The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [61]
I am woman as well as physician…I understand now why this life has never been lived before. It is hard, with no support but a high purpose, to live against every species of social opposition…I should like a little fun now and then. Life is altogether too sober.13
In the course of a century of struggle, reality gave the lie to the myth that woman would use her rights for vengeful domination of man. As they won the right to equal education, the right to speak out in public and own property, and the right to work at a job or profession and control their own earnings, the feminists felt less reason to be bitter against man. But there was one more battle to be fought. As M. Carey Thomas, the brilliant first president of Bryn Mawr, said in 1908:
Women are one-half the world, but until a century ago…women lived a twilight life, a half life apart, and looked out and saw men as shadows walking. It was a man’s world. The laws were men’s laws, the government a man’s government, the country a man’s country. Now women have won the right to higher education and economic independence. The right to become citizens of the state is the next and inevitable consequence of education and work outside the home. We have gone so far; we must go farther. We cannot go back.14
The trouble was, the women’s rights movement had become almost too respectable; yet without the right to vote, women could not get any political party to take them seriously. When Elizabeth Stanton’s daughter, Harriet Blatch, came home in 1907, the widow of an Englishman, she found the movement in which her mother had raised her in a sterile rut of tea and cookies. She had seen the tactics women used in England to dramatize the issue in a similar stalemate: heckling speakers at public meetings, deliberate provocation of the police, hunger strikes in jail—the kind of dramatic non-violent resistance Gandhi used in India, or that the Freedom Riders now use in the United States when legal tactics leave segregation intact. The American feminists never had to resort to the extremes of their longer-sinned-against English counterparts. But they did dramatize the vote issue until they aroused an opposition far more powerful than the sexual one.
As the battle to free women was fired by the battle to free the slaves in the nineteenth century, it was fired in the twentieth by the battles of social reform, of Jane Addams and Hull House, the use of the union movement, and the great strikes against intolerable working conditions in the factories. For the Triangle Shirtwaist girls, working for as little as $6 a week, as late as 10 o’clock at night, fined for talking, laughing, or singing, equality was a question of more than education or the vote. They held out on picket lines through bitter cold and hungry months; dozens were clubbed by police and dragged off in Black Marias. The new feminists raised money for the strikers’ bail and food, as their mothers had helped the Underground Railroad.
Behind the cries of “save femininity,” “save the home,” could now be glimpsed the influence of political machines, quailing at the very thought of what those reforming women would do if they got the vote. Women, after all, were trying to shut down the saloons. Brewers as well as other business interests, especially those that depended on underpaid labor of children and women, openly lobbied against the woman’s suffrage amendment in Washington. “Machine men were plainly uncertain of their ability to control an addition to the electorate which seemed to them relatively unsusceptible to bribery, more militant and bent on disturbing reforms ranging from sewage control to the abolition of child labor and worst of all, ‘cleaning up’ politics.”15 And Southern congressmen pointed out that suffrage for