Revisiting The Feminine Mystique

Just when you thought that with the interesting yet complicated angle Palin is injecting into red state feminism, we might onto something new, Christina Hoff Sommers is back fanning the flames of the mommy wars by arguing that in building her case, Betty Friedan made a fatal mistake that undermined her book's appeal at the time and permanently weakened the movement it helped create.

According to Sommers in a New York Sun article titled Reconsiderations: Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Friedan 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.

I seriously can't wait for Stephanie Coontz's reconsideration of TFM (which is in the works). We need it, bad.

And while we're at it, Newsweek reports that a new study finds that children of privileged families fare worse when the mother works outside the home--but what does the research really tell us? Read it and see.

(Thanks to Steve Mintz and the Council on Contemporary Families--on whose Board I now sit!--for the links.)