The day of cards, candy and phone calls restores the debate over the most-analyzed figure in American society–Mom–and recalls my intense relationship with Feminism’s “Mother of Us All”–Betty Friedan.

In early 1957, as a free-lance writer, she suggested an idea: At her fifteenth college reunion, she would pass out a questionnaire asking classmates how they felt about their lives. I assigned her to do an article about it.

That questionnaire became the Holy Writ of the Women’s Movement, prompting Betty to write ”The Feminine Mystique.” In the following decades, as the last man to edit a mass magazine for women, I worked with Betty as a contributing editor and became embroiled in the struggles of those who changed the lives of American women forever.

As The Mother told it, I almost killed the Woman’s Movement in utero. In the “The Feminine Mystique,” she says I rejected it before birth, confirming the venality of men who edited women’s magazines, one of the book’s themes. It is not exactly what happened.

In the 1950s Betty was a housewife and part—time writer, who was “getting strangely bored writing articles about breast-feeding and the like.” Actually, those she did for me were paeans to suburban life, which were edited to tone down her exuberance for the joys of housewifery and motherhood.

Then came the questionnaire. Her classmates said they were dissatisfied with being wives and mothers when their education had prepared them for worldly accomplishment.

In “The Feminine Mystique,” Betty wrote that she submitted an article to me, and I told her agent, ‘Betty has gone off her rocker. She has always done a good job for us, but this time only the most neurotic housewife could identify.’” Thus thwarted, she told her agent, “I’ll have to write a book to get this into print.”

Nice story, embellished over the years with references to me as “an old friend” whose betrayal was particularly painful.

But there was no article. Instead, Betty sent her book outline with the theme that “the women who ‘adjust’ as housewives, who grow up wanting to be ‘just a housewife’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in concentration camps-—and the millions more who refused to believe that the concentration camps existed.”

If I used the word “neurotic,” I was being polite. I might have said “paranoid.”

In any event, there were no hard feelings. Betty interviewed me for the book, and I spent hours answering questions. After it was published, there were hard feelings. She had taken what I said and twisted it to fit the tunnel vision of a polemic. Writing a novel like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to arouse a revolution is one thing, but making a “sociological” argument with tendentious research is another.

The Simon Legrees of “The Feminine Mystique” were the editors of women’s magazines: “The men and women who make the editorial decisions often compromise their own very high standards in the interest of the advertising dollar.”

The immediate response of those compromisers was to publish parts of her book in the four largest, bringing it to the attention of millions of women. They saw her provocations only as good copy to sell magazines.

I was not one of them. I took the book seriously and I took it personally. So when the Women’s National Press Club asked me to appear with Betty at a meeting in Washington–although it seemed an invitation to a bear-baiting, with guess-who as the bear——I accepted.

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