Talk:Betty Friedan

Headline text
I, but it'll be hard to keep it NPOV... I'm also a little dismayed that it doesn't mention her work with labor unions. That tends to get overlooked because she's so often portrayed as the epitome of bourgeoise feminism, so I think it's important for it to be concluded. I'll do some research on it and see what I can find. Leyanese 15:46, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Whoever made the claim Friedan plagiarized from The Second Sex doesn't know what he or she is talking about. Neither book is remotely similar. I am deleting the "plagiarism" reference because it's nonsense and reeks of somebody putting his or her point of view in the article.

WHICH "critics" make such a charge, praytell?

Cleanup
not encyclopedic, format problems. Jim62sch 22:36, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

Citations for Carl
While the accusations of wife-beating were in the news, Carl Friedan wrote numerous letters to editors, giving his side of the story. He also set up a website, www.carlfriedan.com, which contains all the letters that were published (with full citation details), as well as lots more information. The web site is now gone, but snippets of it can be found at various other places on the web, e.g. http://www.fathersforlife.org/feminism/truth_a_la_friedan.htm. The original web site is in the archive, e.g.

Articles can be selected from there for citation. (This is what I just did with the NY Post quotation.) --Daphne A 06:04, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

The description of the The Feminine Mystique has been vadalized. I would change it back to what it was before, but I am new to Wikipedia and unfamiliar with the interface.

Neutrality
The second paragraph of the gay/lesbian controversy does not seem to be in proper encyclopedia format; it is told dramatically, like a story, and it may be just me but it feels slightly biased. Can somebody who is good at identifying proper style and neutrality look at it? --Queenrani 02:46, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

This is a ridiculous article and laced very liberally with POV.

As mentioned in other posts, this article absolutely reeks with POV. Someone more experienced in that should check it out. Sephirothrr 19:58, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

The third par of the "Before 1963" chapter seems out of context, biased, and generally makes no sense, as grammar is poor. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 125.239.195.213 (talk) 00:38, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

"Breasts" quote
I could not find any source for this quote on "breast usage" on Google, save for pierretristam.com. Should we delete it? SuperGerbil 23:42, 3 June 2007 (UTC)


 * The pierretristam.com source says that it is from a speech called "Crisis in Women's Identity" in San Francisco in 1964. It looks like this speech is in a collection of Friedan's works called It Changed My Life, so it should be relatively easy to see whether or not the quoted line was in the speech. In my opinion, this makes it verifiable and it should be left in the article unless someone looks at the speech and finds it missing. Mike Dillon 03:58, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

The page says:

- [Betty Friedan] is said to have [citation needed] coined the anti-lesbian phrase "Lavender Menace"

Citation Tips:

"Betty Friedan, in 1970, raised the specter of a "lavender menace" in order to purge lesbians from the women's movement. [note 33: It was largely reported that Friedan had remarked that lesbian feminism were a "lavender menace" that would hurt the women's movement. The remark led to the eruption of the lesbian feminist movement, beginning with the twenty-member "Lavender Menace" that disrupted the Second Congress to Unite Women in 1970 (Schneir, 160).]" (Jacqueline Rhodes: Radical Feminism Writing, and Critical Agency - From Manifesto to Modem (2005) p. 34)

Cleanup tag
Article need to be put in chrono order. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 17:01, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Influence section
I took a first shot at cleaning up the Influence section (which was reading like it was extracted from a term paper) but it still needs a lot work. most of the section is not addressing the influence of Friedan's life and work, but the people who wrote books about her.

--Spaceanddeath (talk) 21:05, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

averse vs. adverse
Changing the quotation from "adverse" to "averse" is acceptable only if there's a source for the change. USA Today published "adverse". Our choices are to use the word in the source, to use the word in the source followed by "[sic]", to write brackets and an ellipsis, as in "[averse] ..." instead of "adverse", or to take the passage out of quotation marks and paraphrase it. While, going by the American Heritage Dictionary (3d ed.), averse is probably the word that better fits the context, adverse is not so far off that it is so unlikely to have been said. If another suggestion for Wikipedia comes up, fine. But we can't just substitute a word that's not in the source and surround it with quotation marks. And we can't act as her press agent, polishing after the fact to what she must have meant. I delayed restoring the "adverse" until I checked the USA Today text again, which I did online Wednesday night; but I verified the word. Even if Betty Friedan would have used "averse" in a carefully-drafted essay under her byline, we can't change the newspaper quotation on that basis alone. Suggestions are welcome. Nick Levinson (talk) 11:41, 27 October 2011 (UTC)


 * I got it from the article here; I now see that the author(s) of this article got it from the USA Today story (which I can't seem to locate; is it accessible only to USA Today subscribers?)  Whoever wrote the answers.com story did what I did and changed "adverse" to "averse" for its article. I suppose it should be changed back to "adverse" in the WP article to comply with the verifiability-trumps-correct-usage policy. I have no particular pro-Betty-Friedan agenda or bias. Blake Burba (talk) 12:09, 27 October 2011 (UTC)


 * I think it was in a ProQuest database, and that's a subscription service, but you may be able to use it for free at a public, academic, or institutional library. Where I live, one can get a free library card, including free access to most such databases including the one in which I found USA Today, provided that one lives, works, or studies somewhere in the state; one does not have to live where the library is located. Some databases, though not this one, are then accessible from outside the library via the Web. What's in answers.com for this is from Wikipedia, so it can't be used for Wikipedia.


 * Unless there's a post otherwise, what I'll do shortly is use "adverse [sic]" and add to the footnote that "averse" may possibly have been intended by Friedan.


 * Nick Levinson (talk) 23:38, 29 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Done. Nick Levinson (talk) 00:13, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

editing the lead April 23, 2013
I'm editing the lead's sentence that has been tagged with the Citation Needed template to conform the sentence to what the body already says with a citation. Since this article's lead does not have citations, I'm deleting the template and not replacing it with a citation; functionally, the citation is already in the body's Abortion Choice section. While the sentence originally spoke of tactics, I don't have a source specifically regarding tactics; and while it spoke of her objecting to abortion-centered tactics of radical feminists, I think her objection to radical feminists was to everything radical feminists stood for that differed from what liberal feminists sought, but I don't have a single source for it and I'm not going to spend time to collect various disparate sources, since much of her objection to radical feminism is already in the article, such as her objection, eventually tempered, against committed lesbianism. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:21, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

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Pronunciation
Presumably, she never clarified what the correct or preferred pronunciation of her name was? Or if she did, no one listened? 94.255.196.73 (talk) 12:30, 14 December 2021 (UTC)