"The First Lady of the Conservative Movement"

"The conservative theorist and organizer Paul Weyrich said that Mrs. Schlafly 'dressed up the conservative movement for success at a time when absolutely no one thought we could win.'

"Even liberals conceded her impact. 'If political influence consists in transforming this huge and cantankerous country in one's preferred direction,' the political scientist Alan Wolfe wrote in The New Republic in 2005, 'Schlafly has to be regarded as one of the two or three most important Americans of the last half of the 20th century'—although he hastened to add that 'every idea she ever had was scatterbrained, dangerous and hateful.'"

Douglas Martin in The New York Times writes an obit for Phyllis Schlafly.

"They Essentially Uncovered an Alternative History of Women’s Rights"

"The E.R.A. was opposed by virtually every other women’s organization; they believed that it was reactionary. One of the great achievements of the Progressive Era had been the passage of laws that protected women in the workplace. In 1908, Louis Brandeis's brief on behalf of the state of Oregon had helped persuade the Supreme Court to abandon the constitutionally dubious theory of 'liberty of contract,' and uphold a law limiting the number of hours that women could work. An Equal Rights Amendment would make such laws unconstitutionally discriminatory.
"Who might be in favor of such an amendment? Businessmen might be. So the N.W.P.’s best customers on Capitol Hill tended to be anti-union conservatives—for example, Howard Smith. Virginia textile mills employed large numbers of women, and Smith was interested in any legislation that might benefit mill owners. Smith and Paul were also friends, and Smith had been a supporter of the E.R.A. since 1945."


Louis Menand in The New Yorker looks at the 1964 Civil Rights Act and sex discrimination.

"Not the Kind of Change Friedan Hoped Her Book Would Inspire"

"Sandberg also seems primarily concerned with the economics of gender. But there's a key difference: Friedan didn’t share a view from the corporate boardroom. Her first political home was the labor movement, and she found her way back to it in the mid-1990s. Then in her 70s, Friedan participated with gusto in campus teach-ins to promote the new, reform-minded leadership of the AFL-CIO. 'I have a pretty good historic Geiger counter,' she told a packed audience at Columbia University. 'It clicked thirty years ago' when The Feminine Mystique helped create the modern women’s movement. 'And that counter is clicking again, because I think we are on the verge of something new: a movement for social justice' which might 'transcend the separate interests, the special interests, even the very good interests of identity politics that have been at the cutting edge of democratic progress.' Friedan wasn't able to realize her vision of justice—such is the fate of American leftists. But it was always a far cry from the individualized notion of justice proferred by Sandberg."

Michael Kazin in The New Republic considers Betty Friedan's legacy upon the fiftieth anniversary of The Feminine Mystique.


"Competent female executives run better companies than incompetent male executives, but they’re no more likely to make universal day care the law of the land. If Davos Woman had dominated feminist discourse when the Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed nearly 130 female sweatshop laborers in 1911, would she have pushed for the legislation that came out of that tragedy—the fire codes and occupancy limits that made workplaces safer for women, and men, for generations to come?"

And Judith Shulevitz reviews Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In.

Down with Love

"As Scanlon sees it, however, any young woman claiming entitlement to career opportunities and a satisfying sex life, financial independence and sensational lipstick, abortion rights and a darling apartment, owes a lot to Helen Gurley Brown. The face of feminism today--at least in the hedonistic, individualistic version embraced by many young single women, including some who wouldn't necessarily call it 'feminism'--is more her creation than Friedan's or Steinem's. Yet Brown's brand of mainstream feminism (she has never hesitated to call it that) 'has largely been left out of established histories of postwar feminism's emergence and ascendance.'"

Laura Miller in Salon reviews Jennifer Scanlon's Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown.

Friedan, 1921-2006, and King, 1927-2006

The Los Angeles Times runs obituaries for Betty Friedan, who died on February 4, and Coretta Scott King, who died on January 31. (And for Al Lewis, "Grandpa" on The Munsters, who died on February 3. They always go in threes...)

Addendum: Rebecca Solnit in The Nation connects Friedan with other authors of influential books from the early 1960s, Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson.