She was, supposedly, the mother of us all.

But she was not maternal, comforting, easy - She was an organizer. She organized us.

As she had organized her friends into communes of privileged eggheads living as happy-go-lucky intellectuals in oversized houses or little apartments designed for UN couples. There was always a great swirl of intellectual stimulation, first-rate education, informal and first name participation by professors at Columbia - and plenty of drinking. When Betty came up against the Women's Movement she had already organized her life...against the odds.

Against the horrors of loneliness and the boredom of housewifery, against the isolation of the suburbs. Where a second pregnancy had landed her in an egregious, if unnoticed, case of job discrimination. When United Electricians "let Betty Friedan go", she did. She went free-lance, she organized her friends, her neighbors, then she headed for the hypocritical mystique of the women's magazines, all the alienation of the fifties, the sixties and the seventies. Every lost cause and blighted opportunity - she knew them all. She had been in the rush of life at Smith. Then reality. A little job. Then farther reality, unemployment. If she couldn't build a community and make it work, there was nothing.

Smith saved her. It gave her the Class 1942, fifteen years later, this is the stuff of The Feminist Mystique - the questions she wrote for her classmates. What have you done with your lives?

It's not that they'd done nothing - but that compared with what they intended to do, dreamed of doing, were already for ... the illness without a name. All that energy to end in frustration, spoiled hopes.

Betty reached in and touched some secret ambition in us, some greed for life, something that would have washed away otherwise - been rinsed away by Time - and saved us for ourselves.

Because Betty was organizing us. Explaining us, passionately arguing for us. She paid for us too. Misogynistic hatred polarized around her, she was the representative feminist in the USA. Even feminists resented her, felt bullied and bossed by her, those close to her in the movement frequently acted like rebellious daughters. Women at a distance recognized her. Up close, we were confused. We had the ambivalence of Intimacy. We also didn't know who we were dealing with - a woman of genius who had the right to our allegiance.

The two streams, women's liberation and women's rights, flowed together and created a torrent. They called for abortion and the ERA. They made a thousand changes in our lives, their very quality. It may be too late to undo these changes - but we are every day in danger of losing abortion, the right to choose whether and when to have a child. Or to be invaded and bear children against our will. The ERA seems to be as far away as ever - when once it was so close.

America is in a different place now, easy in the way we live, men and women. Harder in the official structure, influenced by the religious right, fundamentalisms of all kinds. Conservativism is on the rise now, the traditional forms of life, the new male chauvinism of war, fear and Christian and Muslim, fascism, and hatred. As if the whole project of women's liberation has met a new setback, a new and more determined masculinity and oppression.

Think of all the work Betty put into women, into us; the meetings, the letters, the books. All to nurse a project, to breathe life into it - to keep its fires going. To burn steadily. That will be our job now. We have changed life but we must transform it utterly. Perhaps the hardest days are still ahead.

"I have led you into history. I leave you now - to make new history." These were Betty Friedan's words on leaving the presidency of NOW. Surely the hardest days are still ahead.

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