Why do political “progressives” feel the need to lie so regularly about who they are? The question is an old one, but is newly prompted by a biography of feminist leader Betty Friedan, which establishes beyond doubt that the woman who virtually created modern feminism is a political imposter. In her path-breaking book, The Feminine Mystique, Friedan presented herself as a typical suburban housewife not “even conscious of the woman question” before she began work on her manuscript. But now Smith professor Daniel Horowitz (no relation) has shown that nothing could be further from the truth. Under her maiden name, Betty Goldstein, the record reveals that Friedan was a political activist and professional propagandist for the Communist left for nearly thirty years before the 1963 publication of The Feminist Mystique launched the modern feminist movement.

Betty Friedan’s secret was, of course, shared by hundreds of her comrades on the left, who went along with her charade presumably in order to assist her political agendas with the unsuspecting American public. As Horowitz’ biography makes clear, Friedan, from her college days and until her mid-thirties, was a Stalinist Marxist (or a camp follower thereof), the political intimate of leaders of America’s Cold War fifth column, and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects with J. Robert Oppenheimer. Not at all a neophyte when it came to “the woman question” (the phrase itself is a Marxist construction), she was certainly familiar with the writings of Engels, Lenin and Stalin on the subject and had written about it herself as a journalist for the official publication of the Communist-controlled United Electrical Workers union. These newly disclosed facts suggest that the histories of feminism, including some written by other veterans of the Communist movement like Eleanor Flexner and Gerda Lerner, apparently another Party alumna, need to be re-examined, just to get the record straight.

– Hating Whitey

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Related posts:

1. From the Interviews of David Horowitz: January 5, 2010
2. From the Speeches of David Horowitz: January 12, 2010
3. From the Pen of David Horowitz: January 3, 2010