Student of gender politics dies at 84
NANCY FRIDAY
Nancy Friday, the author whose books about gender politics helped redefine American women’s sexuality and social identity in the late 20th century, died Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 84.
The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, her friend Eric Krebs said.
In 1973, when author Caroline Seebohm reviewed Friday’s first book, “My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies,” for The New York Times, she joked about just what kind of “dirty book” it was and playfully reassured readers that despite the author’s findings, “men are still indispensable.”
The book’s shocking premise was that women had erotic thoughts. Friday, however, who based the book on hundreds of interviews, said those thoughts were accompanied by considerable guilt and secrecy.
The book was an immediate best-seller.
But Friday was not considered a friend of the women’s movement. “What pitted her against her adversaries,” Gina Bellafante wrote in The Times, “was her idea that women’s erotic freedom and the shedding of shame” — rather than other factors — “would establish the bedrock of equality between the sexes professionally, economically, politically.”
If critics tended to regard “My Secret Garden” and its sequel, “Forbidden Flowers: More Women’s Sexual Fantasies,” as little more than soft-core pornography, Friday’s third book vastly improved her reputation. “My Mother/My Self: The Daughter’s Search for Identity” (1977), which argued that women’s relationships were shaped by the dynamics of their connection with their mothers, may have been pop psychology, but it was considered a daring and original example.
“We learn our deepest ways of intimacy with mother,” she wrote. “Automatically we repeat the pattern” — taking the role of either mother or child — “with everyone else with whom we become close.”
Kirkus Reviews called the book “a stimulating convergence of personal and cultural inquiry.” It remained on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year.
Friday became a frequent guest on television talk shows, called on to discuss almost any issue that particularly affected women. She often took the unfashionable side of an argument.
Nancy Colbert Friday was born on Aug. 27, 1933, in Pittsburgh. She leaves no immediate survivors.