The work, and unfinished business, of two feminist icons

Marsha Atkind is director of the new Jewish Women’s Foundation of New Jersey and past national president of the National Council of Jewish Women.

Two Jewish-American icons died last week: two women who profoundly influenced the lives of baby boomers, Gen-Xers, teens, and little girls and boys who do not even know their names. Their deaths — like their lives — impel us to stop to consider, as individuals and as a society, where we’ve been and what lies ahead.

Betty Friedan, who was 85, articulated for the first time the dilemma of postwar American women and drove a movement to help them gain equality and the freedom to choose their own paths through life. Playwright/author Wendy Wasserstein, 55 when she succumbed to cancer, gave voice to those baby boomers and Gen-Xers who, faced with new choices, found that having it all was infinitely more difficult than they had imagined.

Betty Goldstein Friedan emerged on the scene in 1963, when TV commercials still featured well-coifed women in dresses and pumps, with frilly pinafore aprons, smiling as they cleaned their pots and pans and toilets. The Ivy League was not yet coed, and professional schools were bastions of male dominance. Married women had difficulty getting credit cards in their own names.

If you were a young woman in high school or college and lucky enough to be from a middle class or wealthy family, you probably grew up with mixed messages. You were encouraged to get an education, told that you were smart and beautiful by your doting parents, but encouraged to get your “Mrs.” degree or become a teacher or a nurse, considered good jobs for wives and mothers who had to work. Very few women were encouraged or had the vision to choose another path. There were few role models to lead the way.

If you were a young man, you grew up believing that you were the breadwinner. If you were married and middle class, you had a right to expect that your wife would take care of your children and be home for you at the end of the day, with your dinner on the table and your slippers and smoke and perhaps a martini ready and waiting. Your wife would support your career by entertaining your colleagues and making connections in the community that would benefit your advancement. If she worked for pay, it would most likely be because the family budget demanded it.

Friedan was a graduate of Smith College, student of psychology, freelance writer and editor, and part-time teacher. Fired by UE News when she became pregnant with her second child, she spent the next 10 or so years primarily as a housewife and mother. In 1957, before attending her 15th college reunion, Friedan began work on a survey to determine whether or not her former classmates felt the same sense of frustration that she felt in her role as wife and mother. What she found eventually became the book that gave birth to the women’s movement, The Feminine Mystique.

The Feminine Mystique detailed for the first time the lives of millions of American women who were expected to find vicarious fulfillment through the activities and accomplishments of their husbands and children. These were not women who were primarily anti-male. They were women who loved their husbands and took great satisfaction from helping their children grow into loving, responsible adults. But it was not enough. They wanted something uniquely their own.

Friedan realized that writing a book was only a first step and went on to become a founder of the National Organization for Women, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the National Women’s Political Caucus, and Women, Men & Media and was a key leader in the unsuccessful struggle to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Criticized as too suburban, too bourgeois, too left by the Right and too right by the Left, Friedan insisted that the women’s movement had to stay mainstream, accept men as allies, and not reject family in the process of liberating women. “A woman has to be able to say, and not feel guilty, ‘Who am I and what do I want out of life?’” she said.

Wendy Wasserstein’s characters ask the same questions. Women from The Heidi Chronicles, The Sisters Rosensweig, and An American Daughter, for example, struggle to find their place in a male-dominated world, and to find love, success, and balance.

Wasserstein spoke some years ago at a meeting of the National Council of Jewish Women, Essex County section. She was warm and witty and totally approachable. She read from her essays and stories and touched us all with her humorous yet poignant insights about the struggle of modern (mostly Jewish) women, from our awkwardness in ballet school or discomfort in succeeding beyond the accomplishments of our boyfriends or husbands, to our frustration from the realization that despite our success, we are often judged by the status of the men we choose to marry.

Different in temperament, in generation, and in method of expression, both Betty Friedan and Wendy Wasserstein were Jewish women of insight, accomplishment, and sensitivity whose lives affected us all. Friedan’s courage and vision made possible a world of choices unimagined by women of her youth. Wasserstein chronicled the consequences of those choices and showed us all that we are not alone in our struggles to define our place in the modern world.

Their work is not yet finished. Americans are engaged in heated debates about the direction of this country and the roles that women and men should play in our society. The most obvious and explosive of those issues is whether women should have the right to reproductive choice. But that is not the only issue. In this country, women still earn only $.77 for every dollar earned by men and make up 57.2 percent of those living below the poverty line. Women comprise a small fraction of CEOs (1.6 percent of Fortune 500 companies), and workplace schedules are major obstacles for many to overcome. Quality, affordable child care is sadly lacking. The modern dilemma of juggling family and work responsibilities, given voice by Wasserstein, cries out for solution. And although women comprise more than 50 percent of the population of the United States, they represent only 22 percent of elected officials, who control the direction of our lives.

Let us take seriously our responsibility to build on the legacy of Betty Friedan and Wendy Wasserstein, take part in the public debate, and ensure that future generations of women and men will live in a world where everyone has choices and every child can grow to his or her full potential.

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