Book Review of Betty Friedan: Her Life

Betty Friedan: Her Life is a fairly quick read for a biography. It chronologically tells the story of Betty Friedan with an emphasis on how her personal life intertwined with her work as a feminist. However, author Judith Hennessee’s tone is so negative that it interferes with the flow, forcing the reader to question the accuracy and balance of the book.

Betty Friedan: Her Life begins with childhood in Peoria, Illinois, and college at Smith. It is peppered with deprecating and snide remarks about Betty Friedan’s temperament, looks and worldview. The book improves in the second half, but may not be worth sticking it out through the first half, which consists largely of denigrating the personality and tactics of the woman credited with jump starting second wave feminism.

Biased Accounts?

Open Betty Friedan: Her Life to a random page. If you land in the early part of the book, you won’t have to read long before you come to an insult of Betty Friedan. If you’re closer to the end, you’ve likely plunged into the story of one of her conflicts with a family member, a fellow feminist leader or even a world leader or other historical figure. If you start reading a quote that praises her, congratulations – those are the rare paragraphs, hidden among the acrimony.

Judith Hennessee takes great pains to explain in her introduction that she interviewed both friends and enemies while researching her subject. She also mentions that she was not originally chosen to write an authorized biography, but that Betty Friedan eventually agreed to talk to her, since she was also interviewing enemies. It would be good for the reader to keep this in mind when coming across personal anecdotes. Judith Hennessee often leads into comments that praise Betty Friedan with a statement like “So-and-so, who always admired Betty, said she did this or that….” There is nowhere near as much effort to preface the insults with “So-and-so, who dislikes Betty…”  

One of the book’s themes is that Betty Friedan was a feminist who disliked other women. Despite Friedan's lifelong fight for women’s independence, she spent much of adulthood caught up in a failed marriage and the struggle to make subsequent relationships work. This thesis isn’t proven as much as hammered into the reader’s head.

A chapter titled “Divorce” discusses the end of Betty and Carl Friedan’s marriage.  Judith Hennesee writes with no apparent trace of irony, “She had dozens of requests to lecture but turned down many of them because Carl objected to her being away, and she felt guilty about leaving the kids. She flew around the country to attend NOW board meetings…” 

While there are plenty of quotes from the couple’s friends about violent fights, dish-breaking and object throwing, there is no analysis (feminist or otherwise) of a double standard for moms vs. dads. Why in the dissolution of the marriage does the burden fall on the wife to be home with the kids while no comment is made on the husband’s activities? It would appear inequality is alive and well, even in a book about the founder of NOW.

Would a biography of a successful man contain the “but he had to be away from the kids a lot” statement? The reader is left asking: who did Carl think he was? Why shouldn’t he be with the children while Betty lectured, at the height of her success and fame? Isn’t this the lesson we were trying to learn, that women were not allowed to be professional once it “interfered” with motherhood, unlike men and fatherhood?

There are well-documented fights and factions in the women’s movement that must be addressed, and the book does a good job explaining the interpersonal relationships of the main characters of these dramas. It illuminates Gloria Steinem’s and Betty Friedan’s years-long inability to see eye to eye. Of course, by the time Judith Hennessee asserts that she doesn’t pick a side in the feminist leaders’ battle, it’s fairly clear to the reader that she no longer needs to state whose side she is on.

Judith Hennessee seems indignant that Betty Friedan felt smarter than and exasperated by most people around her. This anger may seem “fair,” a kind of defending of the little guy from such a tour de force of a woman, but it ignores the readers who empathize with Betty Friedan.

Documentation and Back-Up

Judith Hennessee cites sources when she sees fit. She explains this by saying that since much of the book quotes interviews, she gives a citation only when the context is not clear. She does cite a fair amount of articles about Betty Friedan’s accomplishments and world travels. There are too many anonymous quotes, though, and there are times when the reader wants to know when/in what context a  person said that - but there is no footnote.

Late in the book, Judith Hennessee almost sympathizes about the many bad photos of Betty Friedan that were published (“Where did the media keep these?” she writes), but it’s hard not to hear it as gloating after all that has come before. Then again, the book’s late chapters are the best ones for simply learning about the feminist movement.

A particularly interesting stretch details the U.N.’s First International Conference on Women in 1975 in Mexico City and the Equal Rights Amendment protests with which Betty Friedan contended in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Judith Hennessee leaves no doubt where she stands on these issues, and her tone seems much more fair to Betty Friedan when she is writing about issues for which they fought on the same side.  

The reader becomes interested in getting to the real truth of disputed events, such as what happened with Betty Friedan’s firing/resignation from UE News when she was pregnant in the early 1950s, but Hennessee’s off-putting tone ruins what could have been a neutral uncovering of facts.

Conclusions

Judith Hennessee makes the kind of judgments – “First-class mind, second-class temperament” and “Her insecurities were as great as her achievements” –  that would come across better in a biography looking back decades later. This treatment needs more perspective, the kind you get after a historian has pored over primary source material for years. It doesn’t work as well in a book written during the subject’s own lifetime. (Betty Friedan died in 2006, a few years after Betty Friedan: Her Life was published.)

Merely listing a full page of names of people who were interviewed for a book doesn’t mean one has painted a complete picture, let alone a fair one. Betty Friedan: Her Life is worth skimming, or a quick read of the second half, but there are too many unattributed quotes and emotional reactions. It does not come close to being an objective or important work.