To people who aren't super familiar with feminist history, it might be surprising that the New Yorker writer, Rachel Shteir, would spend an interview with one of the greatest luminaries of modern feminism asking about her feelings about events that happened 40 years ago. But that doesn't do justice to just how important the rift between Friedan and Millett was, and what it symbolized.

In the late '60s, Millett found herself at the center of a controversy at the heart of second-wave feminism. Friedan, famously, had referred to lesbians in the feminist movement in 1969 as "the lavender menace." She worried that if they came out as lesbians, they'd distract from issues of women's equality and create stereotypes about feminists as "man-hating." Friedan, who was straight and married to a man, said other things that were heavily homophobic. Ashley Fetters at The Atlantic, re-examining The Feminine Mystique on its 50th anniversary in 2013, quotes Freidan referring to homosexuality as a "murky smog" spreading across America, and identifying "a recent increase in the overt manifestations of male homosexuality" as a sign that American children were being drilled with "parasitical softening" and "passive, childlike immaturity."

Friedan's comments in 1969 didn't go unnoticed. Shteir notes that Rita Mae Brown coordinated a protest against them at the Congress To Unite Women in 1970, where lesbians and queer feminists wore "lavender menace" T-shirts and stormed the stage. But Friedan's comments, and the attitude they espoused, became personal when Millett was outed in November by TIME magazine. At a rally organized to support Millett, Friedan was offered a lavender armband to wear in solidarity. She refused.

Millett, explaining what happened to Shteir, said: "You have to be loud and outspoken. [Friedan] hated the gay kids. They were messing up her program. We were naughty little kids. She wanted us to behave properly. We didn’t want to behave. She was ordering everyone around at all the demonstrations, and she took off the armband and threw it onto the ground. I felt sorry for her.”

The armband incident wasn't the last of the clashes between queer women and establishment feminism over the years, and the fight has created rancor on both sides. Professor Esther Newton has written that lesbians within feminism in the 1970s were often driven to form separatist movements, some of whom declared "lesbianism" to be "essential" to female liberation, and "pure" because it didn't involve men on any level. While they were "accused of elitism and arrogance," Newton said, they also had to cope with a lot from straight feminist women, often combatting stereotypes about lesbian masculinity and facing problems about peoples' discomfort with queer female sexuality. It's a wonder more women didn't get into situations like Friedan and Millett's.