February 11, 2006
The Girl From Peoria Who Changed the World
By Richard Reeves
LOS ANGELES
-- The lead headline of the Los Angeles Times on Thursday
looked like a kind of high-level boilerplate: "Lawmakers
Hear Details of Spy Program."
What else
is new? This:
The members
of Congress who forced the White House to release more details
were both women: Heather Wilson, a New Mexico Republican who served
in the Air Force, and Jane Harman, a California Democrat who was
once one of the legion of bright young women who did the backroom
work for male legislators.
The story
appeared five days after the death of Betty Friedan. On the day
after her obituary was published, the Times ran this
letter from Eileen C. Moore, associate justice of the California
Court of Appeal (cq):
"It
is almost impossible to inflate the effect that Betty Friedan's
'The Feminine Mystique' had on my life. The women I saw were
either nuns or homemakers who wore housedresses covered with
aprons all day. I knew no one, man or woman, who had gone to
college.
"Friedan's
book set my mind on fire. Was it possible for a girl who was
the daughter of a high school dropout to have a career? Friedan
said it was. I believed her."
Betty Friedan
affected many lives, female and male. Not bad for a "housewife"
in the suburbs of New York. The people who count the most are
the ones who change the way we see things, change the way we think.
She did, as surely as any great scientist or painter does. She
was living in Nyack, north of the city, with three children, writing
for women's magazines when she wrote "The Feminine Mystique,"
published in 1963. Her writing earned her enough money to pay
a housekeeper/baby sitter so she could keep writing.
Those were
the days of "togetherness," recalled another writer,
Susan Jacoby, when if a woman applied for a job at The Washington
Post, she had to write an essay for the personnel department
titled "How I Plan to Combine Motherhood With a Career."
There were then, for the record, 14 women among the 435 members
of the House of Representatives, and two women, both widows of
senators, in the Senate. There are 70 women in the House now,
including the leader of the Democrats, and 14 in the Senate.
She was some
piece of work, the former Bettye (cq) Goldstein of Peoria, Ill.
For 28 years my wife, Catherine O'Neill, and I lived five houses
from Betty in Sag Harbor, N.Y., with family weddings, children
and grandchildren spreading from one house to another year after
year. Actually, I saw her in apron and housedress winter, spring,
summer and fall. I also saw her in a spaghetti pot one rainy night
after a family dinner. My son-in-law, Thomas Fyfe, offered to
walk her home with an umbrella. "Nah," she growled,
often her normal tone, "I have to take the pot back anyway"
-- and she marched down Glover Street with the thing over her
head.
Then there
was the Pontiac. I think it was a Pontiac. Whatever it was, it
was built about the same year as her book. She had cataracts or
something by then and drove it at about 10 miles an hour, oblivious
to everyone and everything in her path. Nelson Algren moved onto
our street in the year before he died. They became friends, and
drove into town together. One day, squinting over the steering
wheel, she swung left onto Main Street with him in the passenger
seat. The door swung open and Algren popped out into the middle
of the roadway.
He was an
old man, but he got up and started running after the Pontiac with
its waving door, and somehow he got back in. He told her she had
dumped him. "Algren," she said, not looking at him,
"it's hard enough driving this thing without your goddamned
jokes!"
Oh, and did
I say she was not easy -- she usually began talking before you
finished because she knew where you were going before you did
-- and that she changed the world? We may not see her like again.
But if we do, we will be the better for it.
Copyright
2006 Universal Press Syndicate
