WOI TV News Clips 485

Betty Friedman is well known, I think, as the author of The Feminine Mystique. What are you interested in at the present time? Well, three things really. I'm trying to finish a new book called the New Woman. This is the woman that is emerging in America that's moved beyond the Feminine Mystique, and and I am president of a, and I helped found, a new national, well you might call it, civil rights movement on behalf of the unfinished business of full equality for women and truly equal partnership with men. It's called N.O.W, the National Organization for Women, but men and women are in it, and it is not a, it's not a woman's organization, it a civil rights movement that's devoted to taking action to bring women into into participation in the decision-making mainstream of all areas of American life, and to break through the silken curtain of sex discrimination that keeps women really in menial housework roles, whether you're talking about industry, or the professions, or higher education, or the churches, and the political parties, or government. It is time that we move ahead again in this unfinished revolution that's been standing still ever since women won the vote, and therefore it's been necessarily moving backward, and we've got to make it possible for women really to use their rights and be full people, and and this will liberate men as well as women, you know to share burdens and responsibilities, as well as privileges and rights, and to break through the stereotypes that keep men and women from being freely themselves. How are you going about this? Well, for instance, we we got organized two years ago when in title seven of the Civil Rights Act, sex discrimination is forbidden now by law in employment, like race discrimination, but even the Commissioner is supposed to enforce the act. We're taking the sex discrimination part as a big joke. Now,  it isn't a joke, you know. Seven, 75% of women who work, that is 28 million women working in America because they have to, and they want to, and they're helping to contribute to their families, or they are supporting them  fully. Of these 28 million women, three out of four are doing the most menial work. Sales, clerical service work. They, it isn't even a question of equal pay for equal work, they don't get a chance at the equal work and their average wage is is only about half of the average wage of men. It's a poverty wage in American standards. The average wage of women in the U.S. today is about $3,000, and and you know this is considered a poverty wage. Well, sex discrimination was supposed to be a joke. It's not a joke. Every woman who works, as you know. I mean, what chance do you have to be the Huntley-Brinkley of Iowa, I wonder, you  know. [Out of your noon slot into nighttime, yes?] When, you know, but, but in  every field, you know, we face it, we are we're we're slotted. If it takes exceptional ability even to arise to surface at all and then you stop right here, you know, and and it's true whether it's you're you're cooking the church supper, but you're not on the board of alders that are preaching the sermon, or whether you're in the political parties, you're addressing the envelopes, licking the stamps, looking up the zip code numbers and running the coffee klatches, but are you in the smoke-filled rooms, are you making the policy on the county committees, the state committees, the national committees? Are you running for office? We have one woman senator out of 100. And in employment, of course, I think employment is the gut issue today because until women are really there in the decision making areas of employment, they're not going to be there in politics either. Well I think now, did succeed, has succeeded already in gradually getting it known in this country, because we are a we do use the media, we get our message across just like I'm getting it here, is that sex discrimination is not a joke, that it should be, that it is outlawed and that that women who are discriminated against on the job should, you know, take their cases to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and that now, if whether we have virtually no money as a have a core of volunteer lawyers that, we have even taught women how to be their own lawyers in taking cases of court because women don't have the money often in these cases you know. So, I think we've gotten that across. I think that that we were responsible in it in in getting President Johnson to go beyond just token lip service to women and saying he's appointing women to what turned out to be nothing jobs, and to add sex to his own executive order forbidding discrimination under government contracting by government contractors. You know, if a university, or a hospital, or a company has a government contract, and it has found that they discriminated employment against the Negroes, that government contract can be removed. And now, President Johnson always had the power to add sex to that executive order, and yet even though he was supposedly the great friend of women, similar to the tokenism in the rest of his position, he did nothing about this until we put enough pressure on it that he finally did a few months ago. Interestingly enough here, Eugene McCarthy is is the one candidate in the picture today who's really serious, takes women seriously as people. I don't know if you know it, but he's the chief sponsor in the Senate of the Equal Rights Amendment, which is what is needed to wipe out the discrimination that exists against women in the laws of many states. I I don't know if your state happens to be one of them, but in many states, there are still extremely unfair things affecting women. Women can be forced to say for the same crime, make a longer jail sentences than men, or that that the grounds for a one-time adultery, for instance, is that in some states, is a ground for a man to get a divorce, but if it's what his wife is found one-time adultery, but it's not a ground for a woman to get a divorce against a man. Or, or, in employment again, that discrimination can mask behind so-called state protective laws, which forbid a woman to work overtime, you know, and so, in many jobs, I mean we're offering labor standards, but let's protect men and women alike, you know, and let's give women, men and women alike the opportunity of the lucrative jobs, and these state protective laws that just really mask discrimination against women because they are used to forbid women access to promotion, to important jobs, that might say require overtime, or in a factory for instance, requiring some states say you can't lift, a woman can't lift more than like 25 or 35 pounds, when you know a  baby or a briefcase can weigh, you know, can weigh that much. But, but, now that the federal law forbids a company to fire women out of seniority first if there's say, a layoff in a plan, the company can get around it by adding this little weight lifting element and then hiding behind the state protective. Well, all of these inequities in, you know, women have never been interpreted, under the Constitution, as people. Women have never been interpreted as people and American citizens entitled a due process protection of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment. Eugene McCarthy's Equal Rights Amendment, which is which is is the last of the unfinished legal business, I think, for women, there's a lot of unfinished business, but this is the important one in the law. Do, do, tell people that they can join now, women and men who are interested in it, there I'm sure that we will have a chapter here as a result, you know, I mean I'm out of the University and the interest in this sort of thing, but it meanwhile they can write to 1629 K Street. Now, 1629 K Street Washington DC, and, and  (inaudible) 1629 K Street Northwest, Washington, DC, they asked to join now. And you'll leave that address with me. Yes. So that if anybody does not get it, then they can write me and be sure and get it. And thank you very, very much, Betty Friedman for being with us, and good luck on your visit to Iowa State. Thank you.