“We live in a world that’s been so transformed by this book and by the movement that followed it, and it’s hard for those of us born after it came out to imagine those days at all,” Katie Roiphe said Wednesday night, at the New America Foundation’s loftlike event space in SoHo. She was moderating a panel about the legacy of Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” published fifty years ago. The three women beside her were Ariel Levy (“Female Chauvinist Pigs”), of The New Yorker; Anne Roiphe (“Art and Madness”), Katie’s mother; and Gail Sheehy (the Passages books).
“I want to talk about the rapidity of change in my own family,” Katie Roiphe went on. “My mom is sitting right here. When my mother was a child, her father told her that ‘Only ugly women become lawyers.’ That was the world she grew up in. And I grew up in a world where my mother removed the Barbie Beauty Palace that my grandfather gave me, and told me the next morning, when I got up and was eager to play with it, that it had been lost.” The audience—a diverse group of about ten men and fifty women, of second- and third-wave vintages—laughed. “And then my daughter, we were watching the Obama–Hillary Presidential election, she was tiny, like five, and she was a big Obama supporter. And I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a woman President?’ And she looked at me disdainfully and said, ‘Mom, of course there’s been a woman President.’ In that short time we went from ‘Only ugly women become lawyers’ to ‘Of course there’s been a woman President’ in a five-year-old girl.”
Roiphe asked Sheehy and Anne Roiphe to talk about the effect of the book in its era. “There isn’t any question—of course it changed people’s lives; it’s still changing people’s lives,” Sheehy said. “It was the greatest social revolution probably since the suffragettes. And that movement took a hundred years, and this movement will take a hundred years. We’re only halfway through. And we have to count on the younger ones to push it along.”
Anne Roiphe said, “I don’t remember how it affected me, but I do know how everything that came before affected me. There were so few possibilities for women. We were expected to be married by twenty-one or twenty-two; we were expected to raise children. We were not expected to do anything, we not expected to make money, and we were not protected against what would happen if we were divorced or someone died. We had no resources to earn our own living, and the vulnerability led us to behave toward men as if they were demigods. I think when ‘The Feminine Mystique’ came out, Betty Friedan put into words what was in so many people’s hearts, that they couldn’t have themselves articulated. And she managed to say it. And the effect across this country was like an electric shock.” Roiphe spoke thoughtfully and deliberately, and the audience listened with rapt attention.
“We felt as if together we were going to change the world. We went on a feminist march to Washington. Suddenly we had a voice. Somebody had to pay attention to us. And it was overwhelming. Which is what made me vigilant about Barbie.” The crowd laughed again.
She went on, “I took a writing class at Sarah Lawrence in 1956. The professor was a man named Horace Gregory.… A woman in the class had gone to Reno to get a divorce, and went to live there for six weeks and came back with a detailed report.… I was riveted. She gets to the end and Horace Gregory turns to her and says, ‘What makes you think anybody would be interested in your divorce?’ And there was this silence. I couldn’t have been the only one riveted by this. But there was also the possibility that women can’t write because we don’t have subjects. What would our subjects be? What would I do? I wasn’t in a war, I can’t write like Hemingway. The sense that we were pushed aside. And yes, there was Doris Lessing. But there was just Doris Lessing.…
“The voices that everybody has now, the voices that I really believe Betty Friedan liberated into our world, are so many, and so amazing, and I am so grateful that I lived to see it.”
Spontaneous applause.
Levy, turning toward Sheehy and Anne Roiphe, said, “It’s so exciting to hear you talk about, ‘Oh, we thought we could do this’—because you bloody well did.” She said that our notion of not appreciating the progress that women have made was also the notion that people had when Friedan wrote “The Feminine Mystique.” “That blew my mind,” Levy said. “Friedan said, We spent the first half of this century fighting for rights and we spent the second half not appreciating them: ‘Rights have a dull sound to people who have grown up after they have been won.’ And this was written in 1963. If there’s a feminine mystique now, it’s that we think we can do everything. This is not the fault of the feminists. This is an opportunity that feminism has enabled.”
Sheehy said, “And I’m glad we haven’t given up.”
The panelists talked about the complexity of choices about career and family, and the anxiety and stresses that still surround it. Anne Roiphe said, “That’s because we only have half of a revolution.… We didn’t change the whole society. All we did was change what women want. Now we have to change what men want, and what society is willing to do for a family—for instance, universal daycare.”
Levy said, “One of the things that makes me so sad is that we were really close. That 1971 thing that Walter Mondale pushed—it was bipartisan, comprehensive child care; they were going to have universal preschool and daycare like they do in Scandinavian countries. And it was Nixon who vetoed that, saying, We don’t want to put the vast moral authority of the federal government behind a nontraditional family structure—you know, a messy life, the thing Katie writes about. And that would have changed so much. Still would.”
Sheehy said, “Just paid maternity leave would be an enormous thing. It will have to come through hassling private companies. If young women coalesce in a new movement, it can happen.”
Katie Roiphe brought up the “astonishing amount of vitriol” that Sheryl Sandberg and her book “Lean In” have received. “Why? She’s trying to do some of the things that are the next stage of the Betty Friedan revolution, and she is trying talk to women about how to succeed in a high-level business structure without sacrificing family, to a great deal of anger from women critics, feminists, and nice-thinking liberals.”
Anne Roiphe said, “The writer Lois Gould said that in this culture, if someone raises their head out of the general muck, takes a deep breath, and says something, someone on the shore will throw a rock at that head.”
Katie Roiphe mentioned that neither Taylor Swift nor Marissa Mayer, the C.E.O. of Yahoo, identifies as a feminist. “As one of my colleagues, Hanna Rosin, argued in Slate, maybe the fact that Marissa Mayer doesn’t consider herself a feminist means that the term is no longer useful. That doesn’t mean that Marissa Mayer is not a feminist; she obviously believes many of the things feminists believe, as my students do.… Should we view this as success of this movement?”
Levy said, “Gloria Steinem once told me—and this is a very Gloria Steinem-y thing—about a woman who was bemoaning the fact that her daughter didn’t call herself a feminist, and how she didn’t know who Gloria Steinem was. And Gloria said, ‘Yes, but does she know who she is?’ ” Audience members murmured their approval. Levy went on, “That said, I think it’s still a perfectly nice word, and I like to say it.”
