The passing of an age

My first real blog was about the death of Rosa Parks. A few days ago, Coretta King died, and today, the passing was announced of Betty Friedan, on her 85th birthday.
It's hard for anyone these days to truly appreciate the magnitude of what these women did. The generations of women who came after stood on the shoulders of giants - and these women were some of those giants. They came from a time when women were not so much thought of as inferior by men, as casually dismissed with a sneer - the idea of a woman having an independent life of value was in itself so absurd an idea as to be radical.
That was the basic concept of Betty Friedan's book 'The Feminine Mystique' . Which, I must be honest here, is sat on my bookshelf but I've never got round to reading the whole thing. And to give you some idea of how times have changed, that's largely because my free time is spent busy with the children, and not reading as many books as I might like!
The women of her generation seemed staid and 'square' just a few years later afterthe revolution they started had kicked in. Betty Friedan became seen in some quarters as an old reactionary. To be honest, I don't know the truth of this. I know she didn't like the lesbian separatist domination of the women's movement in the late 70's, early 80's. That effectively fucked feminism for a long time - and women today seem to me less radical than the women in the early 80's when I was growing up.
Strange, me & Es were talking earlier tonight about the way that men back then were trying to be 'New Men', trying to "get in touch with their feelings". I said that I found it quite insulting to women, because they seemed to equate "being in touch with their feminine side" as being weak and pathetic. Which are not feminine traits as far as I'm concerned.
It's hard, looking back, to understand how the radical feminist scene was then. I was almost one of those guys who became exclusively gay in solidarity with the lesbian feminists. The principle being, if women said that it wasn't possible to have a relationship with a man because there was too much cultural baggage of oppression, then I would restrict myself to relationships with men.
There were so many flaws in this logic, I can only say that it wasn't purely my logic - it was pretty common back then!
We talked about what women and men see in each other, as genders. The whole protection, child-bearing, nurture, alphamale stuff.
But I basically stick to my principle: the differences between any two individuals dwarf and common differences between two genders. Generalisation is the work of weak minds, and whether it is founded on oppression or ignorance, to guide your understanding of humanity on the basis of the gender of a person is an act of oppression in and of itself.