N.O.W.AND THEN

Betty Friedan, who passed away last week, loved a good fight. So I'm not so sure she would have been pleased at all of her adoring obituaries. We do not honor the woman by reducing her life to hagiography. Because the fact is, Friedan may have founded the modern feminist movement, but she also nearly destroyed it.

In 1969, just as the woman's liberation movement was gaining steam, Friedan precipitated a major rift by inveighing against the lesbians whom she accused of taking over the cause. She dubbed them the "lavender menace," and even though her campaign to de-gay the nascent National Organization for Women never got off the ground, the damage has lasted to this day. Instead of a unified front, women became fragmented. Instead of trust, there was fear of Stalinist purges. In place of openness, McCarthy-like smears.

This rift left a perfect storm that allowed traditionalists like Phyllis Shafley to claim the mantle of true womanhood. What should have been the movement's greatest success, an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, turned into its biggest failure.

I met Friedan while attending the Sag Harbor Initiative back in the mid-'80s. If you have never heard of the Sag Harbor Initiative, I'm not surprised. This was Friedan's baby, a collective of activists who were going to spearhead fundamental change. The name says all you need to know, however, about her vision of top-down authoritative style. The pooh-bahs in the Hamptons would meet, decide on a platform, and the world would follow.

What did follow was ? nothing. After a sarcastic news story in the Times, the Sag Harbor Initiative was quickly abandoned.

Today, an entire generation of women abjure the term "feminist." Middle- and upper-class women are opting for just the kind of existence Friedan first investigated and exposed in The Feminine Mystique. Meanwhile, the "woman's movement" debates the bourgeois political niceties of hiring a nanny and breaking through the corporate glass ceiling, while women in much of the world suffer unspeakable indignities daily. It's telling that the most prominent woman-the only prominent woman, as I recall-who actively campaigned against the Taliban's treatment of Afghani women was the wife of late-night talkshow host Jay Leno. Even today, women's studies majors debate whether opposing clitoral circumcision isn't Western cultural supremacy.

The best way to honor Friedan may be to put aside her legacy once and for all and get busy with the real women's work.