Betty Friedan
Lucy Komisar, a journalist for Salon who covers the union of finance and fraud, and who claims to have been an acquaintance of the now-deceased Betty Friedan, said the the feminist icon wouldn’t have voted for Hillary Clinton – rather, she would have chosen Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The claim is somewhat remarkable given Friedan’s activism for the women’s rights’ movement.
“Betty Friedan would vote for Bernie Sanders,” Komisar wrote, in a recent piece for Salon. “I say that having known Betty near the start of the women’s movement in the late ’60s and at the end of her life [in 2006]. As a feminist, she was also a progressive committed to Bernie’s vision of economic justice. But I have another reason.”
And what is it?
“I knew Betty from 1969 when she brought me into the feminist movement, asking me to communicate to the media the message of feminism and of the National Organization for Women, of which she was founding president. Not an easy job in those days! From ridicule to don’t take too seriously to, well, there’s something significant happening. Rather like what Bernie has faced,” Komisar wrote. “I was elected to serve 1970-71 as a national vice president of NOW. Afterwards, I continued to write and speak about feminism.”
Komisar mentioned how she spoke with noted feminist Gloria Steinem in 1977 at a conference in Houston, Texas. And she also mentions that she realizes Steinem supports Clinton for president, as do many of the women voters in the United States.
“[But] I’d like those women to consider what Betty told me and what she would tell them today,” Komisar wrote, explaining how she met in 2005 during Labor Day weekend at Friedan’s cottage on Long Island and spoke of the dictatorships in Haiti, Zaire and the Philippines, as well as Switzerland’s role in furthering those dictatorships by offering offshore secret banking accounts.
And Friedan’s response?
She said, Komisar wrote, “We didn’t challenge the system enough.”
Komisar went on: “In the context, that wasn’t about male and female. The ‘system’ was an economic system that is rigged and corrupt, that allows powerful money interests to grind down the rest of us. … Betty started a revolution. But towards the end of her life, she knew, as others in the women’s movement would recognize, that the vision we shared was not broad enough – not for middle- and working-class women, not for minority women, not for anyone but the very rich – and that the revolution had far to go.”
Komisar called the Obama administration a “disaster” when it came to bolstering Wall Street in the power spectrum of politics, and concluded: “Rather than support a flawed woman candidate who would not challenge the corporate order, Betty would vote for Bernie.”
The piece comes as Clinton, already struggling against Sanders in the polls, is facing questions about the level of support she’s received from women, a camp of constituents she had counted on for votes.
As the New York Times just wrote in a piece entitled “The Women Who Should Love Hillary Clinton,” the former secretary of State “has always counted on women of her generation as her rock-solid base.”
Yet that’s been changing in this campaign season.
“Ambivalence is seeping in about her authenticity and the power of her symbolism as a woman,” writer Gail Sheehy said. “Among those unlikables consistently repeated to me by women who are conflicted about her: not authentic; can’t trust her; she lies; she’s establishment; she’s a hawk.”
In July 2015, by comparison, Clinton’s gender was winning her big points. As the New York Times story reported, in that month, 71 percent of women voters who leaned Democratic said they were likely to cast ballots for her when the time came. But by September, her support from these same female voters had dropped by nearly 30 points, due in large part to her email server scandal and concerns about her honesty.
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2016/02/26/hillarys-got-feminist-vote-not-so-fast/
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