Flawed but Powerful: Friedan’s “Feminist Mystique”
Christina Hoff Sommers reconsiders Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique:
But in building her case, Friedan made a fatal mistake that undermined her book’s appeal at the time and permanently weakened the movement it helped create. She not only attacked a postwar culture that aggressively consigned women to the domestic sphere, but she attacked the sphere itself – along with all the women who chose to live there.
(Link from Arts & Letters Daily) The debate continues, forty-five years later, with the media darling Mommy Wars, a supposed conflict between stay-at-home and on-the-job mothers. I think the flaw in Friedan’s argument continues–all women are not the same. But they’re not all different, either. The best analyses find the balance point in this seeming contradiction.