I think perhaps Rox says it best.
Like most notable feminists, Friedan’s passing will undoubtedly be met with criticisms from all sides of the aisle. But we cannot ignore the simple fact that Friedan ignited a revolution, and it was one that was good for all of us. Some conservatives have complained that she was scornful of housewives; other critics have pointed out that her version of feminism was remarkably middle-class and white. While those are certainly fair statements, Friedan leaves us with a legacy that confers more value onto women — all women — than would have existed should she have never had her “ah ha!” moment and written The Feminine Mystique.
Because the focus of her most famous work was the role of the housewife, I think it’s worth addressing what Friedan left us with in that area. She was certainly critical of the view that housework was a woman’s life calling, and that women were somehow flawed if they didn’t enjoy their domestic role. In her criticisms, she is often perceived to have attacked the housewife herself — anti-feminists will toss out Friedan quotes about housework being suited for the simple-minded and boring as “proof” that Friedan believes stay-at-home moms to be stupid. But I’m not sure that was her point. Housework is boring and repetitive. It isn’t stimulating. Most people do not enjoy it. But it still has to get done. Recognizing that it sucks, and that it’s pretty unfair to hold up members of a particular gender as failures if they don’t enjoy it, isn’t the same thing as disparaging the people who, out of necessity, do it. Criticizing the system is not the same as criticizing the individuals who do their best to operate within that system.
I also don’t buy the idea that Friedan’s work and the feminist movement were bad for stay-at-home women, or that they constructed the stay-at-home woman as a negative thing. If anything, the fact that staying at home is now much more a choice than it was 50 years ago confers a good deal of value onto it — women who are staying home are doing it because they want to, not because they’re mandated to do so. They see it as a viable lifestyle choice, and one that they want for themselves. That breeds an understanding of staying home as one in a series of valid life choices, as opposed to something that, by virtue of having a vagina, some second-class citizens are simply expected to do. Of course, how much of this “choice” is actually made freely is debatable, but it’s certainly much more of a choice, for many more women, than it was before. And our construction of staying home as a valid choice remains fraught with problems. Women who don’t stay home with their young children continue to be branded as selfish, because self-sacrifice continues to be one of the defining characteristics of womanhood. And while women who do stay home with their kids are largely lauded in principle, their day-to-day work is ignored and undervalued; to compound that, they’re often assumed to be submissive, uneducated or simply not that smart, politically conservative, and/or dull. Men who are stay-at-home dads are applauded for their sacrifice, and fawned over for being so family-oriented. Women who stay home get little of this, since they’re simply fulfilling a role that’s still sort of expected. So the situation is by no means perfect. But it’s a heck of a lot better.
Friedan also drew attention to the fact that home-based work, though it may be repetitive and fruitless, is exhausting, taxing and stressful — that women at home are workers who don’t get pay or recognition. And it’s important to recognize the legions of women who never had such a choice to begin with: the low-income women who, even in Friedan’s time, didn’t have the option of staying home with their kids or focusing their efforts on mop-n-glow. These are the women who were invisible in Friedan’s book.
But in the aggregate, I think most people would agree that Friedan’s work was good. It was better than good — it was transformative. Feminism may have quickly surpassed Friedan’s politics, and many of us may be ideologically very far from where Friedan was, but her contribution to the movement and to the lives of women everywhere cannot be emphasized enough. She is, and will remain, high on the list of women who helped to instigate major social shifts. We can all be grateful for what she left us.