Friedan was feminist leader and labor journalist

 

Bill Knight column for 7-15, 16 or 17, 2021

 Too often, we’re all in “silos” limiting our views, not realizing other experiences and information that could be useful.

A great example is Betty Friedan, the downstate Illinois native who 50 years ago this week was a founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus, along with Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, Gloria Steinem and others.

If more people knew of Friedan’s complete background, she and the NWPC may have had more allies, and those supporters may have found additional backing from such feminists.

Beside NWPC, most of us know Friedan was the first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and a leader in the unsuccessful push for an Equal Rights Amendment. However, too few realize that Friedan, born Bettye Naomi Goldstein in 1921 in Peoria, was a journalist in high school and Smith College in Northampton, Mass., and an advocacy reporter covering working women’s rights, the labor movement and other progressive issues years before the release of her 1963 best-seller “Feminine Mystique,” about the unfulfilled lives suburban women faced.

From 1942 into 1952, Friedan was a reporter for Federated Press, which provided stories to labor unions for local publications. Then she was a staffer for seven years at UE News, a publication of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE).

“It was a loss to American history that a remarkable journalist and feminist leader failed to bring forward the seminal contributions that labor ideals and struggles had made to feminism in the 20th century,” wrote James Lerner, former UE News editor, in his book “Course of Action: A Journalist’s Account from Inside the American League Against War and Fascism and the United Electrical Workers Union (UE), 1933-1978.”

Friedan grew up in Peoria, the daughter of Harry and Miriam (Horwitz) Goldstein. Miriam was a journalist for a Peoria newspaper until she married Harry, a jeweler. After graduating from Smith, Friedan studied for a year at the University of California-Berkeley, then declined an offer to remain there in order to work as a labor journalist.

“Goldstein and I frequently covered stories of broad national interest to union members, including equal rights for women in the workforce,” Lerner wrote. “She wrote a number of important articles on women’s wages, among them several pieces on wage discrimination against women in the electrical industry.”

In 1947, Goldstein married Carl Friedan, who’d work in public relations and advertising. Betty Friedan (she’d dropped the “e” from her name) took maternity leave in 1949 to give birth to their first child, then returned to UE News, where one of her best pieces was 1952’s “UE Fights for Women Workers,” outlining working women’s exploitation. Foreshadowing “Feminine Mystique,” she described ads that show women working in GE kitchens, watching Sylvania TVs or using Westinghouse Laundromats:  “Nothing is too good for her,” Friedan wrote, “– unless she works at GE, Westinghouse or Sylvania, or thousands of other corporations.”

Biographer Daniel Horowitz wrote, “For Friedan herself, the fight for justice for women was inseparable from the more general struggle to secure rights for African Americans and workers.”

That’s probably forgotten because of the onslaught of anticommunist attacks on unions by the House Un-American Activities Committee and the McCarthy Senate hearings in the late 1940s and early ‘50s – plus a clause in 1947’s Taft-Hartley Act requiring union officers to sign an anti-communist affidavit. That all weakened the UE, whose membership dropped from 600,000 in 1946 to 71,000 in 1950, a decline leading to cutbacks including Friedan’s layoff.

Friedan later became concerned about being “blacklisted,” as Horowitz noted: “Had Friedan revealed all in the mid-1960s, she would have undercut her book’s impact, subjected herself to palpable dangers, and jeopardized the feminist movement.”

If people knew the ties between Friedan the labor journalist as well as Friedan the feminist, there might be more understanding and solidarity between those movements, plus better outcomes to derailed campaigns as different (yet connected) as the Equal Rights Amendment and the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act).

Friedan seemed to realize that in 1997, when she told journalist Judith Warner that the greatest threat to the future of the women’s movement wouldn’t be “age-old sexism, persistent stereotypes, gender expectations or unfairly shared caretaking duties. The larger danger would be the tilt in our national values that occurred in the last decades of the 20th century: ‘the culture of corporate greed,’ the downsizing and downgrading of formerly solid middle-class jobs and ‘the sharply increased income inequality between the very rich … and the rest of us, women and men’.”