Reconsiderations: Betty Friedan's 'The Feminine Mystique' - September 17, 2008 - The New York Sun

Reconsiderations: Betty Friedan's 'The Feminine Mystique' - September 17, 2008 - The New York Sun: "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.

Friedan described herself as 'Diogenes with his lamp,' going from suburb to suburb in search of a mentally sound housewife. (None could be found, she concluded.) The job of housewife, in her estimation, was intrinsically unworthy and undignified, an occupation best suited to 'feeble-minded girls.' She called the suburban home a 'comfortable concentration camp' where women suffer a 'slow death of mind and spirit.' Like the inmates of the camps, she said, American suburban housewives had become 'walking corpses.'

That sort of language didn't sound any less ludicrous back then than it does now and, looking back, Friedan's lamp seems less illuminating than incendiary."