Friedan's Hits and Misses

Christina Hoff Sommers analyzes the influence of feminist Betty Friedan:

Unlike some of her followers, Friedan did not rage against men. And her politics were moderate. Though she had worked as a labor journalist for a Marxist-inspired movement called the Popular Front, there was nothing Marxist about her solution to the "problem that has no name." She urged women to go back to school and into the workplace. A woman needs a job, she said: "a job that she can take seriously as part of a life plan, work in which she can grow as part of society." It was a simple suggestion and, for millions of women, one that has stood the test of time.

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.