Whether you’re surprised or not— the facts below are true. A lot of the history surrounding the women’s movement and the sexual revolution has been erased or skewed by the media, by historians, and by the people most intricately involved in the two movements. In her book Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement, Sue Ellen Browder lays out in painstaking detail the truths behind the fusion of the women’s movement with the sexual revolution, from both a first-hand and a historical perspective.

Basically, the book both blew my mind and confirmed what I’d always suspected: Catholicism and the fight for the equal dignity of women naturally go hand-in-hand. Thanks to a few key players on both sides, we’ve been told that’s impossible. But here are ten truths surrounding the women’s movement and the sexual revolution that suggest otherwise.

If you’re interested in learning more, I cannot suggest Browder’s book enough (and FemCatholic is reading it as part of our virtual Summer Book Club!)

With that, here we go:

1) The women’s movement and the sexual revolution were two different things.

While modern day, secular feminism often fails to differentiate between the equal dignity of men and women (goals of the women’s movement) and legalized access to contraception and abortion (goals of the sexual revolution), this was not always the case. The women’s movement and the sexual revolution were two different social movements, one begun by women and one begun by men.

The women’s movement and the sexual revolution were two different social movements, one begun by women and one begun by men.

Initially, the women’s movement was not interested in teaming up with the sexual revolution. Rather, it was the men behind the sexual revolution, who were primarily concerned with legalizing abortion for population control purposes, that badgered the women’s movement for their support, until the women’s movement finally relented.

2) The women’s movement was pro-family.

Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique, founder of the National Organization of Women (NOW), and often credited with starting Second Wave Feminism, was originally against legalized access to abortion. She asserted that the women’s movement must be pro-family, and considered herself a defender of women’s right to be a mother.  

Friedan’s original goal was to win rights for women to be able to be mothers and have careers. The first draft of The Feminine Mystique made no mention of access to contraceptives or abortion.

In a 1992 interview for Playboy magazine, Friedan stated: “Women are the people who give birth to children, and that is a necessary value in society. . . . Feminism was not opposed to marriage and motherhood. It wanted women to be able to define themselves as people and not just as servants to the family. You want a feminism that includes women who have children and want children because that’s the majority of women.” Discussing sex in that same interview, Friedan said, “Maybe some people still haven’t caught on, but the best sex requires a deeper, more profound knowledge of oneself and the other person. In the Bible, sexual love was to know. It suggests something deeper.”

Friedan understood that empowering women meant reconciling a woman’s career with her family. It didn’t have to be a choice. In response to Gloria Steinem’s claim that marriage was a form of prostitution, Friedan replied, “That extreme form of thinking tends to come from women who hate having to deal with the complexities of juggling a career and a family and so, almost literally, they want to throw the baby out with the bath water. It’s just unrealistic to be a feminist who is anti-family.”

Looking back on the abortion rights movement, Friedan lamented in 1980 that “in cities like Boston, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, where feminist consciousness was supposedly at the cutting edge, women of childbearing years were dividing into bitter antagonistic camps as they were forced into no-win, either-or choices, motherhood vs. career.”  

This was not what Friedan had wanted when she wrote The Feminine Mystique. But by strong-arming the women’s movement to promote legalized access to abortion, Friedan unintentionally strengthened the patriarchy and weakened the family.

3) Betty Friedan and NOW disapproved of Cosmopolitan.

Cosmopolitan magazine, one of the most notorious promoters of sexual promiscuity as a means to women’s liberation, was founded by Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl, published one year before The Feminine Mystique. However, Cosmo did not have the support of the women’s movement.

Betty Friedan called Cosmo “an immature teenage-level sexual fantasy,” promoting “the idea that woman is nothing but a sex object, that [she] is nothing without a man, and there is nothing in life but bed, bed, bed.” She described the magazine as “quite obscene and quite horrible.”

Friedan recognized that women’s equality was more than consequence-free sex-capades. Even after adopting legalized access to abortion as part of the NOW platform, NOW admonished women to boycott products with advertising that was degrading to the image of women and named Cosmo as one of the worst offenders.

4) The “Cosmo Girl” was fictional.

The anecdotal stories of sexually liberated women in Cosmo were primarily made up by the magazine’s writers. Browder, hired by Cosmo in 1970, explains, “Many of the alleged ‘real people’ we wrote about in the magazine were entirely fictitious. . . . The Cosmo Girl was not a real person but a persona, a mask the single girl lonely and alone in the world could put on to turn herself into the object of a man’s sexual fantasies.”

Brown provided guidelines for the writers to follow when making up their fictional anecdotes, including suggesting that it was acceptable for the writers to make up “experts” to quote if they could not find a real person.

The typical made-up Cosmo Girl: she “had a glamour job, traveled a lot, and spent her hard-earned cash on pricey commodities to support her self-centered lifestyle."

Browder describes the typical made-up Cosmo Girl: she “had a glamour job, traveled a lot, and spent her hard-earned cash on pricey commodities to support her self-centered lifestyle.” The book provides two examples of Browder’s made-up tales. In one, the female protagonist is a twenty-four-year-old fashion model who complains about her once-passionate Italian lover’s recently inhibited sexual desire. In the other, we learn about a twenty-five-year-old corporate attorney who meets a thirty-eight-year-old documentary filmmaker in Paris and sleeps with him a few hours later. Both these stories were published by Cosmo and held out not only to be true, but to be imitated by readers.

5) The abortion rights movement and NARAL were started by two white, affluent men concerned about overpopulation.

As mentioned earlier, the sexual revolution and the women’s movement were two completely different causes. Larry Lader, Margaret Sanger’s biographer, began promoting legalized access to abortion as a means of population control.

Before beginning NARAL, Lader was the executive director of the Hugh Moore Fund, which gave millions of dollars to the population control movement in the 1960s. In Hugh Moore’s biography, Lader writes, “It is now recognized that we must reduce birth rates or await the inevitable disaster. We are on our way to breeding ourselves to death” (emphasis in original).

It was Lader who decided that feminist support was necessary to achieving legalized abortion. When planning with NARAL co-founder Bernard Nathanson, Lader explained, “If we’re going to move abortion out of the books and into the streets, we’re going to have to recruit the feminists. Friedan has got to put her troops into this thing—while she still has control of them.”

NARAL co-founder Bernard Nathanson, Lader explained, “If we’re going to move abortion out of the books and into the streets, we’re going to have to recruit the feminists. Friedan has got to put her troops into this thing—while she still has control of them.”

In fact, before targeting feminists as an ally, the majority of abortion advocates were white, upper-middle-class men, employed as doctors and lawyers. It was Lader’s foresight to bring “the feminists” into the sexual revolution that melded the two movements together.

6) Larry Lader specifically chose the Catholic Church to be the “villain” of the abortion movement.

Again, while planning the future of the abortion movement with Bernard Nathanson, Lader explained the need to pick an “enemy” of the abortion movement: “Historically, every revolution has to have its villain. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s a king, a dictator, or a tsar, but it has to be someone, a person, to rebel against.” And, calling them “[t]he biggest single obstacle to peace and decency throughout all of history,” Lader chose the Catholic Church to be public enemy number one.

Though Lader recognized that he couldn’t denounce all Catholics: “First of all, that’s too large a group, and for us to vilify them all would diffuse our focus. Secondly, we have to convince liberal Catholics to join us, a popular front as it were, and if we tar them all with the same brush, we’ll just antagonize a few who might otherwise have joined us and be valuable showpieces for us. No, it’s got to be the Catholic hierarchy. That’s a small enough group to come down on, and anonymous enough so that no names every have to be mentioned, but everybody will have a fairly good idea whom we are talking about.”

Even when Nathanson, himself a self-described Jewish atheist, asked Lader whether he thought there were any others opposed to abortion, Lader responded no.

Lader’s obsession of uniting the abortion rights movement and the women’s movement, while simultaneously making Catholics the enemy of the abortion rights movement, sealed the Catholic woman’s exclusion from mainstream feminism as we understand it today.

Lader’s obsession of uniting the abortion rights movement and the women’s movement, while simultaneously making Catholics the enemy of the abortion rights movement, sealed the Catholic woman’s exclusion from mainstream feminism as we understand it today.

7) NOW’s decision to adopt abortion legalization as part of its platform was made by only 57 members.

NOW didn’t always support abortion. And when it did, it wasn’t decided by the majority of members. It wasn’t even decided by an overwhelming majority of the board. It was decided by 57 members, in an upscale D.C. hotel on November 18, 1967.

Who was at this NOW Conference? According to Pauli Murray, a black civil rights and labor activist who was the first black American to graduate from Yale Law School, the conference was “not broadly representative of women in the same sense” that the 1966 NOW Conference had been. Looking around the room, Murray saw “no Catholic sisters, no women of ethnic minorities (other than about five black women), [and] no women who represented the poor.”

Betty Friedan, who had by now been convinced by Lader that abortion was a necessary cause for feminists, saved the vote on adopting the issue as part of NOW’s platform until the end of the meeting. At that point in the evening, of the reported one hundred and five people who attended the Conference, only seventy-one members were counted in the vote to adopt abortion. After hours of intense battle, the abortion issue won, 57-14.

Afterwards, Friedan received a letter from NOW’s Director of Women’s Activities, TV broadcaster Paige Palmer. In the letter, Palmer accused Friedan of railroading the discussion, showing her support for or animosity towards speakers on the floor while she was presiding over the meeting, and refusing to let the only M.D. present speak while allowing women who knew nothing about abortion, but supported it, to voice their opinions freely. Palmer told Friedan she wished she “had never heard of N.O.W.”

Of course, the Conference and the ensuring battle to adopt legalization of abortion was not disclosed to the public. The following Monday, Friedan held a press conference announcing NOW’s position, claiming that she was speaking for “28 million American working women, the millions of women emerging from our colleges each year who are intent on full participation in the mainstream of our society, and mothers who are emerging from their homes to go back to school or work.” The next day, the Washington Post published that “NOW supports the furthering of the sexual revolution of our century by pressing for widespread sex education and provision of birth control information and contraceptives, and by urging that all laws penalizing abortion be repealed.”

And just like that, the women’s movement and the sexual revolution were fused into one. As Browder writes, “the women’s movement was sharply scissored into two irreconcilable factions: women for legal abortion on demand, and women who opposed it. In the hours before midnight on November 18, 1967, NOW simultaneously became both the national organization for women and the national organization against motherhood, a living contradiction” (emphasis in original).

8) Pro-life feminists never stayed silent.

One-third of members left NOW after the “Mere 57” decided to support legalized abortion. But they didn’t leave their convictions about the equality of women behind.

One-third of members left NOW after the “Mere 57” decided to support legalized abortion.

Just one example: After the abortion vote, Elizabeth “Betty” Boyer, an attorney from Cleveland, resigned from NOW’s Board of Directors and founded the Women’s Equity Action League. Though you’ve probably never heard of it, WEAL made significant strides in the fight for women’s equality, including abolishing “Help wanted (male)” and “Help wanted (female)” classified ads in newspapers and ending overt sex discrimination in colleges and universities. WEAL was also instrumental in passing the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 which gave married women the ability to apply for credit under their own names (because that wasn’t a thing until 1974).

9) Justice Blackmun’s Roe v. Wade opinion cited to Lader’s faulty science as justification to legalize abortion.

Roe v. Wade is the 1973 landmark decision holding that women have a right to abortion. Justice Blackmun, assigned to write the opinion, was unsatisfied with the oral arguments presented to the court and decided to do some of his own research on the abortion issue, with the help of his law clerk, George Frampton Jr.

Frampton, in researching the issue, came across a book written by Larry Lader, Abortion: The first authoritative and documented report on the laws and practices governing abortion in the U.S. and around the world, and how—for the sake of women everywhere—they can and must be reformed. It was this same book that persuaded Friedan to push NOW to support the abortion issue.

Yet, there are a few problems with this book.

First, he claims that the Catholic Church has always been confused about ensoulment of a fetus and therefore, a fetus probably doesn’t have a soul. But if a fetus does have a soul, it probably isn’t until the mother feels the fetus kick for the first time. Claiming to speak for the Catholic Church which he so despised, Lader ignored thousands of years of Church teaching in order to confuse Catholics, his biggest perceived adversary.

Claiming to speak for the Catholic Church which he so despised, Lader ignored thousands of years of Church teaching in order to confuse Catholics, his biggest perceived adversary.

Second, much of the “legal history” in the book was fabricated by Cyril Chestnut Means Jr., a New York Law School professor who later became a NARAL attorney. Specifically, Villanova University law-history professor Joseph Dellapenna writes in his 1,283-page book Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History: “Means propounded two hitherto unsuspected historical ‘facts’: First, that abortion was not criminal in England or America before the nineteenth century; and second, that abortion was criminalized during the nineteenth century solely to protect the life or health of mothers, and not to protect the lives of health of unborn children. Regardless of how many times these claims are repeated, however, they are not facts; they are myths.”

Third, many of the statistics in the book were completely made-up. Bernard Nathanson, NARAL co-founder, later admitted, “Knowing that if a true poll were taken we would be soundly defeated, we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls.” Lader also made up the number of illegal abortions performed annually in the United States, inflating it from around one thousand to one million. Also inflated was the number of women dying from illegal abortions, reported by Lader to be around ten thousand per year rather than the real number of about two hundred to two hundred and fifty.

Consequently, it’s a bit concerning that Lader’s book was cited seven times in the Roe v. Wade decision, while Means is cited as a historian another seven times. Writes Browder, “We don’t know when or even if the history section in Blackmun’s abortion opinions was ever cite-checked. But we do know that if it happened, the fact-checking was faulty. For when Blackmun accepted Larry Lader, a mere magazine writer, as a reliable authority on history, philosophy, and theology, he became as a blind man following a blind guide. Despite his best efforts, [Blackmun] failed to see he had embraced a well-crafted verbal mirage, mistaking it for the truth.”  

10) NARAL co-founder Bernard Nathanson and Betty Friedan both regretted merging the sexual revolution with the women’s movement.

It’s amazing how little we hear about the conversion of abortion advocates.

Betty Friedan, although she never stated that she did not support abortion, did have regrets. In 1981, she published a book The Second Stage. In it, she called for the women’s movement to “set aside its divisive anger, stop overemphasizing abortion rights, and reaffirm the importance of the family.” While promoting the book, she told a reporter that saying you’re for abortion is “like being for mastectomy. We are for the choice to have children, for affirming the generative roots of women in families. . . . The women’s movement . . . has come to a dead end. . . . Our failure was our blind spot about the family.”

Our failure was our blind spot about the family.”

Bernard Nathanson’s conversion was even more dramatic. In the late 1970s, after having presided over what he claimed to be about sixty thousand abortions, he saw a living fetus on an ultrasound monitor. After years of soul searching, he quit the abortion business.

In 1996, he published the story of his conversion from a self-described “Jewish atheist” to Catholicism entitled The Hand of God: A Journey from Death to Life by the Abortion Doctor Who Changed His Mind.

Additionally, while not included in the book, Friedan and Nathanson weren’t the only faces of the sexual revolution to later regret their involvement. Norma McCorvey, “Jane Roe” in Roe v. Wade, converted to Christianity and later to Catholicism, and lived the remainder of her life as a pro-life advocate. Additionally, Sandra Cano, “Mary Doe” in the Roe v. Wade companion case Doe v. Bolton, claimed she “did not seek an abortion nor . . . believe in abortion” at the time her case was brought (she never had an abortion), but was tricked into the case by her attorneys.

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Are you mad? While learning about feminism’s twisted history, I was mad. I’m still a little mad. So, what can you do about it? First, I highly recommend reading Sue Ellen Browder’s Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement to get the whole story. [We’re reading it together as part of FemCatholic’s virtual book club this summer!]

Second, let’s get people informed! Catholics who are leery of feminism and feminists who are leery of Catholics both have a lot to learn from our shared history

NOTE: Version with historical references annotated available upon request, as this blog template doesn't allow annotation capabilities.