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Betty Friedan & The Barbie Movie [1]

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Date: 2023-12-15  

As 2023 comes to a close, we celebrate the 60th anniversary of Betty Friedan’s powerful work, The Feminine Mystique, with a big empty silence.

One of the few articles this fall was titled “The Abandonment of Betty Friedan,” by Rachel Shteir, in which she asks, “What does the academy have against the mother of second-wave feminism?”

https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-abandonment-of-betty-friedan

Betty Friedan’s book in 1963 stirred American society and made feminism a national movement. Several years later Friedan co-founded the National Organization of Women. And then her work arguably led directly to the biggest achievement advancing women’s equality in the last half century or more, Title IX.

She became, and remains, the icon of second-wave feminism. The first wave were the suffragettes and the right to vote in 1920. Second wave feminism sought to free women from just being wives and mothers to gaining equality in the workplace, equality in education, and equality in feminine values, attitudes and contributions.

But second-wave feminism was not anti-male. It did not believe that feminine values were better than male values. And second-wave feminists recognized the biological differences between males and females and the complementary nature of the sexes.

The most often quoted phrase of Friedan’s is "Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims.”

And then in the 1980s second-wave feminism was replaced by third-wave feminism, sparked in large measure by Gloria Steinem’s widely published opinion in 1982 that girls should be raised more like boys, and boys should be raised more like girls.

That set off millions of us baby boomer parents on the futile quest to reverse Mother Nature and God - - interestingly aligned on the issue of biological differences between the two sexes.

My wife and I immediately trashed the plastic guns of our two sons. The boys proceeded to shoot each other with sticks, which we also promptly confiscated. And they continued blasting away with their fingers, which we then cut off……no.

Meanwhile, a good friend and his wife were trying to raise their daughter more like boys, hiding her dolls in the closet and pushing legos out into her bedroom. When our son went over to play with her, her parents would leave the room and she would drag out the dolls again.

Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem did not like each other, and did not like each other’s ideas. When Steinem declared boys should be raised more like girls, Friedan (who had two sons and a daughter) was vociferous in her outrage and condemnation.

The only thing Friedan and Steinem agreed upon, as best I can tell, was their abhorrence of the Barbie doll (for all the obvious reasons).

Third-wave feminism demolished second-wave feminism, to the point where today the few remaining or new second-wave feminists have to identify themselves in their work.

So we come in 2023 to the coinciding of The Barbie Movie and the 60th anniversary of The Feminine Mystique.

What I liked about The Barbie Movie was the implicit acknowledgment that girls could, even should, play with dolls. And by extension, boys and girls have some biological differences, evident at birth and found in almost all cultures in almost every era (see female scientists Doreen Kimura, Peg Donohue, MD and others). It seems Friedan would have approved of this movie (and societal) admission.

Now, to be clear, filming the movie in pink is not nature, but nurture. Pink was used by both boys and girls up until the 1940s when a few department stores urged, uh sold, the switch. And that switch became cemented when Mamie Eisenhower wore a pink gown to the 1952 Inaugural.

Photos: Above left, Betty Friedan, attribution Wikipedia; First Edition W.W. Norton, attribution Wikipedia; and right, attribution Wirestock.

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