Betty Friedan and The Lavender Menace

Given some of the early backlash against the Women’s Movement, as well as the difficulty of trying to prompt society to become aware of its long-standing sexism and gender discrimination, Betty Friedan was concerned that the presence of lesbians in the Women’s Movement could slow or derail the movement. More precisely, she was anxious that the mainstream misperception that lesbians hate men would be applied to all women. Was Friedan’s exclusion of lesbians from the Second Congress to Unite Women in 1970 justified? Indeed, was the formation of the Lavender Menace outside the Women’s Movement, together with the formation of other groups of disaffected women, notably African-American and Latino women, the start of the weakening of the mainstream Movement? A Movement, which—in its Second Wave iteration—came to an end when the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was defeated in Washington in 1982.