The Feminist Mystique remains a good read, half a century on, if only to savour a book that puts the life of the mind ahead of sexual gratification for women: after Fifty Shades, 50 years of Betty Friedan feels somehow redemptive. Before she went into the debating chamber she scrutinised pictures of past committees - a succession of blocks of black ties and dinner jackets: ‘So many men’, she observed disapprovingly, and correctly. She carried the day on a motion that ‘Feminism is Good for Men’, and in passing savaged poor Mary Kenny, who gamely spoke for the other side. ‘You’, she said kindly, ‘are studying history. She asked me what subject I was reading and I said clumsily that I was ‘in history’. She was heroically grand, heroically ugly and with a brilliantly American, unabashed sense of her own importance. She came, and frankly it was like entertaining Cleopatra. When I was a student I invited her to take part in a Cambridge Union debate on feminism. In fact any mention of Betty Friedan brings out something like post-traumatic stress symptoms in me, even though she died in 2006. According to the quote on the cover of my Penguin edition, ‘Feminism … began with the work of a single person: Friedan.’ Quite something, then. It’s the 50th anniversary this year of the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.
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