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貝蒂‧傅瑞丹(Betty Friedan)
2006/02/12 22:47
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為現代女性主義運動奠基的貝蒂‧傅瑞丹(Betty Friedan)4日在華府家中因心臟衰竭去世,享年85歲,當天正是她的生日。這位堪稱美國婦權運動祖師的殞落,無疑是女權運動歷史上重要的一頁。傅瑞丹曾在1963年發表《女性迷思》(The Feminine Mystique)一書,是美國戰後女性主義的先聲,復甦了當時社會認為已經消失殆盡或是不被需要的女性主義,該書其後引發的女性自覺與社會革命,也因此使傅瑞丹被尊稱為美國婦運之母。

雖然同工同酬、無性別差異的薪資等要求,現在看來很合理公平,但那些不分性別的徵才廣告、懷孕女性工作權、平等的專業學校入學標準、以及很更多其它現代理所當然的要求,在60年代,卻被視為女權運動者提出的充滿爭議性的激進要求。

年輕的讀者們也許會很訝異聽到這樣的事情。蘇珊‧雅克比(Susan Jacoby)就曾在洛杉磯時報中寫出自己的經歷:1965年,她才19歲,根本就還沒結婚生子,但為了在華盛頓郵報人事處那兒求得一個小記者的職位,必須在申請文書裡附上這樣的文章:現在她自己看都覺得詭異好笑,但文章的題目的確是「我將如何做個成功的職業母親」。

雅克比表示:「我總慶幸,在去華盛頓郵報面試之前拜讀過傅瑞丹的『女性迷思』。在那之前,我私心以為,外面那些女記者受到的不平等對待不會發生在我身上,她們必定是哪裡做錯了才會被卡在所謂的『社會階層』裡爬不上去。但若不是傅瑞丹在書中傳達的觀點,我一定早被當時面試主管的侮辱語氣嚇壞了,說不定會當場發飆,然後丟掉一個工作機會。幸虧我咬牙忍了過來。」她一邊寫著那篇莫名其妙的文章,一邊告訴自己:「我要成為一個可以改變所有對女性偏見和詆毀的女人!」

在傅瑞丹的葬禮上,她這輩子的好友阿米泰‧伊茲歐尼(Amitai Etzioni)透露,她任教的哥倫比亞大學社會系,在1962年前根本就沒有一位女教授能在那兒任職,她承認當時有幾名女學生修習哥倫比亞大學的課,但她們過得很辛苦,她們的存在不能讓太多人發現。

當社會對女性的許多歧視竟然是合法的,她們的日子是怎樣過的?許多年輕人都不知道答案,甚至不少40幾歲的成年人也不了解;就某些程度而言,他們的無知造成了現在女性在社會中的窘況。更嚴重的是,那些無知還會摧殘女權運動好不容易創下的先業,因為那些世代相傳的無知態度,只會讓錯誤的觀念一再地被重複傳習。

歷史上的確發生過那樣的事:第一波的美國女權運動原本關心的,不只是婦女同胞的投票權。經濟、教育、以及女性在宗教機構裡該有的平等都是女權先鋒揭竿起義要爭取的目標。1848年由路克瑞莎‧馬特(Lucretia Mott)和伊麗莎白‧凱迪‧斯坦頓(Elizabeth Cady Stanton)發起的塞內卡福爾斯感傷宣言與決議(Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions)就是當時轟烈一時的女權運動。當時最備受爭議的就是女性的宗教平等權,因為好幾個世紀以來,「女性注定次於男性」的概念一值是宗教宣揚的教義一部分。然而,事過境遷,雖然之後仍有激進的團體為女性發聲,大部分的焦點卻都只擺在女性的投票權上。

1892年,斯坦頓發表「女性的聖經」(The Woman's Bible),指出聖經文本充滿了大男人主義,質疑它對女性刻畫的適切性;雖然在當時造成大轟動,確同時也是個醜聞──由於她非正統的宗教觀點,斯坦頓從此被歷史除名,直到80年代新一代女性主義學者興起,她的著作才又被重新拿出來研究。71年後,傅瑞丹的「女性迷思」也同樣在女權運動史上寫下了具影響力、卻又富爭議性的一面。

富瑞丹是20世紀女性主義者的先鋒,她意在重建好幾個世紀以來的歷史、文化,清楚呈現女性一值以來被塑造成男性附屬的現象,並提出申明:「如果問題是大家的,那麼,答案就不該只有一個人去找。」

但傅瑞丹想傳達的訊息起先卻無法為大眾接受。1963年紐約時報的書評家露西‧費曼(Lucy Free-man)就曾批評她,因為這位女權運動者反對時下的女性雜誌。費曼表示:「一個關心國家及國際事務的女性愛看和那些主題有關的雜誌,妳制止她做什麼?套一句名言:『鑄下這個錯誤的是我們的文化,不是我們自己呀!』」

誰都不該丟棄過去的歷史。在許多女權運動的堡壘正被攻擊的當今,尤其是合法人工流產被強烈質疑的現在,我們更需要還原真相,重述女性的奮鬥史。社會對過去一再一再的遺忘,正是阻止女權伸張的元兇。好幾百萬的美國年輕人現在無法想像在1973年「羅伊對偉德案」(Roe vs. Wade)前,女性沒有墮胎選擇權的生活;要他們相信那段年代的存在,遠比要他們想像研究所明文寫著「女性不得申請入學」要難得多了。

現在,揭開社會對女性迷思的責任落到我們這代的身上,我們開始收穫先前革命烈士的辛苦耕耘,她們現在都七老八十了,而我們正年輕。為確保女權運動不再像19世紀時一樣凋零,我們有責保護它,讓它深植下個世代的意識中。

(來源/洛杉磯時報 編譯/侯美如)

原文

History is a terrible thing to waste. The recent obituar-ies for Betty Friedan, whose 1963 book, "The Femi-nine Mystique," revived an American feminism then thought to be extinct and unnecessary, were striking in their recognition of how much explanation is now re-quired about the world before the women's movement.

Newspapers had to remind their readers that equal pay for equal work, sex-blind help-wanted ads, the right of pregnant women to keep their jobs, nondis-criminatory admission standards for professional schools and many other matters of simple justice were considered not only controversial but radical proposals in the 1960s.

Younger readers were doubtless as incredulous at this news as my 23-year-old and 15-year-old nieces were when I recently told them about the essay I was required to write by the Washington Post's personnel department as part of my application for a reporting job in 1965. The topic, singularly inappropriate for a child-less 19-year-old, was, "How I Plan to Combine Moth-erhood with a Career."

On one level, the ignorance of the young and the not-so-young - many people in their 40s also know lit-tle about what life was like when most forms of dis-crimination against women were perfectly legal - is a measure of how much has been accomplished. But on a deeper level, this ignorance endangers many feminist gains because it raises the real possibility that future generations will have to reinvent the wheel.

It has happened before. The first wave of American feminism, which began in 1848 with the Seneca Falls convention under the leadership of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was concerned with much more than obtaining the vote for women. Economic e-quality, educational equality and - most controversial of all - equality in religious institutions that had long preached the divinely ordained inferiority of women were part of the first feminist platform. As the century wore on, though, the more radical voices were stilled and the movement concentrated solely on suffrage.

Stanton, whose "The Woman's Bible" created as much of a sensation and a scandal in 1892 as Friedan's book did 71 years later, was written out (literally) of the women's movement because of her unorthodox views on religion. Her name did not return to history until the 1980s, with the research of a new generation of femi-nist scholars.Friedan was the first 20th century feminist to restore the historical and cultural context lost for most of the century and to make the essential point that, if an entire group has a problem, the solution can never be purely personal.

I have always been grateful that I read "The Feminine Mystique" shortly before I went to Washington to interview with the Post. Before reading Friedan, I truly believed that barriers to women in journalism would not apply to me because all of those other women must have done something wrong to be stuck in what used to be called the "society section." Without the perspective provided by Friedan, I might have been surprised by the person-nel director's insulting demand, lost my temper and lost the chance at a job. As it was, I bit my tongue, wrote the essay and told myself that I would become one of the women who would challenge the prejudices that deni-grated all women.

Friedan's message about the cultural nature of wom-en's subordination was not well received initially. In the New York Times Book Review in 1963, Lucy Free-man scolded Friedan for criticizing women's maga-zines and asked, "What is to stop a woman who is inter-ested in national and international affairs from reading magazines that deal with those subjects? To paraphrase a famous line, 'The fault, dear Mrs. Friedan, is not in our culture, but in ourselves.' "

At Freidan's funeral in New York on Monday, her longtime friend, sociologist Amitai Etzioni, noted that his department at Columbia University did not have a single female professor in 1962. The few Barnard fe-male students admitted to Columbia classes, Etzioni acknowledged honestly, knew that they were there on sufferance and "knew that they should not be heard too often."

This entire history is in urgent need of retelling to-day, at a time when other legacies of the movement - most notably legal abortion - are under assault. Histori-cal amnesia, not the fundamentalist Christian right, is the true villain. Millions of young women and men to-day simply cannot imagine what life was like before Roe vs. Wade any more than they can imagine what it was like to be told "No Women Need Apply" at the door to gradu-ate-school classrooms.

The obligation to retell the truth belongs to my gen-eration, young enough to have reaped the benefits of the revolution begun by women now in their 70s and 80s. It is our moral duty to ensure that the history of our women's movement, unlike the history of 19th century feminism, does not perish from the consciousness of the next generation.
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