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lot […] The labor newspaper jobs I didn’t consider career at all. They were just something I could do,
liked doing’’. 15
The interpretation offered by Horowitz has always been rejected by the author, representing an
unauthorized biography but at the same time an essential resource for better understanding the
political trajectory of Betty Friedan’s life.
‘’never intended to write a memoir about my so‐called life’’, affirmed Friedan in the
opening of her autobiography, ‘’but my hand was forced when my family and my friends
told me a few years ago that they were being contacted for interviews for books other
people were writing about my life.’’ 16
To provoke such strong words, Daniel Horowitz had undoubtedly succeeded in touching some
hot spots. Certainly Friedan wanted to avoid the extremely concrete danger to be involved in
McCarthyism repression, shifting her feminist commitment on a less risky and politicized ground, and
picking up the analytical legacy of American social critics like David Riesman, Vance Packard and
William H. Whyte. Focusing on themes like the working conformism, the social eterodirection, the
effects of mass society and the psychological alienation, Friedan interpreted the ‘’problem that has
no name’’ as a sort of identity and maturity crisis. Was feminism to be realized through individual
transformation (and consequent sociopolitical change) or through a sociopolitical struggle that
creates the conditions for individual transformation? The tension between the individual
transformation and the sociopolitical dimension wasn’t questioned by Friedan. Leaving a Marxist and
racial based analysis – particularly attentive to the superstructures of power and exploitation, and
thus to the conditions of working‐class women and black women – Friedan decided to focus on the
life of suburban white educated middle‐class women.
The challenges of the new radical and multiracial feminisms: Betty Friedan’s liberal discourse
under accusation
Choosing an elitist subject, probably more close to her social class and cultural backgrounds,
Friedan confirmed in somehow what she had always stated in interviews: her point of view has
always been that of a white bourgeois intellectual, a sympathizer of radical struggles whose political
reflection was never been integrated with a direct radical action.
Can we actually consider The Feminine Mystique ‘’the revolutionary manifesto of women's
liberation’’, as it was by many defined? 17 Was Friedan’s liberal analysis deliberately based on a
primary exclusion according to class, “race” and sexual orientation, and so purified from the
discomforts which the evaluation of these critical factors would have involved?
Feminist thinking has grown and developed enormously since 1963. Issues of working class
women and women of color – African‐American, Native‐American, Asian‐American, and Hispanic
women – were raised by their own movements. Differences erupted. 18 The challenge of the new
Radical and Multiracial Feminisms of ‘70s put powerfully under accusation Betty Friedan’s feminist
discourse, stressing the limits of her liberal‐white‐middleclass political vision. 19 The Feminine
Mystique was strongly contested on a historiographical ground through a new feminist epistemology,
which considered the intersectionality of “race”, class and sex as an essential analytical starting point.
The political order in '50s was redrawing the boundaries of the feminine mystique − a white political
order which wanted to expel any conflict of class, “race”, ethnicity and gender − was paradoxically
saved by Friedan, whose analysis didn’t question the roots of the American liberal‐democratic
system. Trying to solve the contradiction of women’s exclusion within a liberal political discourse – of
which she partly shared language and values – and trying to reconcile a new proposal for feminine
subjectivity, Friedan failed to unsettle the production and reproduction of those power dynamics
that she was putting under accusation, not bringing to extreme consequences the fact that the
deconstruction of the model of the feminine mystique would have necessarily to conflict with the
process of ideological construction at the base of the liberal‐democratic order. The criticism that she