Betty Friedan and Erma Bombeck

I was feeling melancholy over the weekend when I read that Betty Friedan had passed away. I was not one of the women for whom she wrote The Feminine Mystique, and in fact, was not born until three years after it was published. But I am a woman for whom its effects still resonate.

I never knew a world in which feminism and the so-called "women's liberation movement" did not exist. It was outside my consciousness during the movements biggest years in the sixties and seventies, of course, but it was already affecting my life in ways I wouldn't understand for years to come.

My mother stayed home to raise children, as did most women of her generation. She married in 1959, left college to help support my father, and had the first of her five children early in 1962. Mine was a sterotypical suburban childhood of the 1970s, with a stay-home mother, a father who worked in an office, and a house with a backyard on a tree-lined street. Never once, though, when I had my childish dreams of what I would do when I grew up, did I find myself limited to secretary, nurse, teacher, wife and mother. I knew I wanted to get married, and I knew I wanted to have children. At the same time, I knew I wanted to go to college, write books, practice law, become a psychologist, own an advertising agency, live in a penthouse in Manhattan, be a diplomat, report television news, and paint on canvas.

Though my mother was not part of "the women's liberation movement," she nevertheless knew and somehow communicated to her daughters that we could do or be anything. I don't remember any specific conversations where she laid these things out to us; somehow we just knew.

The name Betty Friedan didn't mean much to me until, as a teenager, I was reading one of my mother's Erma Bombeck books and Erma made reference to her. Erma evidently had something of an identity crisis when she turned forty in the late 1960s, suffering from what Friedan had termed "the problem with no name." By the time I was moved in my teens to learn more about the subject, The Feminine Mystique was considered quaint, and perhaps no longer relevant to the times.

If talking about it was good enough for Erma Bombeck, albeit in her self-deprecating humorous way, it was good enough for me. Erma Bombeck did, and still does, have a place of high regard with me. I loved her.

I don't live the life of the mid-century housewives Betty Friedan had interviewed in research for her first book. My title of "Space Age Housewife" has more to do with my nostalgic fondness for the good and happy parts of an admittedly difficult era gone by. It's my tongue-in-cheek poke at the happily domestic new-and-improved-scrubbed-with-bleach-squeaky-clean-freshly-baked-cookies side of my personality, a side undoubtedly developed from the subconscious longing to provide my children with the same contented homelife I enjoyed as a child. I am The Space Age Housewife, but I almost certainly operate in a more egalitarian partnership with my husband than almost any housewife of fifty-plus years ago. I have credit and financial assets in my own name. I do not defer to my husband as the head of household: together we operate as heads of the household, each of us shouldering our share of the responsiblities and burdens, and each of us sharing in the rewards of our marriage, household, and family. I've been a mother who works out of the home. I've been a mother who works inside the home. I've done these things as my choices and never because someone said, by virtue of my femaleness, that I had to do these things.

Friedan once said, “For a great many women, choosing motherhood makes motherhood itself a liberating choice."

Women of my generation follow life paths by choice, more choice than ever was available to many of our forbears. Betty Friedan is just one women of many who have blazed that path for us.

That's why now, I'm raising my glass to Betty Friedan, who left this world two days ago, and to Erma Bombeck who left this world ten years gone. Both of them will live forever in my heart.