Is betty ferdinand magnificent disrupter. She came to the school at the university and our moderator is the author of seven books, three historical novels and for biographies and a play that focusesyt praised for combining rich storytelling and literary with deep research to provide, to bring alive in 19th century chicago and the disco era manhattan. Her books have been translated into several languages and she has been a judge for prominent literary contests. As a journalists shes written for many publications including the New York Times, the wall street journal, the chicago tribune, the los angeles times, theit smithsonian and te town and country. Rachels book will be available for purchase outside the black curtains once again and we will have a signing right behind us. So i will turn the rest of the program over to you. Thank you. Can everybody hear me . Thank you for coming. Betty ferdinand and as you probably know is a monumental figure in the history of feminism. Her bestselling book the feminine mystique was widely credited with sparking second grade feminism when it was published so morally and sold more than a million copies. She was also a difficult person with an abrasive personality and in her lifetime, she was a very controversial figure. Her life after the feminist battle of the 1970s is less well known, but she continued to fight for womens causes until the end of her life. Rachels book is the first biography in 25 years and it is based on rachels intends Exhaustive Research in the archives and more than 80 interviews. It will be officially published on tuesday and all of the prepublication reviews have been raves. I think i would like to start with rachels reading a little from the book to give you a taste of what i is about. Thank you so much for that introduction. An introduction to betty. The section that i am going to read from as mentioned, betty was one of the cofounders of the National Organization for women, which is the largest Womens Organization in america and also, still exists today and also is one that tried to unite women from diverse backgrounds. That was other peoples vision for it and so, this is a scene in washington, d. C. At a conference where betty wasnt attending the conference as a participant. It was a conference for women who worked for womens rights but also were part of the government about she was there asov a journalist covering this conference so this is the story of the founding of now and this is in 1966. At the washington hilton between june 208th and 30th, this conference targets for action aimed to continue work done by the commission on the status of women under jfk. But the first day discouraged the female delegates whom katherine eased a coauthor of the Commission Report had invited as a journalist. Late in the afternoon it started to rain a so the group convened in the east room instead of the rose garden. Standing next to lady bird, apresident johnson began by addressing thend distinguished d very attractive delegates who took credit for title vii recommended that the women expanded their volunteerism and joked about his wifes interest in the grass in the rose garden. He listed accomplishments in the commission as if womens equality had been achieved and, quote, figuratively patted our heads, recalled. The next day, the National Womens party alice pauls organization tried to introduce a resolution to bring the equal rights amendment under consideration. If they were refused. Surely irritated, freed and invited a group of women into her room at the washington hilton that night. She joined as the Womens Department of the united auto workers. She met them while researching her still uncompleted a second book. There was also the head of the commission on the status of women, Mary Eastwood and eastwid Catherine Conway who worked for the communications commission. They wanted to work through existing channels by introducing emotionit condemning the equal Employment Opportunity commission. Murray, armed with a yellow legal pad is cited with of the activist approach and around 11 p. M. , nancy a young dean at the university of wisconsin sitting on the floor dared to wonder if the world needed a new Womens Organization and shouted who invited you . Get out this is my room and my liquor. [laughter] thank you. If so, you can see why people very often did not like betty and found her difficult. Whyy should we care about her today . So, as you enumerated in your introduction, betty wrote the feminine mystique which is one of the most important feminist books of the 20th century if not the most important one. The feminine mystique was yes as you noted a huge bestseller but what it did is established women as a category, which at the time simply did not exist so you could say betty through the first shot that many other people then picked up so that is the number one, the feminine mystique. Number two, the National Organization for women, as i said it was an amazing organization. Nothing like it existed and the goal was again to unite women as a category and have women be ablegi to agitate for equality f pay, equality of representation and other things like that. And then she went on in the rest of her life to find many other organizations devoted to women and womens rights including the National Political caucus which was solely devoted to getting women intohe government, but she also then founded the womens bank, the womens think tank. She was tireless in her pursuit of womens rights and trying to get equality for women. So i think shes important because we need to remember how long the struggle for womens rights has been going on intr ts country. And as some of the rights and betty fought for our being turned back and its also important because i think she, what people Pay Attention to most of all is her temper and not the things she achieved into the ideas that she had. Do you find that young women that you made, that your students dont think about her and in some cases have not even heard of her . Yes. I find in general betty is much less red in universities now than even ten years ago. The feminine mystique, while it was written and 63 as you said, so its 60yearsold this year. But many women and gender studies programs do not teach it or they teach one chapter of it. And it sometimes is taught in history programs, but then its really often taught ive talked to a lot of historians it is often taught in conjunction with some laterha book as a collectie to show what she did that was wrong. To me the most important thing is she showed to a mass audience how important womens rights were. What do the current gender studies people think she got wrong and it did wrong, what did they object to . So, many things. Most of all i would say the lack of, the feminine mystique was a book about white housewives. It was about the suburbs and how women felt existentially trapped in the suburbs, so thereve been a number of books and famous essays and collectives talking about how bad he should have been more inclusive in her construction of women. But of course she was writing this book in the late 50s and pre civil rights. I would say, i dont want to say my defense, but my response to the critics is that no one was writing on race and class in that way that we now consider basically normal. One thing we consider is her lack of talking about race and also she didnt really talk about poor women. She felt the revolution hand to start in the middle class. That was her argument. And then another problem with of the book that a lot of critics have pointed out is it also you could say that its homophobic, theres certain passages that take a very 1950s freudian approach and that really dogged her. So do you think the gender studies crowd are engendering a disrespect . And is that a dangerous thing . In my opinion it is. I dont think we can use the standard of today to judge the work that was written before civil rights, pre sexual revolution and stonewall. Thats why i say she through the first shot. And that was extraordinarily difficult to do. I mean, i think you can tell i read this passage and its funny i believe she was active in this way because she was in tend on getting people to hear her message and she felt the only way to do that is to yell or scream. That is what she believed. She had a kind of righteousness to her about this and she was not going to back down and she was not going to be polite. She was notob going to be civil and obey the rule in a meeting. But i think she felt she could not do that. She could not. So a lot of young women today owe a lot. When you think about a 60 60 yearsago and the things thatn didnt have, women couldnt open a m bank account by themselves. Theree is a long list. There was discrimination in job hiring. Obviously there was widespread sexism in the Office Culture and workplace culture. So betty was constantly fighting this idea that women dont even really need to be equal. Why do you want to that . She would go on these talkshows in the early 60s it was the advent of television and the announcers would just ridicule and humiliate her. Terrible. So, all the writing about betty that went before your book, what was the tone and how is your book a different take . So, i really tried to, i think the main thing is the other two major biographies were written in the 1990s. There was one written by a journalist and another by a scholar and the one written by the scholar, both of them are quite critical in these ways thatat im describing and what i tried to do is be fair to her. I would say that they were writing it and when icktr ked they werit in the 1990s when she was still alive, so they had to interview her and has anybody that has written a biographer that is a sort of mixed blessing of the subject is still alive. So i think both of them had both interviewed her and they both had a sort of struggled. She had a very clear idea of how she wanted to be remembered and what her legacy was and if you didnt fall in line with that, she would really give it to you. And i read these transcripts into several peopleio after the biographers gave up writing biographies about her because she was so difficult. One was a man and the others were women. So they were both genders. But the main thing i try hard to do in the book is to be fair to her and not judge her outburst. She had of these outbursts. I triedd to write about those d understand them as opposed to judge them which is what the job of a biographer is. Did she respond badly to what was written about her after she cooperated . She had different responses to the biographies because they are different. The biography about the scholar, which is very detailed and meticulous, but he had a specific theory about her which is that she suppressed her when she was writing the feminine mystique she called herself a housewife. She wasnt just writing about other people. She also called herself a housewife and of the problem that had no name that is what she called this that middleclass women had also she described herself as having this problem and this biographer claimed that she exaggerated the extent and pointed out that she had been a radical journalist in the 40s. She had been a writer for womens magazines in the 50s and so he according to him she covered up the career in order to exaggerate her identity as a housewife and she did not like that at all. She tried to sue him and stop the book. She didnt succeed and the book came out and she became very worried about her legacy and then she published a memoir, whichh is terrible. Im sorry, its really bad. Its not a great memoir or insightful in a way you want a memoir to be. The main thing, the purpose of the memoir is to show this particular one got it all wrong. I would just say she also, the biographer was right in a sense she was a radical journalist and she was a writer for womens magazines and active, however, she felt like a housewife and was living in upstate new york in Rockland County and she had three children and have this enormous house and her husband went into the city and despite the fact she did have this somewhat active career, at the titles of this is the 50s and she was being asked to be a housewife and it was stultifying to live inn a suburb and she jut felt, to me what this biography, the previous biographer mrs. Is what she felt, which was trapped. She felt trapped. A lot of women at the time. Sheoo understood them and voiced what they were feeling. The reason the book was a hit, the first paragraph which is this amazing paragraph describing what its like to have Peanut Butter sandwiches and to send your kid off to school and how mindnumbing it is and the last thing is youre not alone. They felt the scene. Where is the phrase the problem has no name come from . Did she coined that phrase . She did. Im not sure where, she had to give through that kind of snappy thing. And rachel, do you think that her brand of feminism is still validme today . And why do you think . This . Because i think the things she fought for like the quality esof pay and Political Representation and childcare, universal federally funded child. D. Reproductive rights those are all things we dont have. And you know, to me she had it right. She had a lot right although she wasnt perfect, but she had this idea that women were equal and they deserved equal everything and we still dont have that. What was her relationship like with the others . Gloria didnt want to participate in the book the reason being they didnt speak after 1972. What happened was after the National Organization was founded it very quickly became radicalized and a lot of younger women flooded into it and they were very interested in what we would call now identity politics and what betty called a sexual politics and they were less interested in bettys vision of feminism and equality. She was very alienated from this and more in that camp. She was interested in identity politics and i would be remiss if i also didnt mention womens struggles to come out and to be counted in the Womens Movement. Betty really didnt support that. She thought that it would weaken the Womens Movement. This was around 1969 awareness a lot of the others did support that so she really found herself on the other side in a more conservative i guess i i would y place. With the housewives rubbing Peanut Butterac sandwiches. Was there a blowup with gloria and can you tell us a little bit about thehe blowup . There were a number of things. You know, one of her less attractive sides is that she would speak to the media disparagingly aboutou other peoe including gloria and this began to happen in 1971 and 1972. So, betty was on the record as saying Gloria Steinem has no idea. Shes a phony, that kind of thing. And obviously gloria didnt like that. And she never responded. She took the high road i would rsay. But obviously they couldnt Work Together as allies. So gloria never denounced no, betty denounced gloria and that sort of boomerang. Can you tell us about some of the other controversies that betty was involved in . Probably the two that are the best known and the most lively, the one that i mentioned about women that erupted in 1969 when betty used the phrase lavender menace at a National Organization for womens meeting in other words she thought that women that wanted to be counted equally or who wanted their identity to be brought much more to the forefront of the National Organization for women, she thought, she called them the lavender menace. Im laughing. I know it isnt funny in this sense, but its not very nice. What she was concerned about was the Womens Movement being weekend and the other controversy was erupted when she did later apologize for the lavender menace. But the other big controversy was 1972 when she was working as a delegate for Shirley Chisholm and she talked about she wrote a press release in which she told everybody that they were going to have a traveling watermelon feast in harlem and this leaked to the media and of course it was a disaster because its terrible she would say that. So those are two really big horrifying things that she did. How did you get involved in writing this book . It was a commission. They yelled at me to do it but that is a little bit of how i got involved in it was on the 50th anniversary of the feminine mystique i wrote an article for the chronicle of Higher Education which is a newspaper for scholars and the article was about, because i had never read the feminine mystique as a student and so i read it for the first time then and at the time there were a number of books coming out. One of them was the end of man and then there was another by naomi wolf and these books t i read and felt they took from bettys ideas were refuted to theideas that without ever mentioning bettys name. Then i read the feminine mystique. It has these problems but its very gorgeously written, and so i wanted to write something about that and how she has kind of been erased despite having written this powerful book and people really like the essay and so they asked me to write for the series this book and thats how it happened. What was your idea when you started the book and how did it and change over the course of writing it . I dont know that i had of course i read of the other biographies and i was sort of frustrated by them and then the that happened was i started to interview people andeverybody had a negative stoy to tell. I felt a little bit defensive of her because there were people held grudges that were like 60yearsold and slow i was very interested in this and obviously again she had this what do i want to call it like a mac for making people upset. She had a knack for upsetting people. Getting her own way or whatever and so the stories accumulated and then as i went into the archives fore lysol and other side of her like a really generous society she could be extraordinarily generous especially to younger women. Shein had her surrogate daughtes that she helped in many ways. She could be very generous and very kind. I think she, yeah as i began to get this picture of her also as someone who was very kind of uncomfortable with other people justhi period, i think although she was in the public eye all the time i dont think she liked being in the public eye. She actually said when she was asked to lead and be the first president of now and she said she had a writers temperament and she didnt want to do it. Many of the women who were trying to kind of get a womens things started wanted her to do it because she was this huge name but she hesitated been thought of herself mostly as a writer. A writer and a journalist, yes for sure. What was her relationship like with her own family and children . Yes. Her marriage was very tempestuous andio also violent. Tempestuous and violent. She married someone who i would say he wasnt her intellectual equal. She was a brilliant person i want to add to that or stress thatsh it meant she won all the awards. She was a dazzling intellect. She went to berkeley for one year to grab school to get a phd and dropped out. But in those days, she was like 25 or something and you had to get married. It was hard y for women. So she married this guy that was kind of i dont know it wasnt a good match. He was kind of like i dont know what kind of guy about anyway, they fought all the time and drink a lot so it was violent and everyone knew that. But this was a sort of tragic thing about her. She worried that this would come out, that people would learn of the violence and marriage and it would discredit the Womens Movement. When you say it was violent, did he beat her up . She hit him and he hit her it went both ways. There are stories about this in the media going back to 1970. Its quites amazing. So it was known. You would see something drop and the people wouldnt really talk about it. Like one time there was a protest at the room in new york and she had a black eye so she was late and finally she had a friend help her with her makeup and she got there and she was late and terrified people would see it and that again she would bebe discredited and everything that they worked so hard for would fall apart. But their marriage was tempestuous and it was very painful toin her that it failed. She got divorced in 1971 and she was never, she had several lovers but she never married anybody. What was the relationship like with her children . She had three children and they are all very successful i will say that. There were certain things. This t is true for her and her husband carl. They were fighting. You have to put that in the backdrop. But also, there are certain ways that they are really amazing parents. They would go out into the backyard and look atik the sputnik. They were very intellectually curious. But then theres other ways she was a terrible mother by many standards. She sent the kids to school in a taxi as onee famous story. Like she would never take them to school. When she was writing she would close the door and they would knock on the door and she wouldnt answer because she was writing. Of thing. But i dont want to paint her as a completely terrible mother because there were also these Amazing Things and she allowed them to kind of be themselves, to be their own of people in a way that wasnt in fashion then at all and i think that each of them reflects that. Did she have a Good Relationship with them when they grew up in her later years . It was difficult because in the early years it was so, they would eat a lot of tv dinners, that kind of thing. It sounds like a great thing for kids. [laughter] i would just love that. One of them was a very successfulhu physicist. One is a macarthur physicist. Another is an engineer and architect and another is a doctor so they are all very successful. They have their own children. And didyo they cooperate with you on this biography . I interviewed all of them so they did. I think they havekn their own le the children of many wellknown people they have their own ideas about what should be told and what should not be told. Do they help you in your thinking about betty . Somewhat. It got to the point i knew more than they did. Im not trying to be arrogant or anything but the knowledge is circumscribed by the fact that they were her children and that was always at the forefront. Have they read the book yet . I dont know. It would be interesting to know if youve changed their view of their mother. Indeed. So much hasan happene recently. What would she think of all this . At the end of her life she was, you know, she was upset at the end of her life because there was so much work i to be done. She died in 2006 so there had been these big setbacks in the 90s like during the bush and reagan years and she was very upset about that. So i cannot help but feel that she would be very upset now. Not a day goes by these days where i dont read somethingt that is like i just read about, i dont know, five female professors suing the college for gender discrimination or you know, theres the un report about how we are not going to have the gender equality by 2030, not a day goes by that i dont read something that just proves that we have not done it. We have failed. Did she continue writing until the end of her life . Yes. What was the nature of her writing toward the end of her life . At the end of her life, so in the 70s, she wrote a collection called it changed my life, which a lot of people didnt like because they felt that she hadat hogged credit for the Womens Movement. Then she wrote something called, in 1982 something called the second stage, which is about how the Womens Movement has to becomet humanism. She thought the Womens Movement as it was was too radical, and she wanted to partner with men. Shee wanted it to be more economically based and so on. People also didnt like that book. It got a pan in the New York Times book review and was widely denounced. People called her a neocon and stuff. Then she wrote a big book in 1993 about aging and she really wanted that book to be a paradigm change or like the feminine mystique. I dont think that it is im having veryk. Mixed feelings abt that book. Its really gigantic for one thing. And for another, it has some inAmazing Things in it, like it points out that one of the things thats really changed is People Living longer and that changes the gender dynamic. Shes very good on that. And theres certain sections of the book where she talks about people having third acts in their lives if they live long enough and if they are in good health. The book didnt it was okay received but not tremendously celebrated or endorsed and there is a number of reasons for that. She had accumulated all of this baggage herself, so it would be impossible for me an unknown quantity like that to have a second big success but also she herself was not in good health. She had a number of Different Health problems and as the book was coming out, it was ironic this book on aging and how you could have a third act and all that and she was really struggling. She had a valve replacement, heart and valve replacement. Data shes soften her views on radical feminists at all . No, i mean, in 1977 she apologized for the phrase the lavender menace, but i think until the endof of her life, i think she believed that identity politics wasnt the way to go for women and that there should be kind of a more economic based feminism that would be the correct thing to do so i dont know about softening it. I do know people who knew her or had to deal with her after the open heart surgery valve replacement did say she was nicer after the valves surgery. I forgot she had a two valve replacements. She didnt just have one. And one i think was a teenage boy. So after that according to some people, she changed her personality quite a bit. She became interested in playing video games. She became, i dont know, nicer. Some people did say that. Are there young feminists today who do celebrate her and and brace her and her brand of feminism . I have met a few people who are reading the book for one reason or another who are very excited about it. They tend to not to be in the academy. The journalists they are just ordinary people. And so, yes, i think people read the feminine mystique and get excited by the language, the strength of the book and stuff like that. But i dont know if it is a widespreadll movement. The feminine mystique, its been a long time since i read it, but it seemed to me very welcoming andd very inviting. It is. And that is a very different from bettys personality. Yes, yes. She kind of invites herself in the feminine mystique. She talks about how she was in part to blame for some of the things that happened because as a journalist, she had you know, done what editors wanted to too narrow, some of her stories so they would just appeal to housewives. So she puts her soul right at the center of it and that strategy makes it very inviting. We would love to hear your questions. Im sure rachel would be eager to answer any questions you have. I am old enough to have seen the term of feminism and feminist evolve. Where do you think it is today . Are people using obviously there isis a movement and thing, but the term itself the term of feminism, i think it is mixed. Honestly im not sure. People dont want to be characterized as feminists and other times i think there are feminists and they are talking about feminism, but i dont feel like its a strong the way when i read about s betty in the 50s into the 70s that was like i dont feel like its like that. Betty actually got very upset whenever anyone would talk about that and she loved men also. She could be quite flirtatious and wanted men to be part of the movement but not every feminist a dead house youra are pointing out there were many who were either separatist or other things. Other questions . Thank you. A wonderful c discussion. Could you Say Something about her and thec writer polemic and what propelled her, and maybe this might be out of the left field, but there is a kind of growing the literature about the disaffection anime and the gentlemens agreement and taking on suburbia. You mean in the 1950s in general, not just for women that there was this general idea but we had to escape it to be individuals. She was influenced by a lot of those people. She was very influenced by hiroshima. She actually wanted the feminine mystique to be like hiroshima. She wanted it to be this very granular account of how women were suffering because of this existential problem. That was one of her models. The feminine mystique is a strange book because it has that side of it, the critique of suburbia but also a memoir selfhelp side of it and sometimes theres two sides that seem in opposition. Great question. We need to be done. We have run out of time, but rachel would be delighted to sign your book andor they are outside on the table there. She will be at the table right there to sign. Thank you so much