embraces Friedan’s radical history. His argument is not so much with her Marxist past as it is with her hiding it.

If Friedan is the mother of modern feminism, the movement she gave birth to has inherited many of her traits. Whether it’s the myth of domestic violence hitting its annual peak on Super Bowl Sunday or the discredited statistic of tens of thousands of women dying each year from anorexia (its actually around 100), one need not look far for examples of feminists putting forward lies to further their cause. When two Georgetown students published a booklet that included a debunking of the feminist mantra of one in four college age women being raped, angry feminists responded by stating "if one woman is not raped by publishing false statistics, then that justifies it."

Betty Friedan has been exposed as a fraud. Feminism deserves such a matriarch.