"Life so far"

Betty Friedan, bless her soul, sometimes confounded me. She wrote The Feminine Mystique, she was among the earliest voices of the women’s lib movement. Years later it was discovered that she lived in a marriage where she was battered.

Did she live a lie? Was she a hypocrite?

I think that human beings often have to make tough calls. The public face is not a facade – it could be a genuine stand, a belief.

People believe in god; they do not become god.

No woman chooses to live through physical torture, but she could make a choice to treat that torture in her way – walk out, confront it, give it back, use catharsis...I find it difficult to just pick on individuals because we do not know the histories they have embedded deep within them, we do not know how the environment has affected them, we do not know who has done what and how they have been viewed.

Every woman is also a little woman who wants to connect with the littlest of things. She uses her time well for every speck of dust in the eye forces it to lubricate.

Two years ago Ms. Friedan died.

Here are some of her words:

"When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman”

“Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.”

“It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.”

“The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.”

“It is better for a woman to compete impersonally in society, as men do, than to compete for dominance in her own home with her husband, compete with her neighbors for empty status, and so smother her son that he cannot compete at all.”

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I love this Clarence Darrow quote, "I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood"!

If anyone wishes to read my views, this is The Feminist Manifesto