Germain Greer / The Betty I Kew

Betty Friedan
by David Levine

The Betty I Knew

Betty Friedan, who died this weekend aged 85, was widely considered to be the founder of modern feminism. Was she really as pivotal as she thought she was, asks Germaine Greer

GERMAIN GREER

Tuesday 7 February 2006

 Friedan's The Feminine Mystique spoke
to American women loud and clear. 

Betty Friedan "changed the course of human history almost single-handedly". Her ex-husband, Carl Friedan, believes this; Betty believed it too. This belief was the key to a good deal of Betty's behaviour; she would become breathless with outrage if she didn't get the deference she thought she deserved. Though her behaviour was often tiresome, I figured that she had a point. Women don't get the respect they deserve unless they are wielding male-shaped power; if they represent women they will be called "love" and expected to clear up after themselves. Betty wanted to change that for ever. She wanted women to be a force to be reckoned with, and yet she let Carl Friedan have all the income from The Feminine Mystique. Or so she told me, sotto voce, in 1971. Something to do with community property, I guess. She was not yet divorced from him then.

I

n its time, The Feminine Mystique was a book that spoke to American women loud and clear. It was based on a questionnaire Betty sent out to the women who were at college with her in the 1950s, all "happily" married and bringing up kids in the suburbs. Betty, who was in the same boat, was feeling restless and dissatisfied. To her immense relief and considerable surprise, she found that just about all the women in the same situation who replied to her questionnaire were feeling the same. Betty was not one to realise that she was being lifted on an existing wave; she thought she was the wave, that she had actually created the Zeitgeist that was ready and hungry for her book. And so, as you see, did her husband, and, though he claims that her descriptions of their married life in her last book My Life So Far are wildly skewed, he still does.

My difficulties with Betty begin with the fact that, as I see it, it's the three million readers of The Feminine Mystique that made the book great. Morever, I disagreed with its basic premise. Betty's Zeitgeist was not mine. She had seen the alternative roles that women had fulfilled perfectly adequately during the war years closed to them, so they were forced to return to Kinder, Küche, Kirche. She contributed three children to the baby boom. That was the era of the New Look when hemlines dropped and waists were cinched and breasts were pushed out. According to Betty, what happened was that women's sexuality was emphasised at the expense of all their other talents and attributes. What Betty saw as sexuality, I saw as the denial and repression of female sexuality. The Female Eunuch was conceived in reaction to The Feminine Mystique.

The National Organisation for Women (Now) was Betty's idea; she certainly founded it but it harvested a huge amount of energy that had been building up for years. The bringing of the important class action suits that would improve the lot of working women is something that American feminists should always be proud of. Betty was important to all of that, but not as important as she thought she was.

When the American edition of The Female Eunuch was published in 1970, I was invited to a Now benefit. Betty grabbed me by the hand and dragged me round, introducing me to the company as if I had been one of her disciples. I kept trying to explain that I wasn't an equality feminist but everything I said sounded callow and ungracious. Betty kept beaming and holding my arm, completely unfazed by anything I said, until I had practically to rip myself from her grasp and explain that I was there under false pretences, and didn't share their belief that you could be a loyal member of the Republican party and a feminist. We now know that Betty didn't think you could either, but she could have fooled me and she certainly fooled everybody else.

In 1972, Betty and I, and Helvi Sipila of the United Nations, were together in Iran as guests of the Women's Organisation of Iran, and once again I had difficulty in dissociating myself from Betty, who would usually take over my allotted speaking time as well as her own and inveigh against younger feminists who burned bras and talked dirty. Her line was that American feminists had taken power, that everything was on the move and the Iranian women should follow suit. "There's more to life than a chicken in every paht!" Betty would howl. She would pour scorn on a life spent reheating TV dinners to women with a houseful of servants. When we were in the air-conditioned Cadillac, she never spoke to me, but rested with her head against the leather and closed her eyes. When I was talking to one of our minders about the particular way Iranian women wore the veil, she yelled "Don't you know the veil has been abahlished in Iran?" If she had opened her eyes she would have seen that the women in the streets were all veiled.

Betty's imperiousness had the shah's courtiers completely flummoxed. She ordered a respirator for her hotel room and one was brought over from the children's hospital. Three days later the courtiers asked me if it would be possible to remove it, as the hospital only had two and she wasn't using hers. I told them to go ahead and grab it, and that I would deal with Betty myself, but she didn't seem to notice that it was gone.

Again and again our escorts, aristocratic ladies with bleached hair and eyebrows, dressed from head to toe by Guy Laroche, would ask me to explain Betty's behaviour. "Please, Mrs Greer, she behaves so strangely, we think she may be drinking. She shouts at us, and when we try to explain she walks away. Sometimes her speech is strange."

I got so sick of being made to admire the Shahbanou's restoration work and eat cake at girls' schools while Betty held the floor, that I arranged to be taken on a side trip to Shiraz University. The night before, Betty swept into my room, fetchingly clad for bed in a cascade of frills and flounces. "Whuttzes extra trip they've laid on for tomorrow?" she shouted, trotting back and forth in a continual frou-frou. "I've told them to cancel it! I've done enough!" By that time I knew her well enough to know that there would be no point in telling her that the trip had been arranged for me. I let her think it had been cancelled, went to Shiraz and met Islamic Marxist women, dressed head to foot in heavy woollen chadors, who told me that no truth could come from the mouth of a western doll. Four years later those same women surrounded the American embassy in Tehran, and the world really was never the same again.

As we were leaving our farewell party to go back to the hotel, Betty propped herself in front of our Cadillac and refused to get in. "Dammit!" she shouted, "I wunt, I deserve my own car! I will nutt travel cooped up in this thing with two other women. Don't you clowns know who I am?"

"Mrs Greer," pleaded the courtiers, who were shaking with fright. "What shall we do? Please make her quiet! She is very drunk."

Betty wasn't drunk. She was furious that the various dignitaries and ministers of state all had their own cars, while the female guests of honour were piled into a single car like a harem. Helvi and I looked on from our Cadillac at Betty standing there in her spangled black crepe-de-chine and yelling fit to bust, "I will nutt be quiet and gedinna car! Absolutely nutt!"

Eventually one of the ministers' cars was sent back for Betty. As it pulled out of the gateway I caught sight of her, small, alone in the back, her great head pillowed on the leather, eyes closed, resting after this important victory.

Betty and I met a few times after that, in circumstances where she didn't get to use my time as well as her own. I always let her speak first because it was easier to explain my position by stepping off from hers. Everything Betty said was up-beat, triumphalist, even as state after state was failing to ratify the equal rights amendment. Betty believed that freeing women would not be the end of civilisation as we know it; I hope that freeing women will be the end of civilisation as we know it.

Betty was disconcerted by lesbianism, leery of abortion and ultimately concerned for the men whose ancient privileges she feared were being eroded. Betty was actually very feminine, very keen on pretty clothes and very responsive to male attention, of which she got rather more than you might think. The world will be a tamer place without her.

THE GUARDIAN