She wrote an article in The Nation entitled “Betty Friedan, 1921 – 2006,” and you can read the whole thing here. Below is an excerpt:
… “In a spirited, much discussed polemic in the December American Prospect, retired law professor Linda Hirshman argues that it’s not a media myth that educated young women are going back home in droves; it’s really happening, and it’s feminists’ fault for replacing the language of justice with the language of choice: Whatever you decide is fine, if that’s what you really want! For Hirshman work is everything: She counts as slackers even new mothers who take a few years off or go part-time. And work means a high-paying career with a corner office in your sights: none of your poverty-wage, idealistic, do-good jobs for her, so eat your hearts out, Nation staffers. Hirshman wants feminists to assert that stay-home mothers waste their talents, buy into domestic subordination and perpetuate inequality in the public realm. Even if she’s right in some abstract, theoretical way, and even if there were some central committee of feminism to issue these fatwas, it would be hard to think of a better recipe for political suicide: As if American women don’t already feel attacked by the cartoon feminist in their heads! ….
“The Feminine Mystique didn’t change my life; I was only 13 when it came out and even then I didn’t see myself as a Future Homemaker of America. The book I loved was Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, which was about literature. Still, whenever I open Friedan’s manifesto I’m carried away by its directness and pungency, its moral seriousness, its Emersonian call to women to use their best energies and be true to their best selves. It is so contrary to the caricature of feminism put forward in the media down to this day–child-hating feminazis in power suits–and it is not really Hirshman’s feminism either. Friedan doesn’t disparage love or motherhood (in fact, for women’s liberationists, she was far too devoted to conventional domestic arrangements); she doesn’t insist you get up from the delivery table and go straight back to your desk; she doesn’t, like Hirshman, belittle majoring in English or art history as a ticket to nowhere. Still less did Friedan–whose major experience of full-time employment was as editor of the left-wing United Electrical Workers union newspaper–advise women to drop their foolish predilection for socially meaningful work and go for that big corporate paycheck. I doubt she would say, with Hirshman, that domesticity is inherently “not interesting” even if she thought it. She would simply say it is not enough for a whole human life. Cooking and cleaning and shopping are not why we are here.
“The Feminine Mystique has a larger and deeper vision: Women, like men, have a duty to their minds and talents and selves that cannot be fulfilled by living vicariously through husbands and children. An equal cannot live a happy subordinate life; an adult cannot thrive in a culture that infantilizes her. If Rousseau had not been a mad misogynist, he would have applauded Friedan.”
