Nancy Friday

Nancy Colbert Friday (born August 27, 1933 in Pittsburgh) is an American author who has
written on the topics of female sexuality and liberation.

Nancy Fridays successful fantasy revelations (My Secret Garden, Forbidden Flowers) have
seen her placed among the feminist erotic pioneers.[1] Her writings argue that women have
often been reared under an ideal of womanhood, which was outdated and restrictive, and
largely unrepresentative of many womens true inner lives, and that openness about womens
hidden lives could help free women to truly feel able to enjoy being themselves. She asserts
that this is not due to deliberate malice, but due to social expectation, and that for womens
and mens benefit alike it is healthier that both be able to be equally open, participatory and
free to be accepted for who and what they are.
Biography

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Walter F. Friday and Jane Colbert Friday,
Nancy Friday grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, and attended the only local girls collegepreparatory school, Ashley Hall, where she graduated in 1951.[2] She then attended Wellesley
College in Massachusetts, where she graduated in 1955.[3] She worked briefly as a reporter for
the San Juan Island Times and subsequently established herself as a magazine journalist in
New York, England, and France before turning to writing full-time and publishing her first book,
My Secret Garden, in 1973. This book, which compiled interviews of women discussing their
sexuality and fantasies, became a bestseller; Friday has regularly returned to the interview
format in her subsequent books on themes ranging from mothers and daughters to sexual
fantasies, relationships, jealousy, envy, feminism, BDSM, and beauty. She had not written a
book since the publication of The Power of Beauty (released in 1996, and then renamed and
rereleased in paperback form in 1999)despite contributing an interview of porn star Nina
Hartley to XXX: 30 Porn Star Portraits a book by photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
published in 2004until Beyond My Control: Forbidden Fantasies in an Uncensored Age
(2009).

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s she was a frequent guest on television and radio
programs such as Politically Incorrect, Oprah, Larry King Live, Good Morning America, and
NPRs Talk of the Nation, Friday also has a web site, created in the mid-1990s, to complement
the publication of The Power of Beauty. Initially conceived as a forum for development of new
work and interaction with her diverse audience, it has not been updated in several years. As of
2005, Friday is currently working on her first novel.

Despite the judgment of Ms. magazine (This woman is not a feminist),[4] she has predicated
her career on the belief that feminism and appreciation of men are not mutually exclusive
concepts.

Literary motivation

Friday has explained how in the late 1960s I chose to write about womens sexual fantasies
because the subject was unbroken ground, a missing piece of the puzzle . . . at a time in history
when the world was suddenly curious about sex and womens sexuality.[5] The backdrop was
a widespread belief that women do not have sexual fantasies . . . are by and large destitute of
sexual fantasy.[6]

Friday considered that more than any other emotion, guilt determined the story lines of the
fantasies in My Secret Garden . . . women inventing ploys to get past their fear that wanting to
reach orgasm made them Bad Girls.[7] Her later book, My Mother/My Self, 'grew
immediately out of My Secret Garden 's questioning of the source of womens terrible guilt
about sex.[8]

When she returned 20 years later to her original topic of womens fantasies in Women on Top,
it was in the belief that the sexual revolution had stalled: it was the greed of the 1980s that
dealt the death blow . . . the demise of healthy sexual curiosity.[9]

Friday, like other feminists, was especially concerned with the controlling role of the images of
Nice Woman . . . Nice Girl[10]of being bombarded from birth with messages about what a
good woman is . . . focused so hard and so long on never giving in to selfishness.[11]
However, as feminism itself developed a stunning array of customs, opinions, moral values,
and beliefs about how the world of women . . . should conduct itself,[12] so too it ran into the
difficulty of moralism versus human naturethe fact that feminismany political
philosophydoes not adequately address sexual psychology eventually sparking the 'feminist
sex wars . . . from the early 1980s[13] onwards. Against that backdrop, Fridays evidential
and empirical concerns continue to address the open question of how many of their sexual
freedoms the young women . . . will retain, how deeply they have incorporated them.[14]

Criticism

Critics have labeled Fridays books unscientific, because the author solicited responses,[15]
thus potentially biasing the contributor pool.

My Secret Garden was greeted by a salvo from the media accusing me of inventing the whole
book, having made up all the fantasies; My Mother/My Self was initially . . . violently
rejected by both publishers and readers;[16] while Women on Top was heavily criticized for
its graphic and sensational content.[17]