Attending the talk tonight...a complex subject for all. As a daughter of a feminist in the 60's and 70's this was not an easy time in the upheaval and redefining of family and should not be romanticized. By woman of privilege going out and redefining their place in society did it create greater economic struggle for families today? (the requirement of two bread winners to survive) And if they had not gone out to challenge society would so many of our freedoms we all have today, to tackle this and other social struggles, not be in place?

Seminal?? NO! GERMINAL, maybe.
Betty Friedan, Yes, of course!
But don't forget Elizabeth Janeway (Man's World, Woman's Place), Kate Millett (Sexual Politics), Simone de Beauvoire (The Second Sex)

I graduated from the same college as Betty Friedan. Even in that rarified environment, thinking the world was our oyster, we were still conventional in much of our thinking. The British ambassador who gave our graduation speech, told us "You have been given the best education anywhere in the world so you can become your husband's cultural partner and your children's culturnal mentor." I did not "wake up" until some years later when I was divorced, with a child to raise and no particular working skills. I gradually pushed ahead in the public relations field but it necessitated several moves to increase my salary and survive male bosses who were sexual predators. It was not an easy time.

To the caller (Tony?) who said women went to college to find a higher class of man to marry, when I was in college in the '70s, a male classmate stated that most of the women there were just looking to get an MRS degree. I granted him a BS on the spot!

When I was growing up in the 50's and 60's my mother told me many times that a woman never knows when a man will walk out on you or drop dead. So I had better get my self a good degree. I got my self a teacher's degree.

If its about middle class white women then what happens when white men decide to marry outside that group? For example, more men are now using Match.com to find foreign woman who live in developing countries. Will the the families resulting from such unions teach their daughters to embrace the work of Friedan? If so, is that a problem for the movement?

The mention of tranquilizers made me realize how long it's been since I thought about how women's dissatisfaction was not only pathologized but medicated! How common was it for women to be prescribed tranquilizers?

Did Friedan ever respond, formally, to the criticism that she left out so many working women in her landmark work?

I'm 51, read it and loved it because it explained much of my own mother's misery.

Urgh, upper middle class whites crying into their martinis.

What about the women who gave up kids for a profession and have that guilt.

Problem is, other than middle and upper middle class women never did and don't now have the luxury of finding meaning through work. Work is just another soul-crushing treadmill for so many women, true then, and still true now.

Never identified with the book or with her. A Latina on scholarship at NYU, she seemed to be a whiner. My mother raised me to be strong and self-sufficient, and not to accept the stereotypes of Puerto Ricans or women.

An other book not read "A Theory of Justice" by John Rawls 1971: but many refer to it; demonize it but the but is not leftist. It is an apology for the current bourgeois society with its inequality

I am appalled at this author's characterization of a time when "women were not allowed to balance work and family." When I read the Feminist Mystique in college, all the women I knew worked outside of the home (some of them worked in the homes of the women of whom Coontz speaks). It was as if I was reading about aliens.

Can we at least mention class and race here??????

The success of feminism has proven that women in power can be as corrupt and imperious as any male. The feminist card has become just one more weapon in the arsenal of any garden variety workplace opportunist. Men must now affect a passive-aggressive milquetoast demeanor or be accused of being sexist, right Brian?

It's no longer taboo for women to say exactly what they want -- in ALL rooms of the house -- and that's a good thing!

"feminism" is the canary in the coal mine of every dying civilization, in every time, in every place, without exception.

many contemporaneous commentators viewed the 60s (feminism was the "canary", but not the "methane") as the watershed into the West's irreversible decline. interestingly, the Red Cinese, in spite of all their colossal problems at the time, correctly perceived the 60s as ushering in the West's fin de siecle.