One day in the 1970s, I sat in a crowded auditorium at the Student Union.  Although there were a few men, the audience was primarily women.  Everyone was restless and excited.  We were there to see Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique.  This feminist text was my introduction to feminism.  And why isn’t Betty Friedan on a coin?

If you don’t know who Betty Friedan is, I can only say she changed my life.  Of course Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Mann, Joan Didion, and D. H. Lawrence played a role, but Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique opened my eyes to a new future.  Friedan wrote about the sexism that restricted women to housewifery and motherhood.  She talked about equal pay for equal work and abortion on demand.

I was relieved when I read Friedan’s book, because my future was a blank.  I had known that I would grow up and a man would fall madly in love with me, but was vague about how this would happen.  And I thought of literature:  what happened after Gwendolen Harleth married Sir Hugo in Daniel Deronda?  She supported her mother and sisters, at a great personal cost.

 The Feminine Mystique made me reimagine my life. Maybe love wasn’t everything.  (I didn’t believe that, though.)   Finally Friedan came onto the stage. She was homely, yet attractive and charismatic.  Not only was she brilliant, she was funny.  We laughed at her cartoon representation of the ridiculous sexism that kept us down.

And then an absurdly dramatic sequence took place.  A friend’s gloriously beautiful teacher, who would have been a fashion model if she hadn’t worn overalls and a t-shirt, stood up and challenged Friedan for making jokes.

“Why do we always have to laugh at ourselves?”

I don’t remember Friedan’s reply, or what the teacher said next, if anything. It was as if Diana (the teacher), goddess of the hunt and the moon (and surely feminism), had challenged Athena, goddess of war and wisdom, who would certainly have been her ally if they’d had time to talk.  But they were feminists of two different factions.  Friedan “handled it” and went on with her speech.

 The Second Wave feminists had ongoing arguments, but there was little or no censorship: the goal was to be well-read, not well-censored. We read John Stuart Mill, Marx, Edmund Gosse, Denise Levertov, Marvin Bell, the classics, R. D. Laing, Marshall McLuhan, Rachel Carson, and Simone de Beauvoir. 

But political groups did break into factions as a result of vigorous discussion and disagreement.  It happened to groups of feminists, anarchists, socialists, anti-war activists, and countless others.  Some of these groups lasted for many years, though. I don’t know what broke them up in the end. The rise of the yuppies, perhaps.

In general, the Cancel Culture practitioners of today go much farther than the Second Wave feminists.  Yes, some Second Wavers were very, very far to the left, but they believed in free speech and fought censorship. Today free speech is under attack by the left as well as the right.  It astonishes me. We all need to take a breath and examine history.

And now…  let me write briefly about Cancel Culture, as I understand it.  Today people are canceled for accusations of almost anything, whether it be sexual harassment, attitudes toward trans men and women (several women writers have had their hands rapped), or cultural appropriation. And that’s as far as I go, because I rarely read the news! 

My problem with Cancel Culture is that it enables people to blacklist others for disagreeing with them, for their perception of someone else saying what is politically incorrect, or, quite often, because someone is just pissed off. It reminds me so much of the far-right McCarthy hearings, the John Birch Society, and other far-right-wing groups.  And do we want the Left to be so judgmental? One wonders if this is actually a swing to the Right, nor the left.

I say, Up with free speech!