People misread Betty Friedan in opposition to Gloria Steinem. Steinem has always taken a harder line on most feminist issues (she's against pornography, for instance). And yet people preferred Steinem to Friedan always, thinking of her as less acerbic and less radical because she had her hair streaked and had beautiful long legs - basically because it was nice to think that a woman who didn't 'have' to be a feminist would choose to be one. People liked Steinem because she was pretty and disliked Friedan because she was so damn froglike, which is just fine by me: given the choice between someone aesthetically pleasing and someone else whose appearance is somewhere short of offensive, I will always take the former.
But we should not get their positions - which were essentially similar - confused on important matters. In the seventies, the president of one university actually said, when asked his position on feminism, 'I don't subscribe to the radical anti-male views of Betty Friedan, but I think I can be comfortable with Gloria Steinem's ideas.' If he'd just said, 'I like Gloria Steinem, she's got great legs,' he would have proved that at least he can see, even though he obviously cannot hear.
Elizabeth Wurtzel, Bitch - in praise of Difficult Women
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