NOTE: I REGRET THE INTERMITTENT INTERRUPTIONS IN THIS SERIES. BLAME THE LACK OF TIME – AND ALL THOSE OTHER INDIVIDUALS AND ISSUES ON WHICH I CHOOSE TO COMMENT. BUT AS YOU SEE, THIS VERY SHORT COURSE CONTINUES.
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As indicated in my post of last August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)
The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they will prompt you to dig deeper.
The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.
Today’s leadership literacy classic is in Part II of the book, Literature as Leadership. The idea that writing can be an act of leadership at first seems astonishing. But it is not, or it should not be. After all, writing is communicating. It is using words to send a message, in this case about change. Specifically, every writer in this section of the book was a leader. An intellectual leader who sought to create change by so convincingly making their case that people would feel compelled to act.
The eight men and four women who fall into this category all set out to right what they deeply believed was a wrong. Remarkably they did – or at least they had an enduring impact. Moreover, they wrote so well that we read them still.
Today’s writer as leader – or, if you prefer, leader as writer – is Betty Friedan. Friedan was both singular and part of a tradition. She was part of a tradition of great women writers – such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Cady Stanton – who fought for the cause of women’s rights with such immense eloquence and preternatural persuasiveness that they started or at least suggested a social movement. Friedan though was singular in that she identified a problem – a problem with no name – that most women of her time did not consciously even know existed. After all, in the 1960s women could vote, they could divorce their husbands without losing their children, and they could own property. In other words, unlike the women in Wollstonecraft and Stanton’s time, women in Friedan’s time, especially if they were white and reasonably well-off, had nothing obvious to complain about. Not to speak of revolt about.
But Friedan did it, changed the way women thought. Moreover, her classic contribution, The Feminine Mystique, which was, not incidentally, published the same year (1963) as Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” hit a nerve almost immediately. Large numbers of women across the country identified with the issues that Friedan had raised, and they responded accordingly. It is not too much to say that The Feminine Mystique was the match that lit the movement. The women’s liberation movement that in the 1960s and ‘70s especially played a such a prominent part in the American political firmament.
Friedan continued to be politically active to the end of her life. And she continued to write books. But The Feminine Mystique was her signal contribution. As the New York Times wrote in her obituary, the book “permanently transformed the social fabric of the United States and countries around the world.” In other words, a classic of both literature and leadership.
From Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique – 1963:
The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, and ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – Is this all?
…. If I am right, the problem that has no name stirring in the minds of so many American women today is not a mater of loss of femininity or too much education, or the demands of domesticity. It is far more important than anyone realizes…. It may well be the key to our future as a nation and a culture. We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says, “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.”