Desperate Housewives?

In her discussion of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Christina Hoff Sommers writes,

"[I]n 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.

...

Betty Friedan did indeed pull the trigger on history — but she also took aim at the lives of millions of American women. Her book was a classic and a landmark for both good and ill: In writing modern feminism's first textbook, she was also the author of modern feminism's Original Sin."

I'm not sure I like the terms of this discussion: first of all, at one level, a liberal democracy is concerned with making a space for people to choose their version of the good life. I am not, however, interested in stopping the discussion of ways to achieve the good life for women at this point. Yes, these choices should be allowed and some women will choose "to work" and some women will choose to "stay at home." But that isn't interesting. And I'm not sure that that is a fair division, either--it is not fair to women who "stay at home" well.

It seems to me that the division between work and home is false. Some women choose to work in the public realm; others choose to work in the home. Still others choose to enjoy the leisure at home at the expense of a husband who works. Let's not conflate the last two categories.

I don't know what I think about men and women of leisure. I mean, I'm all against work, personally. But, on the other hand, it seems to me that the balance of work and leisure must be maintained--people who are satisfied with constant leisure might have something wrong with them. And women who are content with spending their lives getting spa treatments and manicures and going to the mall are an embarrassment to real women, women who attempt to make the household a real realm, a productive realm and not only a consumptive one. These women, like my mother, bake and cook and grow things and can them, see to the education of their children, care for their parents, and serve in their church and other local associations.

Basically, women (or for that matter, men) who do not first orient themselves toward their home and family by engaging in activities that, as far as they can tell, benefit the home, are disordered. Women who enter the public realm while disregarding their families evidence the same lack of ability to navigate between the public and private realms as women who lounge at home with no interest in strengthening their families and their communities. The women who we should emulate are women who enter the public realm, while keeping their families and homes as priorities, and the women who devote themselves while at home to their families and communities--volunteering, praying, serving neighbors, etc. Both the household and the public realm are realms that women have to make sense of (although in different ways at different times in their lives). Friedan was right, then, to apply for entrance of women to the public realm. She was also right to disparage some ways of acting as a housewife. Her critique went too far, however, when it didn't allow that housekeeping might be done well.