Betty Friedan and the Radical Past of Liberal Feminism

WITHIN THIS THEORETICAL AND POLITICAL context, the revelations in Daniel Horowitz's book Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique are intensely dramatic and disorienting. For Horowitz meticulously details the voluminous evidence of Betty Friedan's entirely un-bourgeois and un-liberal political commitments prior to the publication of The Feminine Mystique. Much of the new historical data Horowitz offers is significant precisely because it throws into question the tidy narrative of the progressive enlightenment of the women's movement -- from limited and exclusionary to sophisticated and aspiring to be fully inclusionary Horowitz's book disrupts this sort of Darwinian tale of the evolution of feminist politics, with its liberal, radical, socialist, global and post-modern phases representing steps up the evolutionary ladder of politics.

• While at Smith College (1938-1942) Friedan's leftist politics were developed by the radical outlook of her professors. She put her beliefs into practice. Friedan (then using her maiden name, Betty Goldstein) was editor of a college campus weekly paper where she argued for her positions e.g. non-intervention in WWII (up until Pearl Harbor), unionization of the maids on the college campus. She attended a summer course at the famous activist training camp, Highlander Folk School.⁸

• Friedan spent one year doing graduate work in psychology at Berkeley (1942-1943). She was offered a scholarship but declined it. While at Berkeley her social milieu consisted of active members of the Communist Party United States of America (CPUSA). Notably, one of her boyfriends, David Bohm, a party member, was a physicist at work on the Manhattan Project, developing the atomic bomb. He was later called up by HUAC, (as were several of her Berkeley professors). Bohm was acquitted and left the country.⁹

• After leaving Berkeley, Friedan's first job in New York City was as a journalist at Federated Press, the U.S.'s premier leftist news service. While at FP (1943-46) Friedan wrote stories, for example, promoting unions, exposing and opposing corporate exploitation, denouncing racism and sexism.¹⁰

• After being fired from FP (to make room for a man or because of her excessively pro-Soviet positions, the evidence is not entirely clear) her next job was as a staff reporter for UE News (1946-1952), the newsletter of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. This union was among the most radical in the country and was in the orbit of the CP. It should be stressed that Friedan wrote extensively on the specific and unique problems of inequality and hardship faced by working class and African American women. Friedan wrote an important pamphlet, UE Fights for Women Workers in 1952.¹¹ In this pamphlet she outlined how corporate America exploited women workers and engaged in discriminatory practices. As Horowitz explains: "To support the call for equal pay for equal work and to fight discrimination against women, she countered stereotypes justifying lower pay for women: that they were physically weaker, entered the work force only temporarily, had no families to support, and worked only for pin money." And "she highlighted the ‘even more shocking' situation of African American women faced, having to deal with the ‘double bars' of being female and African American."¹²

• While working as a freelance journalist (after leaving UE News in 1952) she wrote another pamphlet for UE in 1953, Women Fight For a Better Life! UE Picture Story of Women's Role in American History in which "she used photographs and texts to provide the social, economic, and political dimensions of the story of how over the centuries American women had fought against discrimination and for peace, justice, and equality." Again, she emphasized the "double discrimination" faced by African American women historically in the U.S.¹³

• Friedan was fired from UE News with her second pregnancy. Her life from 1952 - 1963 most approximates that of a suburban housewife -- pivotal to her persona in The Feminine Mystique. However, even on this count, Horowitz provides a full account of how unorthodox a suburban housewife she was. Friedan continued to write freelance articles, many based on her experiences, and taught writing courses at New York University and the New School for Social Research. That is to say, she continued to be extremely active in community-based politics, writing, for example, of experiments in co-operative living and of a nationally-recognized educational project she set up in her community.¹⁴

  This information was virtually unknown for almost four decades though one broad and very public hint had been dropped by Friedan herself. In a 1974 essay in New York magazine, "The Way We Were -- 1949" (which was later reprinted in the collection of her essays, It Changed My Life), Friedan argued that 1949 was the year that the feminine mystique "really hit." She offers an analysis of her mind-set in that fateful year. Friedan declares, "After the war, I had been very political, very involved, consciously radical. Not about women, for heaven's sake! If you were radical in 1949, you were concerned about the Negroes, and the working class, and World War III, and the Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthy and loyalty oaths, and Communist splits and schisms, Russia, China and the UN, but you certainly didn't think about being a woman, politically. It was only recently that we had begun to think of ourselves as women at all. But that wasn't political -- it was the opposite of politics."¹⁵ As Horowitz notes, neither Friedan nor any journalist or scholar followed the thread of this startling declaration. It was only when Horowitz first published results of his research in a 1996 article in American Quarterly, (his book was published in 1998), that the proverbial cat was let out of the bag. As Horowitz puts it, "In public, with a few exceptions, Friedan has avoided, denied, minimized or obscured her progressive political convictions of the 1940s and 1950s, especially on women's issues."¹⁶

  Subsequent to this, Friedan did grant extensive co-operation to Judith Hennesee for her 1999 biography, Betty Friedan: Her Life. Hennesee does focus some attention on Friedan's political activism in the 1940s-1950s. Hennesee openly depicts Friedan as a Marxist in her college days and notes her dismissal of her pivotal activist years 1943-1952 as unimportant. However, unlike Horowitz, she concentrates on the more personal aspects of Friedan's life, her family relationships, marriage, affairs, children, personality traits and so on. In this sense, Hennesee's portrayal of Friedan is more consistent with the mode of self-presentation constructed by Friedan in The Feminine Mystique.¹⁷ It is only very recently that Friedan herself has provided extensive detail about her radical past with the publication of her recent autobiography, Life So Far.¹⁸

  Beyond The Feminine Mystique

  WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE of all this new information about Friedan's hidden years of political activism? What are its implications for an assessment of Friedan herself as an author, feminist leader, liberal feminist, socialist feminist? What are the implications for an understanding of The Feminine Mystique as a founding text of Second Wave feminism? More generally, what can we learn about the contribution of women in the Communist Party and its political circles to the women's movement?¹⁹

  Certainly it is evident that portrayals (and dismissals) of Friedan as a clued-out liberal feminist must be reconsidered. Clearly she was a canny, seasoned political activist when she wrote The Feminine Mystique. Arguably, it may have been her political and professional experience that enabled her to tap so brilliantly into the mood, of and appeal to, middle-class housewives. She left out references to Marx, Engels, and de Beauvoir which, according to Horowitz, were included in early drafts and instead emphasized her persona as a smart college graduate and trapped housewife. In short, the Betty Friedan depicted by Tong and hooks may be said to no longer exist. Further, as mentioned above, Horowitz's research raises serious questions about the usual chronology of the women's movement itself and intriguingly, the connections between liberal and socialist feminism. Finally, Horowitz's work is a forceful reminder, as he puts it, that "social movements and their leaders do not…come out of nowhere. They have histories that powerfully shape their destinies . . . "²⁰

  But, apart from all such questions, which will have to be sorted out over the years to come one question must first be approached: Why did Betty Friedan avoid public discussion about her political past? And how does Horowitz address the specific question of her obfuscations about the past? He argues the following: "Friedan had reason to worry that her involvement in radical politics for at least a dozen years beginning in 1940 meant that a full rendering of her life after 1960 was dangerous, given McCarthyism's power in memory and reality . . . Had Friedan revealed all in the mid-1960s, she would have undercut her book's impact, subjected herself to palpable dangers, and jeopardized the women's movement."²¹ Thus, obscuring her past was merely a sensible, utilitarian choice. Given this motivation for concealment, Horowitz asserts that it was "morally reasonable" since "in the early 1960s, protecting oneself from McCarthyism is an understandable and defensible act."²²

  Indeed, Horowitz's entire re-telling of Friedan's political past is structured around the notion of the "tragedy of McCarthyism," that the wave of anti-communism which swept the U.S. in the 1950s destroyed an indigenous left tradition, broke connections between generations of radicals and terrified dissidents like Friedan into inactivity and silence. As he states, "I wish to highlight the damage McCarthyism did to progressive social movements in the 1940s and early 1950s, and especially to feminism, which it forced underground but could not destroy."²³

  But why tell all now? The political climate is clearly more conducive to such news. It would appear that any immediate danger posed by rabid anti-communism has disappeared. And, Horowitz's motives are precisely to reveal the political losses America has suffered due to McCarthyism, that is, the lessons and experiences of an entire generation of radicals obscured. He wishes to restore a sense of the continuity of feminist politics from the 1940s to the 1960s and bemoans the lack of dialogue between what he terms the Old Left and New Left feminism and seeks to encourage such dialogue through the example of Friedan's life.²⁴ Thus, he writes, "I felt that what I was going to reveal about her life made her a more significant, heroic and interesting figure in American history than her own story allowed. After all, I was arguing that Friedan's life, in connecting the 1960s and the Old Left, gave second-wave feminism a richer heritage, one of which both Friedan and American feminists should be proud."²⁵

  Friedan, for her part, seems singularly unimpressed by Professor Horowitz's efforts. She refused to co-operate with Horowitz in any way. He was denied interviews and the right to print anything from her unpublished papers. Her hostile attitude is on display in her recent autobiography:

  A deconstructing male historian would try to dismiss my credibility in writing The Feminine Mystique by claiming that it was all a communist plot, starting with my Smith student days and my labor immersion, and insisting that I never was a real suburban housewife. But that isn't true. My experience with Communist dogma had given me a healthy distrust of all dogma that belied real experience, while Smith had given me the conceptual ability to take on the feminist mystique, training as a hands-on reporter gave me a third ear to hear pieces of new truth behind denials and defenses and rigidity. That ability to follow leads, clues from many different fields, was invaluable once I truly committed myself to solve this mystery.²⁶

  How can we explain Friedan's hostility? After all, the threat of McCarthyism is long gone and she herself has indicated her involvement with left-wing causes. If anything, a radical past could only improve her image in the women's movement. The key seems to me to be in Horowitz's confident declaration that "Friedan's life . . . gave second-wave feminism a richer heritage, one of which both Friedan and American feminists should be proud." In fact, Horowitz presents voluminous evidence, that "At least from 1940 until 1953 [Friedan] inhabited a world where Communists and their sympathizers held influential positions, where she witnessed redbaiting, and where she encountered the ideology of American Communists, especially in their Popular Front appeals."²⁷

  Given this, one would expect more caution about assertions of a proud heritage. After all, at this time, Stalin was at the height of his powers in Russia engaging in political crimes of world-historic proportion which the world's Communist Parties blithely ignored or explained away lest it destroy their faith in the existence of a worldly utopia. Moreover, there is no question that the CPUSA adhered to the idealization of Stalin's regime and took direction from Moscow on international and domestic issues. It is at this point that Betty Friedan's anxiety and hostility may become entirely understandable. To say this is a "problematic" political heritage with which Old and New Leftists and feminists have to contend is to understate the case beyond measure.

  Political Anxieties

  HOROWITZ'S NARRATIVE of Friedan's political life is, I would argue, one-sided, with its focus on the "tragedy of McCarthyism," and scant attention to the "tragedy of Stalinism," to the point of possible misrepresentation. This is certainly not to dismiss the dismal legacy of McCarthyism with jobs lost, lives destroyed and radicalism gone underground. But, it is crucial to insist on the atrocious legacy of Stalinism and its domestic effects in the U.S. -- blind adherence to party-lines, excusing inexcusable crimes against humanity in the name of a greater good -- which also played a central role in discrediting the aspirations of more than one generation of socialists.

  This narrative strategy indicates Horowitz's anxiety about being associated with any form of red-baiting by criticizing overtly the CPUSA and its fellow-travelers. Horowitz thereby positions himself within current debates within American historiography as part of a stream of historians who wish to restore the image of the CPUSA as an organization comprised of "home-grown radicals," motivated by a passion for social justice. This stream of historiography is counterposed to that which views the CPUSA as a mere vehicle for Soviet aims. Horowitz and like-minded historians wish to explore "issues without concentrating on the obedience of some party members to a Soviet-directed party line." He objects to this approach because it presents "a one-dimensional core-periphery model which exaggerate[s] the degree of control of the Kremlin and the Communist Party over people who they thought were passive and naive recipients of a party line. Such a perspective over-emphasizes the importance of actual party membership, as well as the influence of the party and Moscow."²⁸

  Horowitz proposes instead to "stress the varied sources of American radicalism, whose origins, power, and sophistication a focus on the party underestimates."²⁹ And he writes, "I can well appreciate how progressives would join with party members in supporting the Soviet-American alliance in World War II, or in fighting for social justice for women or African- Americans."³⁰

  This is the prism through which Horowitz analyses Friedans's political life. He specifically describes Friedan as a "Popular Front" feminist or radical. By this he means to include her among those "who battled anti-communism and were inspired by issues articulated by radicals -- party members and non- party members alike."³¹ He doesn't specifically address whether or not Friedan was, in fact, a CPUSA member.³² But, as noted above, he does position her squarely in CP circles.

  However, he also insists that she was not a dogmatic adherent of Stalinism. He contends the following: "I knew that in the immense amount that Friedan published in the 1940s and early 1950s, some of which appeared in party-sponsored publications, she never mentioned the party or displayed a preference for the Soviet social or economic system. I have found no evidence that she sanctioned the killings of millions of people carried out by Stalinists in the USSR, approved of pro-Soviet Americans conveying national security secrets to a foreign nation, or looked favorably on the party's penchant for making dramatic and opportunistic shifts."³³

  This, of course, proves absolutely nothing. Joseph Stalin himself would not fit this absurd definition of a Stalinist -- he never advertised his mass murders and, of course, spies were operating clandestinely in the United States. Thus, Horowitz produces an exaggerated definition of Stalinism to prove that Betty Friedan was not a dogmatic Stalinist. Moreover, he consistently downplays the extent to which it does indeed appear, the political views espoused by Friedan were entirely consonant with those of official CPUSA party line. He recounts the positions taken by Friedan in articles for FP and UE News as simply as those of an independent radical espousing her own personal views. The significance of the fact that in virtually all cases that Horowitz recounts, her work pushed the concerns and views of the CPUSA is not acknowledged let alone accounted for.

  I will note one example that Horowitz raises from Friedan's FP days:

  Because Goldstein [her maiden name] also worried that tensions between America and the Soviet Union were early signs of the Cold War, she hoped for a post-war world order built on the continuation of Soviet-American friendship. In March, less than two weeks after Winston Churchill had delivered his speech in which he coined the phrase ‘iron curtain,' Goldstein and Kolkin [a colleague at FP] wrote a story that reported favorably on a protest against Churchill's fostering of hostilities between the United States and the USSR. Two days later, she hailed Wallace's efforts to rally Americans around a decreased commitment to Anglo-American coalition and to develop in its stead a greater understanding of Soviet actions. This, she wrote, would diminish American enthusiasm for a war against the USSR. A few days later, she discussed how interest in oil led the British to support an anti-democratic government in Iran at the same time that she cast a skeptical eye on news of Russian military presence there. In the spring of 1946, she expressed concern that America's support of fascist governments abroad would lead to the deterioration of Soviet-American relations."³⁴

  This passage is indicative of the general method Horowitz uses in his approach to Friedan's politics. He presents her as an independent journalist or a Popular Front feminist and ignores the glaring indications that in her journalism she is promoting positions which are entirely in tune with those of the CPUSA (not to mention in the interests of the USSR).

  This is certainly not to say that the specific political positions Friedan took were wrong or problematic simply because they were consistent with those of the CP but it is to note that time and again Horowitz obscures or downplays the extent to which she is surrounded by CP members, espousing CP positions and promoting CP-related institutions and organizations in her writing. For instance, Horowitz refers four times to Friedan's dealings with Ruth Young. He refers to an interview with Young as being the most important article Friedan wrote on women at FP during the war. He refers to Young as a "UE official . . . a forceful advocate for women's rights in the union movement."³⁵ Next, it's "Ruth Young, the UE leader whom Friedan had interviewed in 1943 . . . "³⁶ The third reference notes that Friedan "knew Ruth Young, the key feminist in the UE leadership."³⁷ There's little preparation, then, for the final reference to Young which is, as follows: "The transformation of Ruth Young's life under McCarthyism was especially fraught with meaning for Friedan since she had written about Young early in her career as a labor journalist. Young, a Communist since 1937 and the daughter of a Communist, was the first woman member of UE's executive committee and was active in the Congress of American Women [a CP popular front organization]."³⁸ Horowitz then tells a tale of Young and her husband's de-radicalisation and responses to McCarthyism. So, on the one hand, CP connections are not mentioned. When they are mentioned, they only serve to highlight the "tragedy of McCarthyism."

  A similar strategy is evident with Horowitz's account of Friedan's relationship to the newspaper, Jewish Life. He writes,

  Nothing better illustrates the stakes surrounding McCarthyism than the treatment of articles Friedan wrote for Jewish Life: A Progressive Monthly. This publication noted a scholar, was ‘in the orbit of the Communist Party' until 1956. Although it apologized for Soviet anti-Semitism, in many ways the periodical fought for admirable causes. In its pages, writers explored the relationship between Jewish life and progressive politics. They celebrated the resistance of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. They emphasized the connections between discrimination aimed at African Americans and Jews. Moreover, Jewish Life published some of the period's strongest attacks on anti-Semitism.³⁹

  The following is from the entry in the Encyclopedia of the American Left that Horowitz uses as his source:

  JL, for the first nine and a half years of its existence [1946-1956 -- jb], adhered to current CPUSA positions on Jewish and other issues. From 1948 to the middle 1950s, it followed the Soviet view concerning assimilation when, under Stalin, after 1948 all Jewish social and cultural institutions suddenly shut down. JL's explanation for these events was that they merely reflected a natural process of assimilation of Jews into the general Soviet population and thereby should be seen as being a progressive development and a direct result of the building of a new socialist society in the USSR. When the anti-Semitic campaign in the USSR and Eastern Europe reached its zenith during the years 1948-1953, JL referred to it as a myth fed by Cold War lies. The publication defended the Prague trials of 1952 and wrote an effusive eulogy on the death of Stalin called ‘Stalin and the Jewish People.' These positions served to isolate JL from organized Jewry.⁴⁰

  The central difficulty here is that when one consults the source used by Horowitz for information on the periodical, Jewish Life, what one encounters is a more clear picture that this was a CPUSA publication which followed its international politics to the point of condoning the extreme oppression of Jews in the Soviet Union.

  Horowitz recounts that Friedan wrote a series of four articles for Jewish Life attacking the policies of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), which was the UE's major union rival. The fourth article never appeared because the editors devoted the issue to the execution of the Rosenbergs. His argument is that this must have struck terror into Friedan's heart, given that she was a radical Jewish woman with extensive Party connections (though he doesn't say this explicitly), that she had dated a party member working on the atom bomb, and so on.

  However, Horowitz's dramatic juxtaposition of Friedan's association with Jewish Life (fighting for "admirable causes") against the drama of the execution of the Rosenbergs emphasizes the aggression of the American state and entirely downplays aspects of Friedan's political engagements which may be extremely "problematic." In particular, why did Friedan write for a journal which idealized the Soviet Union to the point of condoning its anti-Semitism?

   

  THIS RHETORICAL STRATEGY of emphasizing the "tragedy of McCarthyism" vs. the "tragedy of Stalinism" runs through Horowitz's book. This strategy continues the obfuscation begun (for whatever reasons) by Freidan. It prevents a full accounting of the character of the politics of women activists of the period. And, without this, an open, informed and informative dialogue between Old Left and New Left feminists cannot productively move forward. The difficulty, of course, in assessing the work of women activists such as Friedan is the extent to which their understanding of "male chauvinism," "women's equality," "ending sex discrimination," as ideals were separable from the long-term goal of establishing a society akin to the Soviet Union in the United States. This strikes me as one of the most problematic areas of accounting in which socialist feminists must engage. I would argue that it is far too simplistic to look back at the work of activists/intellectuals/reporters such as Friedan and one-sidedly praise their work any more than it is useful to dismiss it because of its connections to the Stalinist CPUSA.

  Notes

  1. Anna Quindlen, "Introduction," to Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), p. x. return

  2. For an excellent discussion of the narrative structure of Friedan's The Feminine Mystique as a mystery story see Rachel Bowlby, "The Problem with No Name: Rereading Friedan's The Feminine Mystique," Feminist Review, 27, Sept. 1987, pp. 61-75. It should also be noted that recent studies have questioned the picture of 1950s domestic conformity which Friedan so effectively popularized. See, for example, Eva Moskowitz, "‘It's good to blow your top': Women's magazines and a discourse of discontent, 1945-1965," Journal of Women's History, Fall 1996, pp. 66-98; and Joanne Meyerowitz, "Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946-1958," in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), pp. 229-262. return

  3. Friedan says in her introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of The Feminine Mystique, "until I started writing the book, I wasn't even conscious of the woman problem . . . " Friedan, Mystique, p. 3. return

  4. Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Thought, (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998), p. 26. return

  5. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000), pp. 1-2. return

  6. hooks, p. 3. return

  7. I use the term "feminist" here advisedly. There is considerable and important evidence that activists in the CPUSA, radical unions and Popular Front organizations were quite conscious of the need to fight "male chauvinism" (and "white chauvinism"). Of course, this need not (within the context of an orthodox Marxism) constitute "feminism" as it is now understood. Nonetheless, I would use the term to emphasize that Horowitz's research indicates that Friedan was clearly conscious of and wrote extensively about the unequal position of women in American society well before she began research for The Feminine Mystique. return

  8. Her biographer, Judith Hennesee, comments, "The most profound thing that happened to Betty at Smith was her radicalization. She became committed to Marxist philosophy . . . " and she quotes from one of Friedan's editorials, powerfully defending the right to organize unions as a democratic and American right: "As the Nazis rose to power in Germany they attacked and destroyed labor unions . . . For fascism to survive all free and democratic institutions must be prohibited . . . Union . . . members are . . . as American as the funny papers they read, the movies they see, the beer they drink, the streets they live on; their aims are basic to the protection and expansion of democracy in America." Judith Hennesee, Betty Friedan: Her Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), p. 26. return

  9. Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), pp. 147-148. return

  10. Horowitz, Ch. 6. return

  11. Horowitz, Ch. 7. return

  12. Horowitz, p. 139. return

  13. Ibid. return

  14. Horowitz, Ch. 8. return

  15. See Betty Friedan, "The Way We Were -- 1949," in It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement (New York: Dell, 1976), p. 27. return

  16. He continues and neatly summarizes all significant details missing from the popular narrative of her life: "She has rarely, if ever, publicly named Federated Press or the UE News as publications she worked for, or revealed her authorship of the 1952 pamphlet on sex discrimination against working women. Nor has she talked about the distinctive nature of the suburbs in which she lived beginning in 1950s, or how she saw this innovative program as an answer to McCarthyism. She has not noted that she had to excise references to class and race in what she wrote for popular magazines in the 1950s, or the way she questioned Cold War consensus in the published versions. When discussing The Feminine Mystique, Friedan has not mentioned how, from first draft to final product, she changed its tone and narrowed its focus. Finally, she has offered only the vaguest hints at the connection between her book and her earlier experiences with Marxism or progressive feminism. These omissions from her story have enabled Friedan to insist that until 1957 she had little or no knowledge of women's issues. As late as November 1995, she reiterated key elements of her story, especially her denial that she had any interest in women's issues before 1957." Horowitz, p. 237. return

  17. See Hennesee, Friedan. return

  18. Arguably, despite significant candor in her autobiography, Friedan continues to present her political commitments somewhat ambiguously. For instance, in the following passage, she appears to be a decidedly passive student of radical politics. Of her early days in New York City, Friedan comments, "In our classes at the Jefferson School, we learned that communism was a system that put the interests of the people first and in which private profit from the exploitation of workers was abolished . . . With Spain as an example, I also learned that communism, to protect the revolution from its enemies, at home and in the world, had to suspend the freedoms of speech and the press and other democratic rights we hold dear. We were told that under capitalism, democratic freedoms, like religion, are ‘opiates' for the masses, serving the interests of profiteers by keeping the people diverted and quiet. We were told that both political parties in America were controlled by big business and their networks, newspapers, the arts, etc." Betty Friedan, Life So Far (New York: Touchstone, 2001), p. 72. return

  19. For an excellent book which elaborates on the activism of American Communist Party women and their contribution to 1960s feminism see Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women's Liberation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). return

  20. Horowitz, p. 245. return

  21. Horowitz, pp. 242-43. return

  22. Horowitz, p. 322, in n. 26. return

  23. Horowitz, p. 12. return

  24. Horowitz comments that unlike the voluminous accounts of "troubled conversations" among men of the Old and New Left there is an almost complete absence of such discussions among women, "Remarkable for their absence are frank discussions among Old and New Left women, one consequence of which is that most 1960s feminists had little or no inkling of what their progenitors, even those among them, had learned and experienced." Horowitz, p. 249 return

  25. Horowitz, p. 13. return

  26. Friedan. Life, p. 111. return

  27. Horowitz, p. 134. return

  28. Horowitz, pp. 10-11. For an excellent discussion of the general trends and divisions in approaches to the history of the CPUSA and related issues see Maurice Isserman, Which Side Were You On?: The American Communist Party During the Second World War (Middletown, Conn., Wesleyan University Press, 1982), pp. vii-xii. return

  29. Horowitz, p. 11. return

  30. Horowitz, pp. 12-13. return

  31. Horowitz, p. 11. As I argue below, I find this definition singularly evasive. It fails to indicate the extent to which the relationship between the domestic and international fronts of political battles in this era for CP members, allies, fellow-travelers were inseparable. Consider, for instance, the CPUSA's massive shift in approach during the notorious period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact (August 21, 1939 - June 22, 1941) from a militant non-interventionist stance in World War II to an equally militant pro-interventionist stance based solely on the dictates of Stalin's regime's needs. For a discussion of this see Isserman, Chs. 3-6. return

  32. Friedan, in a wonderfully evocative passage in Life So Far which combines candor with concealment, evades the question of party membership. She tells a colorful story about applying for party membership -- but never actually offers the punch line. She writes, "One day before I left for Berkeley, I looked up the address of the Communist party headquarters in New York and, on my day off from the hospital, went into their dark and dingy building on 13th Street and announced I wanted to become a member. The woman at the desk looked a little surprised. Maybe it was unusual for a well-dressed college girl, in Braemar twin sweater set, pumps and pearls, to come in out of the cold and announce she wants to be a communist, or maybe it was not. There was nothing illegal then in America, or even incriminating or subversive, about being a socialist or communist or Trotskyite. Of course, when I went home and told my parents, my father had a fit. ‘Is that what I sent my daughter to Smith for, to be a communist?' But I talked with such pseudo-sophistication then about everything. Using all those sexual words I'd now learned in psychology class, while still fighting the good backseat battle to keep my virginity intact." Friedan, Life, pp. 57-58. return

  33. Horowitz, pp. 11-12. Despite Horowitz's exaggerated definition the evidence is ambiguous here. Certainly, as mentioned later, Friedan appears to have been very preoccupied with a Soviet-American alliance for the post-war years. In addition, she wrote about the atom bomb and spying, calling for civilian control of the atom bomb. Moreover, she denied the existence of Soviet spying. She referred to "the smokescreen of the Canadian spy scare" (that is, the Gouzenko case) from which she spun the notion of a conspiracy being hatched to prevent the use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes. Horowitz, 116. return

  34. Horowitz, p. 115. return

  35. Horowitz, p. 109. return

  36. This is in the context of a discussion of Friedan's writing about the Congress of American Women "whose 1946 formation Friedan had helped announce in Federated Press. Horowitz refers to this as "the most important Popular Front organization of progressive women. It was the American branch of the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF)." Horowitz, p. 126. return

  37. Horowitz, p.144. return

  38. Horowitz, p. 150. return

  39. Horowitz, pp. 150-151. return

  40. David A. Hacker, "Jewish Life/Jewish Currents," in Encyclopedia of the American Left, Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas, eds. (New York & London: Garland, 1990). return

   

  

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