Empowerment has had important impact on women's health, Friedan says

By LOIS BAKER
News Services Editor
Betty Friedan, the first president of the National Organization for Women and the nation's best-known feminist, presented an informal talk on the impact of women's empowerment on their physical and mental health Saturday during the 62nd Spring Clinical Day, sponsored by the UB Medical Alumni Association and held in the Buffalo Marriott, 1340 Millersport Highway, Amherst.

Friedan was the first woman to present the Stockton Kimball Lecture and to receive the association's Stockton Kimball Award. "Women's Health" was the theme of this year's Spring Clinical Day, which featured several presentations on breast and ovarian cancer.

Accustomed to speaking before gatherings attended almost exclusively by women, Friedan opened her remarks by joking about the number of men in the audience, a legacy of a profession that for many years was almost exclusively male. She contrasted that historical state of affairs with the current situation, in which enrollments in many medical schools are half women. In fact, the class entering the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences this fall will have a majority of women for the first time in the school's 150-year history.

The empowerment of women through the women's movement of the 1960s and '70s clearly brought about this change, Friedan noted, pointing out that this change has an important impact on women's health, as well as their economic status. She mentioned an early study that found that women's mental health peaked when they were in their 20s and dropped dramatically after age 40, compared to men. "It was thought normal for women to go into depression in menopause," Friedan said. "It even had a classification-involutional melancholia."

When women were defined only by their feminine role, not as a person in their own right, life was over after 40, she noted. "The love story was the only one women could be a hero of. But now, women's mental health after menopause is better, maybe better even than it was in their 20s, 30s and 40s."

As women entered the professions in large numbers, the concept of the working wo-man took on a negative tone, Friedan observed. "The hype was 'Women have to have it all,'" she said. "But nobody ever says anything about men having it all. For 30 years, people have been trying to prove that women's employment is bad for children and they couldn't do it. Now the newest study shows that employment is good for children...Big News! Of course women are happier when they aren't living exclusively through their children, and they aren't seething with frustrated rage," Friedan said. "There is also less stress and pressure on the man when he isn't solely responsible for providing for the family. That has to be good for children."

Friedan noted that, while empowerment has had a positive effect on women, they historically have lived longer than men, and she suggested this discrepancy is a fertile area for study. "Something about the male role must be a killer. There should be research into the things about women's roles that are good for life," she said