The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [54]
Some of them—and even a few men who realized that half the human race was denied the right to become fully human—set out to change the conditions that held women in bondage. Those conditions were summed up by the first Woman’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, as woman’s grievances against man:
He has compelled her to submit to laws in the formation of which she has no voice…. He has made her, if married, in the eyes of the law, civilly dead. He has taken from her all right to property, even to the wages she earns…In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming to all intents and purposes her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement…. He closes against her all the avenues of wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine or law, she is not known. He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her…. He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account to man. He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God. He has endeavored in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
It was these conditions, which the feminists set out to abolish a century ago, that made women what they were—“feminine,” as it was then, and is still, defined.
It is hardly a coincidence that the struggle to free woman began in America on the heels of the Revolutionary War, and grew strong with the movement to free the slaves.1 Thomas Paine, the spokesman for the Revolution, was among the first to condemn in 1775 the position of women “even in countries where they may be esteemed the most happy, constrained in their desires in the disposal of their goods, robbed of freedom and will by the laws, the slaves of opinion…” During the Revolution, some ten years before Mary Wollstonecraft spearheaded the feminist movement in England, an American woman, Judith Sargent Murray, said woman needed knowledge to envision new goals and grow by reaching for them. In 1837, the year Mount Holyoke opened its doors to give women their first chance at education equal to man’s, American women were also holding their first national anti-slavery convention in New York. The women who formally launched the women’s rights movement at Seneca Falls met each other when they were refused seats at an anti-slavery convention in London. Shut off behind a curtain in the gallery, Elizabeth Stanton, on her honeymoon, and Lucretia Mott, demure mother of five, decided that it was not only the slaves who needed to be liberated.
Whenever, wherever in the world there has been an upsurge of human freedom, women have won a share of it for themselves. Sex did not fight the French Revolution, free the slaves in America, overthrow the Russian Czar, drive the British out of India; but when the idea of human freedom moves the minds of men, it also moves the minds of women. The cadences of the Seneca Falls Declaration came straight from the Declaration of Independence:
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that they have hitherto occupied…. We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.
Feminism was not a dirty joke. The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a stage of evolution far short of their human capacity. “The domestic function of woman does not exhaust her powers,” the Rev. Theodore Parker preached in Boston in 1853. “To