But during those heady years, Friedan's marriage was crumbling. She claimed years later to have been a battered wife, a contention that outraged Carl Friedan, who vociferously denied the charges. Their 22-year marriage ended in divorce in 1969. He died in December.
In 1970, Friedan stepped down as NOW president amid growing dissatisfaction with her vision of the movement. But not even her critics could deny the power of the changes she had unleashed.
By this time, however, the mother of the movement was being assaulted by its more radical elements. In 1969 she had delivered her first public attack on lesbianism, labeling it a "lavender menace" that would tarnish the entire feminist agenda. Enraged, many lesbians quit NOW. Susan Brownmiller, then a member of New York Radical Feminists, blasted the group and its founder as "hopelessly bourgeois."
By the end of the 1970s, Friedan was relegated to the sidelines of the movement she had inspired. She was dismayed not only by its direction but what she saw as its mounting toll and the growing political backlash. In her view, the movement had burdened rather than liberated women, burning out those who were trying to juggle motherhood and career or penetrate the corporate glass ceiling. Moreover, she observed, women in lower-level jobs were still earning only 59 cents to every dollar earned by men -- this after almost two decades of renewed feminist activism.
What to do?
Friedan's response was "The Second Stage," published in 1981. The movement's senior theorist had always insisted that men were not the enemy. In her new book, she startled many by insisting that the enemy was the victim herself.
"I believe we have to break through our own feminist mystique," Friedan wrote, arguing that "the equality we fought for isn't livable, isn't workable, isn't comfortable in the terms that structured our battle." Feminists, she charged, had fallen into a new trap "which denied that core of women's personhood that is fulfilled through love, nurture, home....
"We have to free ourselves from male power traps, understand the limits of women's power as a separate interest group ... and put a new value on qualities once considered -- and denigrated as -- special to women."
