Book Review

Canada and the United States

As most of us who teach U.S. women's history know, there is relatively little scholarly literature on feminist activism of the 1960s and 1970s, especially when compared to other twentieth-century political movements of comparable significance. For that reason, I was anxious to read Daniel Horowitz's book. An intellectual powerhouse with an ego sized to match, Betty Friedan is one of the most intriguing and frustrating of the post-World War II feminist leaders. Her career highlights both the astonishing momentum that drove the American women's movement from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s and the raging battles over ideology and leadership style that so often threatened to derail it. Horowitz makes a convincing argument that Friedan's life also illuminates previously unexamined links between the ideology of the Old Left and liberal feminism in the 1960s.	1
Rejecting Friedan's self-presentation as a trapped housewife who came to her gender analysis only as a result of her deep frustration with married suburban life, Horowitz roots Friedan's feminism in the ferment of the late 1940s, when Friedan was working as a labor journalist. Popular Front feminists, who published in many of the same journals that Friedan wrote for and who traveled in the same political and social circles, were then publishing essays and books that placed women at the center of contemporary and historic movements for social change. These Socialist and Communist-affiliated women also provided a theoretical framework about gender on which Friedan would later build. Betty Millard, Elizabeth Hawes, and Mary Inman, among others, expanded on Friedrich Engels's theories of the relationship between private property and the oppression of women, examined the gender socialization of children, and attributed economic value to the unpaid labor of wives and mothers.	2
The ideological lines that Horowitz draws from Popular Front feminism to the women's movement of a generation later constitute one of the important historical contributions made by this nuanced and detailed book. His attempts to understand why Friedan later tried to erase her radical past are somewhat less satisfying, not because of any lack of subtlety or sophistication in Horowitz's analysis but because Friedan herself has always been such an ambiguous figure, and because Horowitz's book examines only her pre-1963 career as a writer. Friedan's stormy and important "second career" as founding president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and as the most visible face of American feminism from 1963 through 1970 receives virtually no attention in this book. That is a shame, because I think that both Horowitz's analysis and our historical understanding of Friedan would be enhanced by extending his perceptive portrait of a brilliant, complex, and deeply conflicted woman haunted and driven throughout her life by profound ambivalence about her Jewish background, her middle-class origins, her yearnings for an ideal heterosexual union, and even her feminism.	3
Horowitz's narrative offers many insights into the nature and origins of Friedan's ambivalences, beginning with her Peoria, Illinois childhood. She was born Betty Goldstein, privileged daughter of an upper-middle-class Jewish family. Midwestern anti-Semitism, Horowitz argues, sparked her first interest in social justice issues. Faculty at Smith College later schooled her in Freudian and Marxist analysis and provided exposure to the hotly contested labor struggles of the late 1930s. Her consciousness of social inequities was sharpened by her dismay at the genteel anti-Semitism of some of her classmates and even more by their disdainful treatment of the working-class women who served them food and cleaned their rooms. She voiced her concern over these and other issues in writing, as she would throughout her career, becoming the editor of a progressive campus paper.	. . .