Betty Friedan was dead just a couple of days and already the naysayers were out.
Why do I care? It’s just that I can’t help but see a trend—one I first noticed in March of 2005, when, just three months after Susan Sontag’s death, Terry Castle, in the London Review of Books, aired a list of personal grievances succinctly described by one friend as “very funny but rather nasty.” It says something about Sontag’s fierceness, and Castle’s cowardice, that she waited to print it until the moment when no rebuttal was possible.
And then there was Terry Teachout’s more measured consideration of how he did not like the plays of Wendy Wasserstein, although he found her exceedingly friendly as person. Fine. But the day after she died?
Why the new willingness to poop on the dead? And so quickly after they’re gone. To be sure, the opposite extreme is no better. Witness the sickening hypocrisy of Ronald Reagan’s apotheosis in death—by people who knew better—as if he had been a great president.
Could it have anything to do with the fact that they were powerful women?
excellent post!
I think that Wendy Wasserstein and Betty Friedan were both visionaries. Wendy's plays spoke to the conflicts in the women in my generation the way The Feminine Mistyque did for my parents' generation.