Betty Friedan
Personality

The New York Times obituary for Friedan noted that she was "famously abrasive", and that she could be "thin-skinned and imperious, subject to screaming fits of temperament".

Media focus would fall on feminists grading each other on personality and appearance, the source of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem's well-documented antipathy. In February 2006, shortly after Friedan's death, the feminist writer Germaine Greer published an article in The Guardian, in which she described Friedan as pompous and egotistic, somewhat demanding and sometimes selfish, citing several incidents during a 1972 tour of Iran.

Betty Friedan "changed the course of human history almost single-handedly." Her ex-husband, Carl Friedan, believes this; Betty believed it too. This belief was the key to a good deal of Betty's behaviour; she would become breathless with outrage if she didn't get the deference she thought she deserved. Though her behaviour was often tiresome, I figured that she had a point. Women don't get the respect they deserve unless they are wielding male-shaped power; if they represent women they will be called "love" and expected to clear up after themselves. Betty wanted to change that forever.

Indeed, Carl Friedan had been quoted as saying "She changed the course of history almost singlehandedly. It took 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 that kind of conduct doesn't work. She simply never understood this."

Writer Camille Paglia, who had been denounced by Friedan in a Playboy interview, wrote a brief obituary for her in Entertainment Weekly:

Betty Friedan wasn't afraid to be called abrasive. She pursued her feminist principles with a flamboyant pugnacity that has become all too rare in these yuppified times. She hated girliness and bourgeois decorum, and never lost her earthly ethnicity.

The truth is that I've always been a bad-tempered bitch. Some people say that I have mellowed some. I don't know.

The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.
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