She said all this at undue length, and with more passion than style, but her effect was and still is persuasive. “American women lately have been living much longer than men,” she observed, “walking through their leftover lives like living dead women. Perhaps men may live longer in America when women carry more of the burden of the battle of the world, instead of being a burden themselves.” She might also have quoted from a letter Jung wrote to Freud in 1909, remarking that “in America the mother is decidedly the dominant member of the family. American culture really is a bottomless abyss; the men have become a flock of sheep and the women play the ravening wolves—within the family circle, of course.” Give women some access to a few other circles, the Friedan message goes, and maybe there wouldn’t be so many dangerous matriarchs around, or so much wasted energy.

She is no heroine among lesbians, nor does their cause much interest her.

You might think her colleagues in sisterhood would rally to Friedan’s support, in gratitude for the harsh and early light she shed on such matters, but not all of them have. The movement’s momentum has been so dizzying that some feminists see Friedan as “hopelessly bourgeois,” practically a Helen Hokinson caricature. She is no heroine among lesbians, nor does their cause much interest her. She hints that some among them, along with radicals who see the movement as a class struggle, may be plotting to take over the whole operation, perhaps in collusion with the CIA. They hint right back that she is a reactionary who could have carried the movement much farther than she has chosen to do. She was hissed at a conference of OWL (Older Women’s Liberation), for urging her sisters to “stay reality-oriented, instead of debating clitoral versus vaginal orgasms.”

Nobody’s perfect. “Betty is impossible sometimes,” writes the author of the autobiographical Bella!, “because she tends to regard herself as ‘the’ leader of the women’s movement.” It might have been a nice gesture, readers of her Times piece last year wrote to say, if she had shared a little of the credit with Simone de Beauvoir, and with the other cofounders of NOW (the National Organization for Women) and the strike and march on August 26. Jill Johnston’s letter mentioned something about “sexual McCarthyism.”

And all along there have been men, like my companion in seat 8B, who squirm at the very sight of Friedan’s name. A frailer spirit, amid such eclectic crossfire, might have crumpled in defeat, but Friedan’s has not. Far from it. A suburban housewife when The Feminine Mystique came out, she is now a Manhattan divorcee, ensconced, as she tells us in her epilogue, “high in an airy, magic tower with open sky and river and bridges to the future all around.” The future she envisions, both personally and politically, will most assuredly not exclude men. However middle-class and shrill she may seem, and whatever her excesses and shortcomings, I think she’s on the right track. Her book is worth rereading.