The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [55]
The women and men who started that revolution anticipated “no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation and ridicule.” And they got it. The first to speak out in public for women’s rights in America—Fanny Wright, daughter of a Scotch nobleman, and Ernestine Rose, daughter of a rabbi—were called respectively, “red harlot of infidelity” and “woman a thousand times below a prostitute.” The declaration at Seneca Falls brought such an outcry of “Revolution,” “Insurrection Among Women,” “The Reign of Petticoats,” “Blasphemy,” from newspapers and clergymen that the faint-hearted withdrew their signatures. Lurid reports of “free love” and “legalized adultery” competed with phantasies of court sessions, church sermons and surgical operations interrupted while a lady lawyer or minister or doctor hastily presented her husband with a baby.
At every step of the way, the feminists had to fight the conception that they were violating the God-given nature of woman. Clergymen interrupted women’s-rights conventions, waving Bibles and quoting from the Scriptures: “Saint Paul said…and the head of every woman is man”…“Let your women be silent in the churches, for it is not permitted unto them to speak”…“And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home; for it is a shame for women to speak in the church”…“But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence; for Adam was first formed, then Eve”…“Saint Peter said: likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands”…
To give women equal rights would destroy that “milder gentler nature, which not only makes them shrink from, but disqualifies them for the turmoil and battle of public life,” a Senator from New Jersey intoned piously in 1866. “They have a higher and a holier mission. It is in retiracy to make the character of coming men. Their mission is at home, by their blandishments, and their love, to assuage the passions of men as they come in from the battle of life, and not themselves by joining in the contest to add fuel to the very flames.”
“They do not appear to be satisfied with having unsexed themselves, but they desire to unsex every female in the land,” said a New York assemblyman who opposed one of the first petitions for a married woman’s right to property and earnings. Since “God created man as the representative of the race,” then “took from his side the material for woman’s creation” and returned her to his side in matrimony as “one flesh, one being,” the assembly smugly denied the petition: “A higher power than that from which emanates legislative enactments has given forth the mandate that man and woman shall not be equal.”4
The myth that these women were “unnatural monsters” was based on the belief that to destroy the God-given subservience of women would destroy the home and make slaves of men. Such myths arise in every kind of revolution that advances a new portion of the family of man to equality. The image of the feminists as inhuman, fiery man-eaters, whether expressed as an offense against God or in the modern terms of sexual perversion, is not unlike the stereotype of the Negro as a primitive animal or the union member as an anarchist. What the sexual terminology hides is the fact that the feminist movement was a revolution. There were excesses, of course, as in any revolution, but the excesses of the feminists were in themselves