Farewell Speech to NOW – March 20, 1970

Friedan gave this speech as the 4th annual convention of the National Organization for Women.

Our movement toward true equality for all women in America in fully equal partnership with men has reached a point of critical mass. All of us this past year have learned in our gut that sisterhood is powerful. The awesome power of women united is visible now and is being taken seriously, as all of us who define ourselves as people now take action in every city and state, and together make our voices heard.

It is our responsibility to history to ourselves, to all who will come after us, to use this power now, in our own lives, in the mainstream of our society, not in some abstract future, when the apocalypse comes. There is an urgency in this moment. We face recession in this country, and repression, with the babies overproduced in the postwar era of the feminine mystique moving into the job market; with inflation eating up all our dollars; with men taking over even those professions that used to be female, as automation replaces blue-collar work. And in this era of recession, if we are going to compete for jobs with men, as we must to support ourselves and our families, there is bound to be more resistance than we have yet encountered. We are going to have to show that we meant it, and use our economic power to break through the barriers of sex discrimination once and for all, if women are not again to be the first fired, the last hired, as they have been in all other economic depressions.

As we visibly become the fastest-growing movement for drastic socia1 change in the country, it would be naive not to recognize that there are, and will be many trying to destroy our strength, to divide and divert us. I have said from the beginning that the enemy is not man or men, though individual men among bosses, politicians, priests, union leaders, husbands, and educators must be concretely confronted as enemies. Men are fellow victims; ours is a two-sex revolution.

The rage women have so long taken out on themselves, on their own bodies, and covertly on their husbands and children, is exploding now. I understand the conditions that cause the rage, the impotence that makes women so understandably angry, but if we define that rage as sexual, if we say that love and sex and men and even children are the enemy, not only do we doom ourselves to live lives less rich and human, but we doom our movement to political sterility. For we will not be able to mobilize the power of that great majority of women who may have been oversold on love as the end of life, but nevertheless have a right to love; who may be over defined as sex objects, but nevertheless cannot be asked to suppress their sexuality. Nor will we be able to use the political power of the men who are able to love women, and perhaps even more importantly, to identify with them as people. We will not be able to use their power to help us breakthrough sex discrimination and to create the new social institutions that are needed lo free women, not from childbearing or love or sex or even marriage, but from the intolerable agony and burden those become when women are chained to them.

I would warn you that those societies where women are most removed from the full action of the mainstream are those where sex is considered dirty and where violence breeds, If we confront the real conditions that oppress men now as well as women and translate our rage into action, then and only then will sex really be liberated to be an active joy and a receiving joy for women and for men, when we are both really free to be all we can be. This is not a war to be fought in the bedroom, but in the city, in the political arena.

I do not accept the argument that to use this power to liberate ourselves is to divert energies to stop repression and the war in Vietnam and the crisis in the cities. Our movement is so radical a force for change that as we make our voices heard, as we find our human strength in our own interests, we will inevitably create a new political force with allies and a common humanistic frontier, with new effectiveness against the enemies of war and repression that affect us all as human beings in America. Either that energy so long buried as impotent rage in women will become a powerful force for keeping our whole society human and free, or it will be manipulated in the interests of fascism and death.

I therefore propose that we accept the responsibility of mobilizing the chain reaction we have helped release, for instant revolution against sexual oppression in this year, 1970. I propose that on Wednesday, we call a twenty-four-hour general strike, a resistance to both passive and active, of all women in America against the concrete conditions of their oppression. On that day, fifty years after the amendment that gave women the vote became part of the Constitution, I propose we use our power to declare an ultimatum on all who would keep us from using our rights as Americans. I propose that the women who are doing menial chores in the offices cover their typewriters and close their notebooks, the telephone operators unplug their switch­ boards, the waitresses stop waiting, cleaning women stop cleaning, and everyone who is doing a job for which a man would be paid more – stop – and every woman who is pegged forever as an assistant, doing jobs for which men get the credit – stop. In every office, every laboratory, every school, all the women to whom we get word will spend the day discussing and analyzing the conditions which keep us from being all we might be. And if the condition that keeps us down is the lack of a child-care center, we will bring our babies to the office that day and sit them on our bosses' laps. We do not know how many will join our day of abstention from so-called women's work, but I expect it will be millions. We will then present concrete demands to those who so far have made all the decisions.

And when it begins to get dark, instead of cooking dinner or making love, we will assemble, and we will carry candles symbolic of the flame of that passionate journey down through history – relit anew in every city – to converge the visible power of women at City Hall – at the political arena where the larger options of our life are decided. If men want to join us, fine. If politicians, if political bosses, if mayors and governors wish to discuss our demands, fine, but we will define the terms of the dialogue. And by the time those twenty-four hours are ended, our revolution will be a fact.

Rubin, Dana. 2023. Speaking While Female: 75 Extraordinary Speeches by American Women. Herdon, VA: RealClear Publishing.