- In addition to Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedman (aka
Friedan)
-- a Stalinist-Marxist who spun herself into an oppressed *American*
housewife,
did her best to destroy America:
-
- Betty Friedan's Secret Communist
Past
- By David Horowitz
- Salon Magazine
- January 18, 1999
-
- Why has this feminist icon continued to cover up her
years as a party activist?
-
- What is it with progressives? Why do they feel the need
to lie so relentlessly about who they are? Recently Rigoberta
Menchú's
autobiography was exposed as a complete hoax. Now it's Betty Friedan's
turn to be revealed as a feminist fibber.
-
- In a new book, "Betty Friedan and the Making of
the Feminine Mystique", Smith College professor Daniel Horowitz (no
relation) establishes beyond doubt that the woman who has always presented
herself as a typical suburban housewife until she began work on her
groundbreaking
book was in fact nothing of the kind. In fact, under her maiden name, Betty
Goldstein, she was a political activist and professional propagandist for
the Communist left for over a decade before the publication of "The
Feminist Mystique" launched the modern women's movement.
-
- Professor Horowitz documents that Friedan was from her
college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political
intimate of the leaders of America's Cold War fifth column and for a time
even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb
projects
with J. Robert Oppenheimer. Her famous description of America's suburban
family household as "a comfortable concentration camp" in
"The
Feminine Mystique" therefore had more to do with her Marxist hatred
for America than with any of her actual experience as a housewife or
mother.
(Her husband, Carl, also a leftist, once complained that his wife "was
in the world during the whole marriage," had a full-time maid and
"seldom was a wife and a mother").
-
- It is fascinating that Friedan not only felt the need
to lie about her real views and life experience then, but still feels the
need to lie about them now. Although Horowitz, the author of the new
biography,
is a sympathetic leftist, Friedan refused to cooperate with him once she
realized he was going to tell the truth about her life as Betty Goldstein.
After he published an initial article about Friedan's youthful work as
a "labor journalist," Friedan maligned him, saying to an American
University audience, "Some historian recently wrote some attack on
me in which he claimed that I was only pretending to be a suburban
housewife,
that I was supposed to be an agent."
-
- This was particularly unkind because Friedan's
professor-biographer
is such a fellow-traveler himself that he bends over backwards throughout
the book to sanitize the true dimensions of Friedan's past. Thus he
describes
one character in the book, Steve Nelson, as "the legendary radical,
veteran of the Spanish Civil War and Bay Area party official." In
fact, Nelson was an obscure radical but an important apparatchik (later
notorious for his espionage activities in the Berkeley Radiation Lab) who
was in Spain as a Party commissar to enforce the Stalinist line.
-
- Professor Horowitz also bends over backwards, and at
length, to defend Friedan's lying as a response to "McCarthyism."
When she makes the ridiculous accusation that he is going to use
"innuendoes"
to describe her past as a justification for refusing to grant him
permission
to quote from her unpublished papers, he is all-too understanding. The
word "innuendoes," he explains, was often used by people
"scarred
by McCarthyism."
-
- Reading this reminded me of a C-Span
"BookNotes"
program on which Brian Lamb asked the president of the American Historical
Association, Eric Foner, about his father, Jack. Foner claimed that Jack
Foner was a man "with a social conscience" who made his living
through public lectures and who, along with his brothers Phil and Moe,
was persecuted during the McCarthy era. When Lamb asked Foner why they
were persecuted, Foner responded that his father had supported the loyalist
side in the Spanish Civil War. But no one was actually persecuted for
siding
with the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War. The Foner brothers,
on the other hand, were fairly famous Communists, one a Communist Party
labor historian and another a Communist Party union organizer and leader.
It is a fact that, on orders from Moscow, Communist-controlled unions in
the CIO opposed the Marshall Plan's effort to rebuild Western Europe. The
Marshall Plan, it should be recalled, was in part designed to prevent
Stalin's
empire from absorbing Western Europe as it had its satellites in the east.
That's why socialists like Walter Reuther purged the reds from the CIO
and also why Communists like Foner's uncle came under FBI scrutiny -- i.e.,
why they were "persecuted" in the McCarthy era. That Communists,
like the Foners, lied at the time was understandable. They had something
to hide. But why are their children lying to this day? And why are people
like Friedan lying long after they have anything to fear from McCarthy
committees and the like?
-
- Surely no one seriously believes that people who reveal
their Communist pasts these days have anything to fear from the American
government. Angela Davis, for example, was once the Communist Party's
candidate
for vice president and served the Soviet empire until its very last gasp.
Her punishment for this is to have been appointed one of only seven
"President's
Professors" at the state-run University of California, and to be
officially
invited at exorbitant fees by college administrations all across the
country
to give ceremonial speeches on public occasions.
-
- Folk singer Pete Seeger, who has been a party puppet
his entire life, is a celebrated entertainer and was honored recently at
the Kennedy Center with a Freedom Medal by the president himself. In the
midst of the Vietnam War, Jane Fonda incited American troops to defect
in a broadcast she made from the enemy's capital over Radio Hanoi. She
then returned to the United States to win an Academy Award and eventually
become the wife of one of America's most powerful media moguls, where she
oversaw a 24-episode CNN special purporting to be a history of the Cold
War. Bernadine Dohrn, leader of America's first political terrorist cult,
who once officially declared war on "Amerika," and who has never
conceded even minimal regret for her crimes nor hinted at the slightest
revision of her views, has just been appointed to a Justice Department
commission on children. The idea that America punishes those who betray
her is laughable, as is the idea that leftists have anything to fear from
their government if they tell the truth.
-
- So why the continuing lies? The reason is this: The truth
is too embarrassing. Imagine what it would be like for Betty Friedan (the
name actually is Friedman) to admit that as a Jew she opposed America's
entry into the war against Hitler because Stalin told her that it was just
an inter-imperialist fracas? Imagine what it would be like for America's
premier feminist to acknowledge that well into her 30s she thought Stalin
was the Father of the Peoples, and that the United States was an evil
empire,
and that her interest in women's liberation was just a subtext of her real
desire to create a Soviet America. No, those kinds of revelations don't
help a person who is concerned about her public image.
-
- Which is why it probably has seemed better just to lie
about this all these years. The problem, however, is that lying can't be
contained. It begets other lies, and eventually becomes a whole way of
life, as President Clinton could tell you. One of the lies that the denial
of one's Communist past begets is an exaggerated view of McCarthyism. Fear
of McCarthyism becomes an excuse that explains everything. That McCarthyism
was some gigantic "reign of terror" (to use Carl Bernstein's
sappy analogy), as though thousands lost their freedom and hundreds their
lives while the country itself remained paralyzed with fear for a decade
is simply not true. McCarthy's personal reign lasted but a year a half,
until Democrats took control of his committee. Being an accused Communist
on an American college campus in the '50s, moreover, was only marginally
more damaging to one's career opportunities than the accusation of being
a member of the Christian Right would be on today's politically correct
campus, dominated as it now is by the tenured left. Bad enough, but reign
of terror, no.
-
- The example of Betty Friedan should be a wake-up call
to the rest of us to insist that people be candid about their politics
and about calling things by their right names. Otherwise, we are going
to continue being inundated with books from the academy with ludicrous
claims like this: "In response to McCarthyism and to the impact of
mass media, suburbs, and prosperity, a wave of conformity swept across
much of the nation. Containment referred not only to American policy toward
the U.S.S.R. but also to what happened to aspirations at home. The results
for women were especially unfortunate. Even though increasing numbers of
them entered the work force, the Cold War linked anti-communism and the
dampening of women's ambitions." If you believe that, there is a
bridge
I have to sell you. On the other hand, at least according to Friedan's
biographer, that's exactly what Friedan has sold American feminists:
"With
'The Feminine Mystique,' Friedan began a long tradition among American
feminists of seeing compulsory domesticity as the mmain consequence of
1950s McCarthyism." Well, perhaps it's not American feminists Friedan
has sold this bizarre version of reality to, so much as American Communists
posing as feminists and unsuspecting young women whose only understanding
of this past will come from their tenured leftist professors.
|
