"Not the Kind of Change Friedan Hoped Her Book Would Inspire"

"Sandberg also seems primarily concerned with the economics of gender. But there's a key difference: Friedan didn’t share a view from the corporate boardroom. Her first political home was the labor movement, and she found her way back to it in the mid-1990s. Then in her 70s, Friedan participated with gusto in campus teach-ins to promote the new, reform-minded leadership of the AFL-CIO. 'I have a pretty good historic Geiger counter,' she told a packed audience at Columbia University. 'It clicked thirty years ago' when The Feminine Mystique helped create the modern women’s movement. 'And that counter is clicking again, because I think we are on the verge of something new: a movement for social justice' which might 'transcend the separate interests, the special interests, even the very good interests of identity politics that have been at the cutting edge of democratic progress.' Friedan wasn't able to realize her vision of justice—such is the fate of American leftists. But it was always a far cry from the individualized notion of justice proferred by Sandberg."

Michael Kazin in The New Republic considers Betty Friedan's legacy upon the fiftieth anniversary of The Feminine Mystique.


"Competent female executives run better companies than incompetent male executives, but they’re no more likely to make universal day care the law of the land. If Davos Woman had dominated feminist discourse when the Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed nearly 130 female sweatshop laborers in 1911, would she have pushed for the legislation that came out of that tragedy—the fire codes and occupancy limits that made workplaces safer for women, and men, for generations to come?"

And Judith Shulevitz reviews Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In.