FRIEDAN’SPROGRAM FOR THE’80S

“1. Begin a new round of consciousness-raising for the new generation. These younger women, each thinking she is alone with her personal guilt and the pressure of having both a career and a baby before it is too late, may be secretly blaming the movement for getting them into this mess.

“2. Mobilize the new professional networks and the old established volunteer organizations to save women’s rights. We can’t fight fundamentalist backlash with backward-looking feminist fundamentalism.

“3. Get off the pornography kick and face the real obscenity of poverty. The shameful secret of the women’s movement is that it has never really dealt with the fact that middle-class women are sinking into poverty.

“4. Confront the illusion of equality in divorce. A new generation of feminist lawyers and judges has drafted a law that treats marriage as a true economic partnership. It should be a law that does not penalize women who have chosen family over, or even together with, a professional career.

“5. Return the issue of abortion to the matter of women’s responsible choice. We must not surrender family values and religious principles to the far right.

“6. Affirm the differences between men and women. This involves the restructuring of work hours and patterns of professional training so they take into account the fact that women are the people who give birth to children.

“7. Break the spell of the youth cult. Let’s lead the rest of society in drawing on the still enormous energies and the wisdom that may come to some of us in age.

“8. Bring in the men. Women cannot, and should not try to, take the responsibility for liberating men from the remnants of machismo. But there has to be a new way of asking what men really want. Women cannot restructure jobs or homes just by talking to themselves.

“9. Continue to fight for real political power. There is no substitute for having women in political offices that matter.

“10. Move beyond single-issue thinking. Even today I do not think women’s rights are the most urgent business for American women. Women may have to join their energies with men to redeem our democratic tradition and turn our nation’s power to the interests of life instead of the nuclear arms race that is paralyzing us.”

Copyright 1986 by Betty Friedan. Adapted from the afterword to “The Second Stage” (Summit Books). Used by permission.