REBEL WITH A CAUSE

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32265, 7 April 1970, Page 3

REBEL WITH A CAUSE

(Newsweek Feature Service) NEW YORK. Mrs Betty Friedan is a short, chunky woman who makes strong men turn pale. And that is only the beginning. For if the amorphous, divisive, but furiously expanding women’s liberation movement achieves only half its goals, Mrs Friedan, aged 49, the movement’s chief strategist and founder, may come to be recognised as one of the most influential figures of the era.

Her message is clear and simple: down with the maledominated society. “Men now bear an Intolerable burden of guilt for the destiny they’ve forced upon women,” says Mrs Friedan. “Women have neither freedom nor dignity until they assert, demand and control their own bodies and reproductive forces.” Those who marcn most directly to the drum of Mrs Friedan rally under the banner of N.0.W., the National Organisation for Women, the largest one of the earliest of The proliferating women’s rights groups. Mrs Friedan was the principal organiser of N.O.W. four years ago, and until recently its president. She has watched it grow from a handful of New Yorkers to a naJional organisation that claims thousands of members. 1 N.O.W.’s newest project is a general strike for women in August, on the fiftieth anniversary of the women’s suffrage amendment. The purpose of the strike, and one of the driving goals of Mrs Friedan, is to achieve more end higher job opportunities Tor women and better salaries. TV “EXPLOSION”

Nothing so infuriates her as the traditional concept of “womanly” matters. Recently, th chic, greying ac-

tivist found that a television show she had agreed to appear on was being devoted largely to fashions. A live television explosion ensued. “I take outrageous exception to this programme,” she said at her very first opportunity to speak “1 am considered the leader of a serious movement that concerns 53 per cent of the population. To ask me to appear on a fashion show is like at the beginning of the civil-rights movement to have had the temerity to ask Martin Luther King to appear on a minstrel show.” The outburst says a lot about how Mrs Friedan views her role. It also happens to coincide with many other feminists’ estimation of Mrs Friedan. To a devoted number. she became the Martin Luther King of their cause with the publication seven years ago of “The Feminine Mystique.” an impassioned book that exhorted women to seek fulfilment as individuals and to shake off the narrow confines of motherhood and wifedom. N.O.W, FORMED “After I wrote my book." she explains in tracing her switch from author to activist, “I was so bombarded with letters from women, who were having difficulties going back to school or getting a job because of unspoken discrimination. But nobody was protesting. So several professional women, who were

also aware of the problems, got together and formed N.0.W.”

■ Before “Mystique” and N.0.W., there was little, on I the surface at least to suggest the future feminist leader. Born in Peoria, : Illinois, to a jewellery-store i owner and an unassertive mother, she seemed cut out I for a quiet academic life. | After graduating summa cum laude from Smith College in 1942, she accepted a fellowship to study psychology at Berkeley, then gave it up to come to New York. There she met and married Carl Friedan, a summerstock producer, and settled into the life of a suburban housewife and mother, bearing at four-year intervals Daniel, Jonathan, and Emily. For years Mrs Friedan was able to “compartmentalise” her personal and public lives. In the end, however, the upheaval she stirred in other women’s lives was reflected in her own. “I kept vacillating between being a good wife and mother and playing Joan of Arc of the movement,” she says. Last year she gave up trying to be a good wife. She and her husband were divorced after 22 years of | marriage. She now resides, between frequent travels, in an apartment on Manhattan’s upper West Side. She gives parties and goes bicycling in Central Park when time permits. But! time does not often permit. LAW REFORMS In recent months, N.O.W. and Mrs Friedan have been in the forefront of agitation for abortion-law reform and for congressional action on a twenty-sixth amendment that would guarantee equal rights, regardless of sex. “On abortion,” says Mrs ’ Friedan, “there is only one voice that is important—the voice of the woman who must bear, care for, and love the child.”

As for the twenty-sixth amendment: “Pakistan guarantees constitutional equality for women, and we shouldn’t be behind Pakistan in this.” Activist as she is, Mrs Friedan is nevertheless not active enough for some of the

younger, more militant women. To them sihe is a mere reformer and her organisation too patient, too wellbehaved.

Mrs Friedan, of course, disagrees. “We’re the real radicals,” she declares. “We’re changing things.” She also disagrees with those ultra-feminists who want to disassociate completely from men. “That," says Betty Friedan, who still likes men in their proper place, “is for the birds.”