Freidan Discusses 'Second Stage' In K-School Forum Panel Talk

As the women's movement enters its second stage, women face the agonizing conflicts of combining career and family without becoming "tired superwomen," Betty Freidan, first president of the National Organization of Women (NOW), said last night.

Defending her latest book--called "Second Stage."--before a crowded Kennedy School Forum, Freidan said that during "the first stage,'" "women broke through the barriers to equality."

Those early feminists never came to terms with the family, Freidan said, because they didn't deal with the reality of women's situations. The goal of the second stage, she added in the panel discussion, is to restructure homes and work so that both men and women can lead full lives.

Taking issue with Freidan, Ethel Klein, assistant professor of Government, said the shift in the women's movement should not be from the "personal to the familial," but beyond that to greater societal "responsibility for child care."

Jane Edmonds, former chair of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, also criticized Freidan, saying she was "hopelessly bourgeois".

Anita Diamant, a reporter for the Phoenix, said feminists are angry at Freidan's latest book because it ignores feminist discussion of the family and denies that feminism is a "new mode of thought."