Coretta and Betty

I haven't written before now about the passing of either Coretta Scott King or Betty Friedan. Mary Ellen has been posting here about Friedan. In the case of King, the fact is that I don't know very much about her. She has been the most important living link to her justly famous husband. But I haven't even wanted to read much of the obituary material because I'm so sick of seeing the conventional-wisdom, defanged, postage-stamp version of King's career, which inevitably gets incorporated into such retrospectives.

This was a smart, gutsy guy, who not only was a key leader in mounting a successful challenge to the biggest blight on American democracy at home, Southern segregation. But he was also willing to take on the broader issue of poverty, which even the most fierce Democratic liberals are hesitant to touch today. And he challenged President Johnson's Vietnam War policy in a way that leave little doubt about what stand people who genuinely want to honor his memory would be taking about the Iraq War today.

Torture in the Bush Gulag? Illegal warrantless wiretapping (of which King himself was a victim)? Preventive war as a national policy and actual practice? Official claims of unlimited "national security" powers for the President? Anyone who takes the Republican Party line on those things or even mealy-mouths about them should choke when they try to praise Martin Luther King. To hell with phony platitudes about how MLK "had a dream" coming from the mouths of people to whom democratic dreams are entirely alien.

As for Betty Friedan, I do have a live impression of her from a few years ago when she appeared at a conference at my undergraduate alma mater, Millsaps College in Jackson MS which as I recall was in 2002. Its topic was the book Eve's Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History by Bob McElvaine, a former professor of mine who is now the chair of the history department there. Shoot, I even got to ride up in the elevator with her going to the auditorium! And I managed to refrain from saying, "Oh, gosh, you must be Betty Friedan!" or something similar.


I was impressed with her presentation, which focused on the need for earnings parity between men and women and social arrangements to allow both fathers and mothers to spend more time with their children. She said something that was news to me but stuck with me, that Australia had essentially achieved earning parity, and that their parental leave policies were the kind she would like to see in America and other developed countries. I haven't followed up to investigate the details of those factors in Australia; as always, I'm sure the issues are complicated and controversial.

She also made the point that we needed to reconceive work so that we "break out of the male model". Which in the context, I found intriguing. I'm willing to believe that there's a "male model" of work that could use modification. Unfortunately, she didn't elaborate on it.

Sadly, it was also evident at that point that her mental acuity was succumbing to the vagaries of age. She repeated the same arguments two and three times, apparently without realizing she was doing so. It's not that she was incoherent, far from it. It was just obvious that her mind was no longer operating at full capacity on all fronts.

Her emphasis on the social structures of work and her awareness of the ways in which class affects the relative status of men and women were things that I found particularly intriguing. (Dang, Dave, there's that "class" word again!) She seemed to have a broad and pragmatic views of policy goals.

I can't pretend to be very familiar with her larger life's work. Some of the press articles I saw, apparently relying on the lazy pseudo-"balance" methodology that has infected our Potemkin press corps, quoted people saying she denigrated motherhood in her famous book The Feminine Mystique. I'm not up on the polemics over that book. But that claim sounds to me like the typical rightwing airhead accusation that feminism is hostile to mothers and full-time homemakers. If that was any part of Friedan's perspective, I never saw it. And I certainly wouldn't assume that at all from that one live presentation where I saw her.

One part of The Feminine Mystique on which I did focus closely at one point several years ago was her chapter on Freud and psychoanalysis, which I viewed through a very critical lens. Although she included a disclaimer that her criticism was really more directly at the 1950s American psychoanalysts, she put her arguments in the form of a polemic against Freud's works, arguing that he persistently denigrated women.

One of my favorite cultural themes to follow is the academic criticisms of Freud, which seem to go through various fads. And those fads seem remarkably divorced from the medical aspects of his work. Not many medical textbooks from the first half of the 20th century are considered current today. And the same thing is of course true for Freud and his work. For instance, the question of "clitoral orgasm" versus "vaginal orgasm", the latter of which Freud thought to be (to grossly oversimplify) the accurate understanding seems to have been medically settled in favor of the former. Freud himself expected that chemical solutions, i.e., psychopharmalogical medicines, would largely supplant the kind of therapy he practiced. Although he was scarcely lacking in self-confidence about his arguments, he would probably be quite surprised at how much of his work has survived in recognizable form.

The academic fads are a whole other thing. In the 1960s, in significant part because of Friedan's argument, the prevailing fad seemed to be that Freud's whole theoretical framework was oppressive to women, which understandably often got boiled down in transmission to "Freud hated women". His famous question, "Was will das Weib?" was taken as an obvious example of this. The most common English translation seems to be "What does a woman want?", although I would translate it, "What does the female want?" ("Weib" in recent decades has come to be considered an old-fashioned and in some contexts an insulting word for "female", which it was not in Freud's time; the adjective form "weiblich" is the normal usage still and so far as I'm aware doesn't have any pejorative implication.)

This theory eventually faded out, though these things never seem to die out completely. A large part of this was due to female psychoanalysts like Juliet Mitchell who pointed out the extent to which psychoanalysis had exposed claims of "natural" roles for men and women as largely social constructions which could be questioned and changed. Also, the notion that Freud somehow denigrated women, much less hated them, hardly holds up to biographical scrutiny. Some of his closest friends, including his daughter Anna, were women who definitely did not fit the Phyllis Schafley model of proper womanhood.

His famous question "Was will das Weib?" was in a letter to Marie Bonaparte, a French princess who he had trained as a psychoanalyst. Her precise response is unknown, though she did write a book called Female Sexuality. Another woman he trained as an analyst and with whom both he and his daughter Anna were close friends was Lou Andreas-Salomé, a Russian woman who was a pioneering feminist writer in the 19th century. She had also been close friends with the philosopher Nietzsche and the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. (Okay, she was a bit more than friends with Rilke.) Altogether, I would say she was one of the most interesting women of the 19th and the 20th century.

If you subscribe to the electronic edition of the New York Review of Books or want to spring for $3.00 to read it, this article from the 10/03/74 issue provides a look at that particular academic fad and why it was fading by then: Freud and Women by Christopher Lasch.

The Freud fads moved on. The next fad that took prominance was that Freud was a wicked sinner because he had ignored claims of childhood sexual abuse from his female clients and built his central libido theory on that basis and therefore his entire psychoanalytic theory was tainted at the source. Or something like that. This line of argument was particularly associated with Jeff Masson. All of the academic fad theories generally included accusations that Freud was malicious and despicable in various ways.

That dog didn't hunt very well, either. For one thing, Freud did take the sexual abuse claims seriously. And his work opened new avenues to understanding that problem, including the lifelong damage that childhood sexual abuse did to the victims.

So the next big fad was in some ways just the opposite. Frederick Crews seemed to be the leading promoter of this one. In Crews' view, none of those claims from Freud's female patients about childhood sexual abuse should have been taken seriously. In fact, all of this sex stuff mostly came from Freud's own dirty mind. (This was kind of coming full circle back to Freud's time when critics said his theories about sex came from his filthly Jewish imagination.) And because Freud gave such weight to wild fantasies, he was responsible for more recent abuses in "regression" therapy to undercover "multiple personality disorders". And also for the people who claimed they had been abducted by UFOs.

Frederick Crews' hack writing on Freud doesn't rise anywhere close to Friedan's serious and scholarly criticism of psychoanalysis, even though I differ with her conclusions on that particular subject. And, no, I didn't try to argue with her about Freud when I saw her at that presentation!