Countywide : Friedan Urges New Feminist Direction

Betty Friedan, who helped launch the feminist movement 30 years ago, told a meeting of Orange County women Monday that feminism needs to move beyond defending old victories and strive for new ones.

Women need to rise above being the “victims of oppression to a new empowerment that will help redefine the goals of our society,” Friedan told the annual meeting of the Jewish Federation of Orange County women’s division at the Irvine Marriott.

Friedan, 72, is considered a pioneer of the women’s movement. In 1963, she published “The Feminine Mystique,” which urged women to question their roles in society based only on their relationships to others, such as wife or mother, and discover an identity for themselves. She founded the National Organization for Women in 1966.

The problem in bringing about new victories in equal rights for women, Friedan said, is that old victories are constantly being challenged. For instance, women are still fighting for the right to decide “when, whether and how many” children they will bear 20 years after the U.S. Supreme Court granted women the right to an abortion.

People who don’t support equality for women challenge those rights in order to distract feminists from new tasks, Friedan said. Feminists have ended up devoting all of their energies to maintain hard-fought victories instead of focusing on new ones, she said.

But the 1992 elections should help reduce that problem, Friedan said. The country now has a President who favors abortion rights and respects a woman’s right to work outside the home, and several abortion rights backers, including more women, were elected to Congress, she said.

Those election victories, which women helped bring about, will help feminists achieve new goals, Friedan said.

Those new goals should include restructuring work hours to accommodate women with children, providing leave for new parents, increasing access to child care, and controlling access to guns to ensure family safety, she said.

“I’d like an executive order, for instance, that all companies under government contracts must provide flexible work structures,” Friedan said. Once companies under government contract begin providing child care for workers and job sharing to give employees caring for children part-time hours, other companies will follow, she said.

After her speech, Friedan answered questions from the audience. One woman asked whether the women’s movement was necessary, since qualified women will rise to the top ranks of a business or community organization regardless of sex.

The success of the women’s movement, Friedan replied, can be seen by just looking around at what women have gained in the last 30 years.

The woman’s question prompted many older audience members to smile knowingly, said Rae Cohen, 57, of Newport Beach. Women like the questioner don’t realize that the opportunities they have today were achieved by feminists who fought for women’s rights decades ago, she said.

“They are not aware of the changes created by the women who went before them,” Cohen said.