by Ann Wroe
“The Feminine Mystique” was rambling and badly written, but it identified precisely why women were miserable. Oddly enough, since Mrs Friedan had been a keen Freudian at college, much of the problem lay with Freud, whose theories were now so popular. He had thought of women as inferiors, racked with penis envy, whose only route to fulfilment lay through men. Garbage, cried Mrs Friedan.
Women needed simply to be treated as equals and freed to become themselves.
Grateful letters poured in from women readers. Critics, mostly but not merely male, spluttered that she was a danger to the state and a proof of the folly of sending girls to college. But women now had the political wind behind them. Mrs Friedan got busy, co-founding in 1966 the National Organisation for Women (now) campaigning for equal pay, maternity leave, abortion choice and decent child care, fighting for the still unpassed Equal Rights Amendment and, in 1970, celebrating 50 years of women’s suffrage by leading the Women’s Strike for Equality, some 50,000 souls, through New York City.
Much was achieved, especially on abortion law, but it was not plain sailing.Mrs Friedan’s sharp tongue made enemies everywhere. She rapidly fell out with the daft fringe of the women’s movement, the bra-burners and ball-breakers and militant lesbians (the Lavender Menace, as she called them), who wanted all-out war. The impatient disliked her incrementalist approach; the class-conscious condemned her for rooting the “woman problem” in the pampered white suburbs, rather than in ghettos and factories.
Part of the difficulty was that she loathed political correctness, gender politics and the gender studies that came to clutter the curriculums of American universities. She also approved of marriage and refused to hate men. Though she claimed her own husband abused her, giving her black eyes which she hid under make-up (in 1969, she divorced him), she insisted that men were victims of women’s frustrations as much as women were. This was less a sexual problem than an economic one. It would be solved with equal work, worth and incomes.
When Mrs Friedan died, that Utopia was still distant. But at least she had made sure that post-war America’s Ideal Woman was buried at some suburban crossroads, her hair still unmussed, and with a stake through her perfectly calibrated heart.
Imre Friedmann
Imre Friedmann, an extreme microbiologist, died on June 11th 2007, aged 85
LIFE stands no chance at all on the surface of the planet Mars. Fields of reddish oxydised rocks stretch out to the horizon. Carbon dioxide fills the atmosphere, and ultra-violet radiation burns through it. Deep cold and dryness reign everywhere. There has probably been water, for the poles have ice caps and the ground shows channels, gullies and the shifting shoreline of what may once have been an ocean. But water, in itself, is not a proof of life.
So science says. Human curiosity says otherwise. The lines on Mars are surely canals; the dark patches may well be forests; random flashes of light suggest volcanic activity. Move on a notch, and there are little green men, glowing slightly and with their eyes out on stalks, peopling the scene. Or there are far more terrifying creatures, “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic” as H.G. Wells described them, with grey tentacles and slobbering mouths, hammering together their metal war machines and howling with each death-flash of their Heat-Rays, “Aloo! Aloo!”
Imre Friedmann’s version of life on Mars was less noisy but, to him, no less exciting. It lay inside a squarish grey lump of rock known as alh 84001, a meteorite picked up in 1984 in the Allen Hills of Antarctica. Traces of gas inside it seemed to prove that it came from Mars. And there too, like a microscopic “string of pearls” as Mr Friedmann described it, were flexible chains of crystals that could only have formed by some organic process. They seemed to be the fossilised internal “compasses” of magnetotactic bacteria, similar to kinds that still exist on Earth. And since such bacteria need oxygen, their presence suggested that photosynthesising organisms must once have lived on Mars too.
This discovery, announced in 1996, was the apogee of Mr Friedmann’s long search for life in the most daunting places possible. The organisms he found were nothing much to see. They lay under the stony floor of deserts like the Negev, the Gobi and the Atacama, or in the dry valleys of the Antarctic. He called them “cryptoendoliths”, hiders-in-rocks. Most of them were cyanobacteria, familiarly known as blue-green algae, clinging precariously to life in the most extreme conditions of heat, cold, dryness or salinity.
For years the scientific world was indifferent to Mr Friedmann’s studies of these organisms. Fame suddenly engulfed him in 1978, not long after the first Viking landing on Mars, when nasa had disappointingly concluded that the planet’s soil was sterile. Some nasa scientists recalled then that, two years before, Mr Friedmann (with his wife Roseli Ocampo, also a microbiologist) had published a paper on bacteria surviving in terrain almost as hostile as Mars; and the dead rocks began to suggest a different story.
Mr Friedmann himself always felt a peculiar tenderness for his cryptoendoliths: “always hungry, always too cold, in this grey zone”. “In human terms”, he said, “you could compare them to the most miserably living generations of pariahs in India. They are born, they live, and they die in the gutter.” Like pariahs; or like him when, as a Jew growing up in Budapest, he was debarred from university, forced into a labour camp, driven into a life of hiding
from both Germans and Russians bent on killing him, as though he was the most contemptible form of life.
His enthusiasm for science had started in boyhood and in his mother’s kitchen; but his taste for extreme microbiology began in the 1950s, at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He had gone there, a refugee, to restart his academic career. As a student of seaweed, he had the “outlandish” idea that he might find single-celled versions of seaweed in the desert; and he did indeed find, under the limestone surface of the Negev, a greenish layer like a copper compound that turned out to be algae, alive.
When he moved to Florida State University and when, with nasa’s interest, money began to come in, he travelled frequently in search of more. Well into old age he could be spotted, in bright red parka and with frozen beard, lying full-length on the Antarctic sandstone to snap some tiny life-containing fissure in the rocks. Or he could be seen in the Atacama, gently attaching sensors to rocks as if they were living bodies, so that his data boxes could record for seven years the least intimation of something happening insidethem.
Of course, any such movement on Mars had long since ceased. About 3 billion years ago, by the best estimates, life had died out there. But Mr Friedmann was fascinated by the thought that Mars might well have been warm, wet and biologically pulsing before Earth was. This provided another data point from which to explore the origins of life. It was possible, too, that life had originally come to Earth from Mars, since it was much easier to make the journey that way than in reverse, and that it had come in the form of bacteria locked up in meteorites like alh 84001.
Almost as a dare, Mr Friedmann suggested that future voyagers might “terraform” Mars by reintroducing as “pioneer organisms” the cyanobacteria he had discovered. Like the Martian dreams of most Earthlings, it seemed beyond all bounds of probability. But Mr Friedmann’s plucky little organisms, life at its most resistant, could never be counted out of anything.
Takeo Fukuda
Takeo Fukuda, prime minister of Japan in 1976–78 and twice its finance minister, died on July 5th 1995, at the age of 90
Accepting that politics is a cynical game, Takeo Fukuda resolved to make it more so. He spent two decades at the top of government in Japan, a span long enough for him to hold most senior cabinet jobs, to stab most of his colleagues in the back and to go through vast sums of ill-gotten money. And yet, improbable though it might sound, many think fondly of him. He was one part scoundrel, and two parts mystery.
Mr Fukuda went to considerable lengths to avoid consistency. He was elected to the Diet (parliament) in 1952, after a bribery scandal forced him to quit his first career as a finance ministry bureaucrat. He man
aged nonetheless to spend most of the ensuing years posing as the respectable face of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. For a time he led a campaign to rid the ldp of factions, the channels for dirty campaign funds. Yet this did not prevent him from heading a faction of his own. In 1976 he engineered the downfall of a genuinely clean prime minister, Takeo Miki, in order to clear the way for his own succession.
As finance minister in 1965, Mr Fukuda broke with tradition by running a budget deficit, and took the credit for the high growth that followed. Yet he denounced the inflation that followed too, and by the early 1970s he had emerged as chief guardian of Japan’s public finances. For many years a supporter of Taiwan, Mr Fukuda nonetheless devoted much of his energy when prime minister to concluding a peace treaty with communist China. Japan’s aid to Asia doubled during his term. A large slice of it probably landed up in the coffers of his faction.
Mr Fukuda’s two years as prime minister will be remembered by some for the immodestly named “Fukuda doctrine”, which promised that Japan would never again become a military power. Most domestic tributes to Mr Fukuda have dwelt on the supposed idealism of this pronouncement. Yet the doctrine was a con. It gave little away, since the constitution imposed on Japan after the second world war excluded war in any case; and there is little evidence that Mr Fukuda meant it seriously.
In 1978, a year after crafting his doctrine, Mr Fukuda said: “Japan can possess any type of weapon if it falls within the necessary minimum for self-defence purposes, even if this means nuclear or bacteriological weapons.” The comment placed him squarely among the hawks set on a minimalist reading of the constitution’s war-renouncing clause. Mr Fukuda had, moreover, entered politics as a protégé of Nobusuke Kishi, a war criminal turned prime minister who supported rearmament.
Mr Fukuda’s personal loyalties were no more constant than his principles. In 1973–74 he was happy to serve as finance minister in Kakuei Tanaka’s government; yet the “Kaku–Fuku war” divided the ldp between their camps for the ensuing decade.
In 1976 Mr Fukuda became prime minister on the understanding that he would relinquish the job to Masayoshi Ohira after two years. Mr Fukuda tried to wriggle out of the deal; in 1980 he helped destroy Mr Ohira’s government.
Mr Fukuda sometimes compared
himself to the feudal barons of old Japan. Like them, his only real loyalty was to relatives and neighbours. His family farmed silk in Gunma prefecture; and the men at Gunma’s cocoon-futures exchange still tell stories about how deeply their patron interested himself in sericulture. Mr Fukuda’s electoral machine in Gunma is said to have mustered 50,000 members at its peak – enough to ensure that its master won more votes than his local rival, Yasuhiro Nakasone, when Mr Nakasone was prime minister. The machine served Mr Fukuda’s friends and family too: his son and son-in-law still sit in the Diet.
Mr Fukuda’s reputation survived allthis: the nepotism, the corruption, the ambitious hypocrisy. For this he must thank his arch-rival, Mr Tanaka. The two men operated in similar ways: through factions based on dirty cash. Mr Tanaka was the more successful at this game. By the 1980s he commanded far more cash, and his faction had grown to nearly twice the size of Mr Fukuda’s. As a result, Mr Tanaka, rather than Mr Fukuda, is remembered as the architect of Japan’s contemporary corruption.
Another factor in the buoyancy of Mr Fukuda’s reputation is the power of snobbery in Japan. Whereas Mr Tanaka was a self-made upstart, an entrepreneur, a folksy, rough-voiced charmer, Mr Fukuda was a patrician, a graduate of Tokyo University’s law school with a patina of respectability burnished by his years in the finance ministry. Mr Tanaka seldom laid claim to high principles or sophisticated vision; Mr Fukuda spent his later years convening worthy symposiums. Mr Tanaka was surely the less hypocritical of the two. But Japan is in awe of its mandarin elite, so Mr Fukuda is remembered as the more honourable.
John Kenneth Galbraith
John Kenneth Galbraith, economist and public intellectual, died on April 29th 2006, aged 97
ABOVE a large oak bookcase in John Kenneth Galbraith’s elegant sitting room in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a framed sampler was displayed. “Galbraith’s First Law”, read the meticulous red and blue cross-stitch: “Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.” He thoroughly believed it. Save for his humble origins on a farm in Ontario, little about Mr Galbraith or his life was modest.
At six foot eight, he was a giant. Intellectually he was equally towering, a man who spent more than seven decades either on the stage of American public policy – as a bureaucrat in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, a confidante of John Kennedy and adviser to countless other Democrats – or loudly lambasting Washington from offstage left, as a Harvard professor.
For several of those decades, Mr Galbraith – much to the chagrin of his academic colleagues – could claim to be the best-known economist in the world. His books, more than 40 of them, were spectacularly successful. All this made him an extraordinary public intellectual. But for many, particularly on America’s left, he was much more. Mr Galbraith embodied a creed (a broad scepticism of markets and unshakeable belief in a strong state to balance them) and an era, the 1960s, when that sort of liberalism reached its peak. In many eyes, and perhaps his own, Mr Galbraith was America’s Great Liberal Economist, the intellectual heir to John Maynard Keynes, whose contributions to economics are underappreciated by a profession obsessed with mathematical formulae.
He was certainly Keynes’s heir in his passion for the trenches of public policy, his recognition that economics could and should be accessible, and his way with words. A devotee of Trollope and Evelyn Waugh – “Scoop” was a favourite – Mr Galbraith strove to perfect his prose, reworking each passage at least five times. “It was usually on about the fourth day that I put in that note of spontaneity for which I am known,” he once admitted.
Bons mots, however, seemed to come naturally to him. “Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days last a lifetime.” “Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.” As Kennedy’s ambassador to India, Mr Galbraith preferred to write to the president direct: sending letters through the State Department, he told Kennedy, was “like fornicating through a mattress”.
Where Mr Galbraith differed from Keynes, and from other Great Economists such as Milton Friedman, was that he produced no robust economic theories. Robert Skidelsky, Keynes’s biographer, thought that he lacked “the theoretical brilliance, or perhaps merely interest”. In fact, Mr Galbraith disdained a theoretical approach to economics. This was more than a simple aversion to mathematical formulae. The greatest problem with economics, he argued, was its “wilful denial of the presence of power and political interests”. By positing an idealised world of perfect competition, economic theory assumed away the factors that drove societies.
Mr Galbraith was thus less an economist than a mixture of sociologist, political scientist and journalist. His three most influential books were snapshots of the America of their time. In “American Capitalism” (1952), giant firms were balanced by the “countervailing power” of, for instance, unions; in “The Affluent Society” (1958), massive private consumption coexisted with public decay; in “The New Industrial State” (1967), producers held all the economic power and competition was irrelevant. Timeproved especially unkind to that idea.
His faith in government, born of the searing experience of the Depression, verged sometimes on the bizarre. In 1973, for instance, he argued that America’s few-hundred biggest companies should be brought into public ownership. Yet if Mr Galbraith was often wrong, he nonetheless gave much to American public life. “The Affluent Society” not only changed the way the country viewed itself, but gave new phrases to the language: “Conventional wisdom”, “the bland leading the bland”, “private opulence and public squalor”. Amartya Sen, the Indian economist, said that reading it was like reading “Hamlet”: “Y
ou realise where [all the quotations] came from”.
Long after Mr Galbraith’s brand of big-government liberalism fell out of favour, he remained its standard-bearer. His acerbic comments on public policy were always worth reading. In private matters he was not partisan, and could count Bill Buckley, the conservative intellectual, among his closest friends. In the local bookstore in Gstaad, where they both went skiing, they would battle to get their books the best spot in the window.
A decade ago, Mr Galbraith lamented that old age brought an annoying affliction he called the “Still Syndrome”. People would constantly note that he was “still” doing things: still “interested in politics” when he showed up at a meeting, “still imbibing” when he had a drink and “still that way” when his eyes lit up on seeing a beautiful woman. The Still Syndrome lasted an immodestly long time. Its passing has left America poorer.
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg, who howled about life in America, died on April 5th 1997, aged 70
When Allen Ginsberg was being shown around an Oxford college he asked to see the rooms Shelley had used. His companion was uncertain of their whereabouts, but pointed hopefully to a door. Mr Ginsberg entered, dropped to his knees and kissed the carpet, much to the surprise of the occupant, who was making tea. Shelley would have been amused. He would have recognised a fellow romantic and quite likely invited him along to meet Keats and Byron. And as a connoisseur of dope, the American must have a chat with De Quincey about the virtues of opium.
The curious era in American culture that produced the beat generation (from beatitude or deadbeat: take your pick) was in some ways a reliving of England’s 19th-century romantic movement. The beats rejected the rationality of normal living. In their pursuit of “flower power” some sought a return to nature. Mr Ginsberg was their outrageous Byron, although far from handsome and in love with men rather than women.