Book of Awesome Women Writers. Becca Anderson
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But Betty knew that she and the millions of women like her were not sick, just stifled. Betty had put aside her dream of being a psychologist for fear of becoming a spinster, instead choosing to marry and work for a small newspaper. She was fired from her job when she got pregnant for the second time and began, like most middle-class women of her day and age, to devote herself full-time to the work of running a home and family, what she called “the dream life, supposedly, of American women at that time.”
But, after a decade of such devotion, she still wasn’t happy and theorized that she wasn’t alone. A graduate of Smith College, she decided to poll her fellow alumnae. Most of her classmates who had given up promising careers to devote themselves to their families felt incomplete; many were deeply depressed. They felt guilty for not being completely content sacrificing their individual dreams for their families, each woman certain that her dissatisfaction was a personal failing. Betty called this “the problem that has no name,” and she gave it one, “the feminine mystique.”
Over the next five years, her rejected article evolved into a book as she interviewed hundreds of women around the country. The Feminine Mystique explored the issue of women’s lives in depth, criticizing American advertisers’ exclusively domestic portrayal of women and issuing a call to action for women to say no to the housewife role and adopt “a new life plan” in which they could have both families and careers. With its publication in 1963, The Feminine Mystique hit America like a thunderbolt; publisher W.W. Norton had printed only two thousand copies, never anticipating the sale of three million hardcover copies alone.
Unintentionally, Betty had started a revolution. She was flooded with letters from women saying her book had given them the courage to change their lives and advocate for equal access to employment opportunities and other equality issues. Ultimately, the response to Betty’s challenge created the momentum that led to the formalization of the second wave of the US women’s movement in 1966 with the formation of NOW, the National Organization for Women.
Betty was NOW’s first president and took her role as a leader in the women’s movement seriously, traveling to give lectures and take part in campaigns for change, engendering many of the freedoms women now enjoy. She pushed for equal pay for equal work, equal job opportunities, and access to birth control and legalized abortion. In 1970, she quit NOW to fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, and in 1975, was named Humanist of the Year. Of her, author Barbara Seaman wrote, “Betty Friedan is to the women’s movement what Martin Luther King was to blacks.”
In 1981, responding to critics who claimed feminism ignored the importance of relationships and families to most women, she penned The Second Stage, in which she called on men and women to work together to make the home and the workplace havens for both genders. Betty made another revolution with her 2006 book, The Fountain of Age, raising consciousness about society’s stereotypes about aging decades after she had, as futurist Alvin Toffler so aptly put it, “pulled the trigger of history” with The Feminine Mystique. And she didn’t stop there, but went on to advocate for better balance between work and family life with her book Beyond Gender: The New Politics of Work and Family, as well as finding time to pen a memoir, Life So Far. Betty passed away at home in 2006 due to a heart attack on her eighty-fifth birthday, but her life continues to inspire women the world over.
It’s been a lot of fun making the revolution.
Betty Friedan
TONI MORRISON the truest eye
Toni Morrison comes from small-town, working-class Ohio, a state that fell “between” on the Civil War issue of slavery, a state with many stops along the underground railroad, and a state where many crosses burned “neither plantation nor ghetto.” She has made this her canvas for her rich, original stories that dare tell uncomfortable truths. And for her daring, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Born in 1931 as Chloe Anthony Wofford, Toni and her parents worked hard as sharecroppers in their adopted Northern home of Lorain, Ohio. She was keenly interested in language as a child and loved hearing ghost stories, songs, and thundering sermons at church. After high school, she attended Howard University and graduated at the age of twenty-two, following that with a master’s program at Cornell. Her thesis paper examined the theme of suicide in the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. She began teaching at Howard and met and married a Jamaican architect, Harold Morrison, with whom she had two sons, Harold Ford and Slade. The marriage was short-lived, and Toni took the children and moved to Syracuse, and then later to New York City, where she was hired by Random House as senior editor. She worked on several major Black autobiographies of the time, including those of Black Power revolutionary Angela Davis and world champion boxer Muhammed Ali.
As a writer, Toni Morrison made an immediate mark upon America’s literary landscape with The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, and Sula, published three years later. Her next book, Song of Solomon, won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in 1978. In 1983, she left Random House to devote herself full-time to writing and spent the next five years writing Beloved, the fantastical and tragic story of ex-slave Sethe and her children.
Her writing focuses on Black women who had previously been ignored. Her lyrical language combines with both realistic and mythic plot elements to create a distinctive style all her own. In 1993, Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature; she was the first Black American to do so. She said, “I am outrageously happy. But what is most wonderful for me personally is to know that the prize has been awarded to an African American. Winning as an American is very special—but winning as a Black American is a knockout.”
Had I loved the life that the state planned for me from the beginning, I would have lived and died in somebody else’s kitchen.
Toni Morrison, in a speech to the International Literary Congress in New York
Ink in Their Veins
Theories of Relativity
Some women seem to have writing talent encoded in their DNA. This is especially true of several “literary dynasties” wherein several family members are extraordinarily gifted, each with a voice uniquely his or her own. How does this happen? Do the gods (and goddesses) look down from above and occasionally say, “Hmmm, let’s endow this family with writing genius through the end of time”? Or can a special relationship with the Muses can be arranged and passed down from generation to generation?
Certainly, these creative kin have some strange magic in remarkable quantity. To wit, just two examples: the legacy of the Brontë lineage hasn’t faded with time; new editions of books and films of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are released every few years like clockwork. Stateside, their doppelgängers, the Grimké sisters, were stirring up hot controversy with virulent abolitionist texts that helped ignite the Civil War.
Bonded by blood and shelved side by side, the women profiled here are invariably very different from each other. But they all have one thing in common: a love of the written word.
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up by themselves like grass.
Eudora Welty
THE BRONTËS scribbling sisters
The Brontë sisters were originally a troupe of five girls born in the early 1800s in a rural parsonage in Yorkshire, England.