Room of Her Own

Room of Her Own:
"The reaction revealed how far feminism had become removed from ordinary women. There had always been a totalitarian element that was less interested in individual freedom than social revolution - the notion that a woman shouldn't have the option to work outside of the home but rather the obligation. Simone de Beauvoir had written, "No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children... Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one." Yet her strain never found a popular audience: the Second Sex author famously threw Friedan's Second Stage across a room. (Interviewed about the book, Friedan told the New York Times, "Some militants repudiated all the parts of the personhood of women that have been and are still expressed in family, home and love. In trying to ape men's lives, they have truncated themselves away from grounding experiences.)"