JOHN LEO'S BLOG

A blizzard of bludgeoning phone calls became routine. To Betty, the notion that last-minute changes should cost more money seemed outlandish. Construction delays were a personal affront. Her idea of negotiation was to raise the decibel level and make the same objection over and over until the architect gave in. Why didn't people just give her what she wanted?

It didn't take much imagination to see that Betty's temperament had something to do with her loss of control over the group she had been the central figure in founding, the National Organization for Women. But there was another reason. The feminist movement was turning more radical and antimale. Betty had an elitist and radical past herself, including a love affair with communism. But she never considered men the enemy.

She wanted equality and an end to barriers and pressures that kept women in the home or in low-level jobs. In 1969 she famously referred to lesbianism as "the lavender menace." She was leery of homosexuality and leery, too, of the possibility that gay women — with no need to come to terms with men for purposes or forming a family — would take over the feminist movement and turn it increasingly antimale.

She was right to worry. Among the high-profile feminists who took over, few were married and virtually all were extraordinarily hostile to men. Robin Morgan, author of many books and for a time editor of Ms. magazine, said, "I feel that man-hating is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right of class hatred against the class that is oppressing them."

So the battle lines changed. Instead of feminists, both female and male, who wanted fairness and equality for women, it was the women against the men. By the time Friedan wrote The Second Stage in 1985, her message — that women have to work out a new deal with men, not treat them as a permanent enemy — was way too late. Feminist leadership was outraged that Friedan thought feminism should attend more closely to families.

The conservative call for "family values" made it easy for the leadership to discredit Friedan's book as a capitulation to Republicans and the antifeminist backlash. Besides, the radicals considered her bourgeois view an impediment to changing the entire culture. Ellen Willis wrote that feminism is "not just an issue or a group of issues; it is the cutting edge of a revolution in cultural and moral values." A new deal with men would impede the revolution.

After The Second Stage failed to make an impact, Friedan essentially retired from the fray, writing about other issues, such as old age, and refraining from criticizing the dominant feminism of the day. Every now and then, I asked her what she thought of the oppression model of feminism and all the antimale writing. She would always say something like, "Oh, there are many kinds of feminism and all should be heard from." She seemed blunt and straightforward on every topic but this one. As the elder stateswoman of the movement, she was determined not to pick any more fights with the leaders, particularly because they had the ear of the media. Feminism took a wrong turn in the mid-'70s, and, like everyone else, she had to come to terms with it. But she couldn't adopt the mandatory antimale pose.

"I thought once," she said, "about what should be put on my gravestone":

She helped make women feel better about being women and therefore better able to freely and fully love men.