Commentary: At a time when the rights that Betty Friedan helped secure for women are in jeopardy, it’s time to tell the story of her ERA debate.
Betty Friedan was just a fiery radical with a bad temper. It’s convenient to believe this. But at a moment when many of the rights for women she gained are being overturned, it’s time to reconsider common wisdom about her character.
It also did not die. Thirty-five years later, after #MeToo, several states including Illinois began ratifying it. However, procedural complications and blocks from the right continue. The popular 2020 Hulu show “Mrs. America” in part focuses on Schlafly, as played by the elegant Cate Blanchett. In an article published last week,, which in 1973 were reprinted in The New York Times, for tanking the amendment. “The comments didn’t help the cause of the ERA, which has yet to become a constitutional amendment,” Shia Kapos writes.
Today, those words would get you canceled. But at a moment when the rights that Friedan helped secure are in jeopardy, it’s time to tell the full story of this debate. Friedan, who had spent a decade working on reforming laws to support women in every arena, was a liberal who did not want to blame men for inequality but rather sex roles. She later chastised Schlafly for criticizing the women’s movement, since she had benefited from its gains by, for example, attending law school.
Friedan replied that she did not want anyone to fight a war. She turned the debate to how, despite the enormous strides the women’s movement had made since she had published “The Feminine Mystique” 10 years earlier — many spearheaded by NOW — women still did not have equal pay or equal political representation. “We can’t value responsibility too highly,” she said, especially at a time when Watergate was unfolding.
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