Death of a revolutionary: remembering Betty Friedan.

A few words about Betty Friedan, whose death in February at 85 brought a deeply troubled era to its natural conclusion.

By all accounts, Friedan was an unhappy woman. Which is probably why, like so many other 20th century revolutionaries, she projected the personal onto the public. Having convinced herself that her unhappiness was caused by the "suppression" of women, it therefore followed that "liberation" was the solution. The result was The Feminine Mystique, her 1963 manifesto which took North American women by storm and launched the so-called "women's movement."

In the book, Friedan asserted that women had fallen victim to a phony system of values that glorified the role of wife/mother and which urged them to find their identities and fulfillment through their husbands and children, to whom they were expected to devote their lives.

Friedan argued that women should be able to stop living vicariously and forge separate identities as individuals, a revolutionary concept amid the baby boom and suburban sprawl of the 1950s and 1960s.

"A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, 'Who am I, and what do I want out of life?' She mustn't feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children," argued Friedan, in what appears to have been a bid to assuage her own conscience.

The Feminine Mystique sold 600,000 copies in hardcover and more than two million in paperback. Its message was subversive and ubiquitous, appearing in newspapers, magazines, radio interviews and TV talk shows and contending that frustrated women were suffering from "the problem with no name" and were treating it by downing tranquillizers "like cough drops."

And millions of women bought it. Yet, in the rush to leave their homes, get jobs and consign their children to daycare, few questioned Friedan's assumptions about the nature of female anxiety and its true source. So it was that Friedan went on to become one of the strident voices of American feminism.

In 1966, she co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) and became its first president. In 1968, she helped found the National Conference for Repeal of Abortion Laws, which became the National Abortion Rights Action League. And in 1969, she divorced her husband Carl Friedan after 22 years of marriage.

In the following decades, Friedan taught at New York University and University of Southern California, while lecturing widely and continuing to write, though even she was forced to admit she didn't approve of the lesbian direction feminism was taking. "Some people thought I said, 'Women ... you have nothing to lose but your men,'" she said. "It's not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners."

Her rueful observations didn't matter. Pandora had been let out of the box. Friedan had struck a chord with many discontented women who similarly imagined that feminist manna would satisfy what was really their spiritual hunger. And, like the mischief wrought by other female revolutionaries of the 20th century--Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Margaret Mead and Madlyn Murray O'Hair come to mind--the consequences have been vast and negative. By wrongly viewing women as victims, Friedan became the outspoken voice behind the devaluation of women as wives and mothers, leaving the family--the essential building block of all societies--without solid societal support.

Divorce-on-demand left untold millions of North American kids bereft. Friedan's lament that "morality doesn't have anything to do with what two people do in bed" reduced male-female relationships to a matter of disease prevention.

Premarital sex has led to impoverished and exhausted single mothers rocking the baby, paying the rent and spending countless hours with social workers and officers of the court over their at-risk children.

The devaluation of home and hearth has also led to millions of women being denied an opportunity for marriage and family while late-marrying couples spend billions on fertility treatments desperately hoping to have a child in a culture where more than 50 million North American babies have already been aborted.

Some legacy.

All because Friedan, like so many other revolutionaries, wrongly identified the root of her unhappiness, rejected the natural role of suffering in every human life and put her faith in human solutions rather than in God. Which, like every attempt to overturn the natural law, is doomed to failure and untold misery.

The truth is that most unhappiness lies in the indifference to or the rejection of God and His divine plan--a simple fact which eludes the festering complexities and restless spirit of the revolutionary mind.

Paula Adamick is a professional journalist. She writes from London, England where she publishes the monthly Canada Post.