- In addition to Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedman (aka
Friedan) -- a Stalinist-Marxist who spun herself into an oppressed
*American* housewife, did her best to destroy America:
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Betty Friedan's Secret Communist
Past
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By David Horowitz
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Salon Magazine
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January 18, 1999
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- Why has this feminist icon continued to cover up her
years as a party activist?
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- What is it with progressives? Why do they feel the
need to lie so relentlessly about who they are? Recently Rigoberta
Menchú's autobiography was exposed as a complete hoax. Now it's Betty
Friedan's turn to be revealed as a feminist fibber.
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- In a new book, "Betty Friedan and the Making of the
Feminine Mystique", Smith College professor Daniel Horowitz (no
relation) establishes beyond doubt that the woman who has always
presented herself as a typical suburban housewife until she began work
on her groundbreaking book was in fact nothing of the kind. In fact,
under her maiden name, Betty Goldstein, she was a political activist
and professional propagandist for the Communist left for over a decade
before the publication of "The Feminist Mystique" launched the modern
women's movement.
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- Professor Horowitz documents that Friedan was from
her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the
political intimate of the leaders of America's Cold War fifth column
and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working
on atomic bomb projects with J. Robert Oppenheimer. Her famous
description of America's suburban family household as "a comfortable
concentration camp" in "The Feminine Mystique" therefore had more to
do with her Marxist hatred for America than with any of her actual
experience as a housewife or mother. (Her husband, Carl, also a
leftist, once complained that his wife "was in the world during the
whole marriage," had a full-time maid and "seldom was a wife and a
mother").
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- It is fascinating that Friedan not only felt the
need to lie about her real views and life experience then, but still
feels the need to lie about them now. Although Horowitz, the author of
the new biography, is a sympathetic leftist, Friedan refused to
cooperate with him once she realized he was going to tell the truth
about her life as Betty Goldstein. After he published an initial
article about Friedan's youthful work as a "labor journalist," Friedan
maligned him, saying to an American University audience, "Some
historian recently wrote some attack on me in which he claimed that I
was only pretending to be a suburban housewife, that I was supposed to
be an agent."
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- This was particularly unkind because Friedan's
professor-biographer is such a fellow-traveler himself that he bends
over backwards throughout the book to sanitize the true dimensions of
Friedan's past. Thus he describes one character in the book, Steve
Nelson, as "the legendary radical, veteran of the Spanish Civil War
and Bay Area party official." In fact, Nelson was an obscure radical
but an important apparatchik (later notorious for his espionage
activities in the Berkeley Radiation Lab) who was in Spain as a Party
commissar to enforce the Stalinist line.
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- Professor Horowitz also bends over backwards, and at
length, to defend Friedan's lying as a response to "McCarthyism." When
she makes the ridiculous accusation that he is going to use
"innuendoes" to describe her past as a justification for refusing to
grant him permission to quote from her unpublished papers, he is
all-too understanding. The word "innuendoes," he explains, was often
used by people "scarred by McCarthyism."
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- Reading this reminded me of a C-Span "BookNotes"
program on which Brian Lamb asked the president of the American
Historical Association, Eric Foner, about his father, Jack. Foner
claimed that Jack Foner was a man "with a social conscience" who made
his living through public lectures and who, along with his brothers
Phil and Moe, was persecuted during the McCarthy era. When Lamb asked
Foner why they were persecuted, Foner responded that his father had
supported the loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. But no one was
actually persecuted for siding with the Spanish Republic in the
Spanish Civil War. The Foner brothers, on the other hand, were fairly
famous Communists, one a Communist Party labor historian and another a
Communist Party union organizer and leader. It is a fact that, on
orders from Moscow, Communist-controlled unions in the CIO opposed the
Marshall Plan's effort to rebuild Western Europe. The Marshall Plan,
it should be recalled, was in part designed to prevent Stalin's empire
from absorbing Western Europe as it had its satellites in the east.
That's why socialists like Walter Reuther purged the reds from the CIO
and also why Communists like Foner's uncle came under FBI scrutiny --
i.e., why they were "persecuted" in the McCarthy era. That Communists,
like the Foners, lied at the time was understandable. They had
something to hide. But why are their children lying to this day? And
why are people like Friedan lying long after they have anything to
fear from McCarthy committees and the like?
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- Surely no one seriously believes that people who
reveal their Communist pasts these days have anything to fear from the
American government. Angela Davis, for example, was once the Communist
Party's candidate for vice president and served the Soviet empire
until its very last gasp. Her punishment for this is to have been
appointed one of only seven "President's Professors" at the state-run
University of California, and to be officially invited at exorbitant
fees by college administrations all across the country to give
ceremonial speeches on public occasions.
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- Folk singer Pete Seeger, who has been a party puppet
his entire life, is a celebrated entertainer and was honored recently
at the Kennedy Center with a Freedom Medal by the president himself.
In the midst of the Vietnam War, Jane Fonda incited American troops to
defect in a broadcast she made from the enemy's capital over Radio
Hanoi. She then returned to the United States to win an Academy Award
and eventually become the wife of one of America's most powerful media
moguls, where she oversaw a 24-episode CNN special purporting to be a
history of the Cold War. Bernadine Dohrn, leader of America's first
political terrorist cult, who once officially declared war on
"Amerika," and who has never conceded even minimal regret for her
crimes nor hinted at the slightest revision of her views, has just
been appointed to a Justice Department commission on children. The
idea that America punishes those who betray her is laughable, as is
the idea that leftists have anything to fear from their government if
they tell the truth.
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- So why the continuing lies? The reason is this: The
truth is too embarrassing. Imagine what it would be like for Betty
Friedan (the name actually is Friedman) to admit that as a Jew she
opposed America's entry into the war against Hitler because Stalin
told her that it was just an inter-imperialist fracas? Imagine what it
would be like for America's premier feminist to acknowledge that well
into her 30s she thought Stalin was the Father of the Peoples, and
that the United States was an evil empire, and that her interest in
women's liberation was just a subtext of her real desire to create a
Soviet America. No, those kinds of revelations don't help a person who
is concerned about her public image.
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- Which is why it probably has seemed better just to
lie about this all these years. The problem, however, is that lying
can't be contained. It begets other lies, and eventually becomes a
whole way of life, as President Clinton could tell you. One of the
lies that the denial of one's Communist past begets is an exaggerated
view of McCarthyism. Fear of McCarthyism becomes an excuse that
explains everything. That McCarthyism was some gigantic "reign of
terror" (to use Carl Bernstein's sappy analogy), as though thousands
lost their freedom and hundreds their lives while the country itself
remained paralyzed with fear for a decade is simply not true.
McCarthy's personal reign lasted but a year a half, until Democrats
took control of his committee. Being an accused Communist on an
American college campus in the '50s, moreover, was only marginally
more damaging to one's career opportunities than the accusation of
being a member of the Christian Right would be on today's politically
correct campus, dominated as it now is by the tenured left. Bad
enough, but reign of terror, no.
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- The example of Betty Friedan should be a wake-up
call to the rest of us to insist that people be candid about their
politics and about calling things by their right names. Otherwise, we
are going to continue being inundated with books from the academy with
ludicrous claims like this: "In response to McCarthyism and to the
impact of mass media, suburbs, and prosperity, a wave of conformity
swept across much of the nation. Containment referred not only to
American policy toward the U.S.S.R. but also to what happened to
aspirations at home. The results for women were especially
unfortunate. Even though increasing numbers of them entered the work
force, the Cold War linked anti-communism and the dampening of women's
ambitions." If you believe that, there is a bridge I have to sell you.
On the other hand, at least according to Friedan's biographer, that's
exactly what Friedan has sold American feminists: "With 'The Feminine
Mystique,' Friedan began a long tradition among American feminists of
seeing compulsory domesticity as the mmain consequence of 1950s
McCarthyism." Well, perhaps it's not American feminists Friedan has
sold this bizarre version of reality to, so much as American
Communists posing as feminists and unsuspecting young women whose only
understanding of this past will come from their tenured leftist
professors.
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