Betty Friedan

The Stepford Wives and today’s empty feminism

When you think of 1972, what comes to mind? Corduroy flares, President Nixon and the first installment of The Godfather? Or bra-burning, feminist “consciousness-raising” meetings and debates about abortion and birth control? America in the early 1970s was not just a nation of Vietnam War vets and oil crises, but one of significant feminist liberation. Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and helped found the National Organization for Women in 1966, and the decade after saw a whole host of similar organizations, such as the Women’s Radical Action Project (WRAP) and the catchily named Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH).

Gloria Steinem’s revisionist history

Gloria Steinem is back in the news. Steinem, now 86, attacked the recent FX network miniseries Mrs America in a series of high-profile interviews. Yet Steinem’s criticisms reveal much more about her and how her extreme radicalism has harmed the women’s movement than they do about the miniseries. What are her complaints about the show? Steinem objects to its focus on anti-ERA campaigner Phyllis Schlafly, played by Cate Blanchett, and she accuses Mrs America of distorting the history behind the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). According to Steinem, Schlafly ‘never changed one vote’ and the miniseries is ‘hopelessly wrong’ in suggesting that she did.

gloria steinem