February is a month to remember even more about Betty Friedan

Women’s History Month may be in March, but February is a key time for women’s heritage, too. That’s when Peoria native Betty Friedan was born in 1921 and died in 2006. It’s also a time that’s followed a local renaissance of attention for the iconic figure.

The Riverfront Museum has had a hallway exhibit on Friedan, also showcasing local journalist Barb Drake’s 1999 Legacy interview with Friedan; longtime Peoria educator Mary Jo Papich developed a 14-page PowerPoint lesson plan for grades 6-12 (“Let’s Learn about Betty Friedan”); the Peoria Public Library has portraits displayed, inside and out; and in November the Peoria Symphony Orchestra featured “Everywoman: A Friedan Centennial Memoire,” written by the Peoria Symphony’s Stephanie Ann Boyd in a musical tribute narrated by Deborah Rutter of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, and featuring comments by Peoria Mayor Rita Ali.

There’s still a lot to appreciate, from Friedan’s relatively positive comments she made about Peoria to her experience as a labor journalist years before she wrote her landmark “Feminine Mystique” (which also occurred in a February, in 1963).

Born Bettye Naomi Goldstein at Proctor Hospital on Feb. 4, 1921, she was not only a reporter and editor at Peoria (Central) High School and Smith College, but a journalist covering equal rights for working women and various progressive causes for years.

As I wrote for Peoria’s Labor Paper 10 years ago, Friedan from 1943 to 1952 was a reporter for Federated Press, which provided stories to unions and other clients, and then a staffer at UE News, a publication of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE).

Friedan grew up in Peoria, the daughter of Harry and Miriam (Horwitz) Goldstein. Harry owned a local jewelry store and Miriam was a journalist for a Peoria newspaper until they wed.

Years before Drake’s comprehensive conversation for the Journal Star’s award-winning collaboration with WTVP-TV 47, Friedan revealed more of a nuanced reflection on Peoria than other, negative remarks.

“As a Jew, I was barred from the sorority, just as my family was banned from the country club. At some point there in high school … I vowed, ‘They may not like me now, but someday they’;re going to look up to me.

“I never would admit the sweet, sure certainty of belonging in Peoria – that small, self-satisfied, deceptively simple, mysterious, complex heartland of America, which undeniably provided my roots, and therefore the roots of whatever vision of equality, poassion for justice, or sense of possibility drove me to the women’s movement.

“I come from Peoria.”

After graduating from the all-women 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 journalist in the labor movement. That led her to working with Federated Press, then UE, the nation’s most progressive labor union.

“Goldstein and I frequently covered stories of broad national interest to union members, including equal rights for women in the workforce,” 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.”

 “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 ex-GI Carl Friedan, who’d work public relations and advertising. Betty (she dropped the “e” from her first name) took maternity leave in 1949 to give birth to their first child, then returned to UE News to work three more years.

There in 1952, she wrote one of her best pieces of journalism, the 39-page pamphlet “UE Fights for Women Workers,” outlining the exploitation of working women. In it, she foreshadowed ground she’d cover in “Feminine Mystique,” describing advertisements 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.”

 

In 1996, Daniel Horowitz’ “Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America,” he recounted historian Lisa Kannenberg describing Friedan’s pamphlet as “a remarkable manual for fighting wage discrimination that is, ironically, as relevant today as it was in 1952.”

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

If that’s been overlooked since, blame U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.), whose attacks on unions and reformers in Senate hearings and by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1940s and early ’50s weakened the UE, a decline forcing cutbacks including Friedan’s layoff.

A few years later, Friedan became concerned of others linking her profile in the ’60s to the Red Scare era.

“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,” Horowitz said.

Unfortunately, had the public realized the ties between Friedan’s early work as a labor journalist and her later feminist writing and activism, there may have been a better understanding of those movements’ common ground, and better outcomes to failed campaigns from the Equal Rights Amendment to labor reform.

“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 20^th century,” Lerner wrote.

Nevertheless, Friedan’s legacies remain, from the general to the specific, says Peoria activist Dr. Martha Willi.

“Betty Friedan was able to articulate the problem for women in a larger sense – all women felt the inequalities of opportunity in educational access,  in legal standing, in workplace inequality, in lack of child care, among many things, but the book organized and articulated  those thoughts.

“Her other legacy was co-founding the National Organization for Women with other women,” continued Willi, a member of Peoria NOW. “It continues, along with many other groups, to advocate for women's rights.”

As for work that remains unachieved.

“Unfinished business?” Willi said. “It is all still very much unfinished, a struggle still in progress in spite of the gains we have made over the last 50 years. The United States does not guarentee women equal rights in its Constitution.  Without the Equal Rights Amendment,  any law in the area of equality  can be repealed or remain unenforced.”