Carl and Betty Friedan divorced after 22 years of marriage. Carl vigorously disputed that he was abusive toward his wife.

CARL FRIEDAN, the husband of feminist icon Betty Friedan, was so incensed by her claims that she was an abused spouse that he responded in a website of his own. (Carl, who worked in advertising, died in 2005 and Betty died in 2006). Here from that website is an account of an evening Carl and Betty spent together in 1966 when they were still married. I do not post this to gloat over Friedan’s personal problems or the sad state of their marriage, but as one bit of evidence that she was not the normal suburban housewife she claimed to be when she wrote her famous book The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, and that her fanatical belief in ambition and the overthrow of traditional sex roles does not lead to human happiness. By the way, Betty admitted on national television that she had mischaracterized their marriage. From Carl’s account:

A really terrible episode occurred when in late summer of 1966 we made a weekend visit to my parents in Sharon, Mass. where my father had retired and established a four-acre blueberry farm. It was more of a hobby than anything else. And quite an attraction for his grandchildren. He would squint up at you with his good eye and show off his quarter-size blueberries with great pride. Nets covered about two acres of blueberry bushes. And a small third-acre pond, stocked with fish, was home to a small flat bottom rowboat.

The house, which he had built himself, was cramped and uncomfortable so this trip we stayed at a motel on Route 1, a main highway, about three miles from the farm. It was an old-fashioned kind of motel consisting of a row of small self-standing bungalows. Our two younger children, Emily and Jonathan were with us – they were then 10 and 14.

Saturday night we left the kids at the motel to have dinner with an old friend of mine and his wife from Hingham, an historic New England town about twenty miles from Sharon. Bob Siegel was a college classmate when we were at the Mass State, now the University of Massachusetts. He and his wife Dottie met us at a restaurant in Braintree halfway between Sharon and Hingham. The dinner was very enjoyable and the company lovely.

Bob and Dottie had just returned from Yugoslavia where he had been invited by the government to confer with the blueberry commissar of that country. Bob was in the frozen food business, one of his specialties being blueberries. (It’s just a coincidence that my father was also “in blueberries.”) Bob would buy up whole fields of them in Maine and Nova Scotia for the frozen food market.

At dinner that night he regaled us with a story of their trip. They had met the Yugoslav blueberry commissar in Dubrovnik, a landmark tourist town on the Adriatic Sea. But Bob could not talk Yugoslavian and the commissar could not talk English so they decided to meet the next day with a translator. The commissar arrived at the meeting on the following day with a volunteer translator in tow. It turned out to be Nikita Khrushchev, former Russian Premier who had been deposed by that time and was vacationing on an island near Dubrovnik. It was an exciting story that made the dinner memorable. It could not have been pleasanter. And there was little drinking.

After coffee and bill paying we said our goodbyes. We got in our car on the parking lot outside the restaurant and I started driving onto the highway back to the motel when Betty suddenly started screaming at me, “You never took me to Europe…you cheap sonofabitch, you never took me to Europe”. I remember those words distinctly – they are etched in my brain because this episode was the most harrowing of any I have ever experienced in my life.

There had been no time for any argument to develop. We had little if any conversation in the interval between leaving the restaurant and reaching the car. This was truly spontaneous combustion.

The meaning of what she screamed is difficult to recall because it came out of her in such uncontrollable frenzied bursts. None of it made sense.
I slowed down and tried to calm her. “For Christsakes, Betty, stop this, stop this. What is this about?” But she was beyond logic . She was raging about this Europe thing, completely out of control.

With no letup in her fury she suddenly propped her back against the passenger side door and started kicking me furiously – while I was speeding along the highway. Then she lunged at my face with her nails. I felt my shirt being ripped and my chest bloodied.

That’s how these fits usually happened – right out of the blue. Then, suddenly she opened the car door and threatened to jump out. “I’m getting out of this car”, she yelled. That was a scenario I had become use to, her opening the passenger side door while I was driving – it had happened a number of times before.
This was sheer hell – here I am with my hands on the wheel, driving through the darkness, being furiously attacked by a raging woman, and the passenger door hanging out by its hinges. I managed somehow to hold her off with my right hand and to hold on to the wheel with my left. This is how I made my way back to the motel.

The moment I stopped in front of our bungalows she rushed out of the car running up and down the highway shrieking wildly. I went looking for her for fear she could get killed by the speeding cars, but lost track of her in the pitch black of the night.

I was standing by the curb peering into the darkness when suddenly she reappeared and started mauling me all over again with her claws. I fended her off, pushing her away as I did during these fits. That’s how she acquired her “black eyes”, just being pushed away. Eyes and faces are easily bruised. It doesn’t take much, Just pushing her away can do it. It’s like ribs — it just takes a few pounds of pressure to crack a rib. In her case I often had to use some force simply to contain her.

— Comments —

S. K. writes:

Good post on Miz Friedan. However, you’ve cited her book as “The Feminist Mystique,” and it should be “feminine.” Sorry to be an editing Nazi….

Laura writes:

Thank you for the correction!! I have changed it. I like editing Nazis. (Shouldn’t it be ‘Editing Nazis,’ in caps?)

I should have written The Feminist Mistake. Some typos are better than others. : – )

William James Tychonievich:

Yes, it should definitely be “Editing Nazis,” in caps. “I like editing Nazis” makes it sound as if your idea of a good time is composing a critical introduction and footnotes for Mein Kampf.

Laura writes:

I don’t think S.K. is a Nazi.

He is not an editing Nazi, but an Editing Nazi.

I like Editing Nazis, not editing Nazis, which would be a thankless job.

Zeno writes:

From Carl Friedan’s former website in your link:

“Before you continue on my website, know this: I am incensed about misleading allegations of spousal abuse made by my ex-wife, Betty Friedan. They are all delusions, but in challenging these flights of fantasy I carefully make a huge divide between, one, her historical role in leading the feminist cause and, two, her current revamping of our personal history. I am proud of what she did for the world, but am appalled by her misrepresenting our personal family past with outright falsehoods just to satisfy her own legacy.  (…)

Betty being monstrous in the pursuit of her goals doesn’t bother me at all. She changed the course of history almost singlehandedly and it took a “monster” perhaps, a driven, super-aggressive, egocentric, almost lunatic dynamo to rock the world the way she did. Unfortunately, she was that same person at home, where this kind of conduct doesn’t work. She simply never understood this.”

So, despite all her lies and manipulation and the personal problems they had in their marriage, he is still “proud of what she did for the world” and “her historical role in leading the feminist cause”. He doesn’t care about how she affected (negatively) thousands of other marriages, he’s just worried about his own reputation. It’s just amazing.

By the way, I realize now, reading Wikipedia, that Carl’s original surname was the more common Friedman, which was changed to “Friedan”, and that’s why she became “Betty Friedan” (her maiden name is Goldstein) and not Friedman. I wonder, did he change the name at her request, so the surname wouldn’t have the word “man” in it? Or some other reason? It’s a curious change.

Anyway, it’s very clear that Betty had “issues”, even other feminists did not get along so well with her (see here). In her own words, “The truth is that I’ve always been a bad-tempered bitch” (Wikipedia)

Laura writes:

Thanks.

Carl would have a vested interest, of course, in promoting her work, which brought in lots of money, and even though they were divorced it would probably benefit their three children.

By the way, he deleted his website after it drew a lot of attention. As far as I know, he never repudiated its content.

I’d be curious to know when that name change was made.

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