The Second Stage continues the obdurately fair appraisal of the relationship between the sexes begun twenty years ago in The Feminine Mystique. Fair in that Betty Friedan doesn’t let women off the hook. She foresees a positive synthesis emerging from the women’s movement and proclaims that it is not for women only. So she doesn’t exempt men from the opportunity to change, either.
There’s a lot to quibble with in Friedan — she’s straight, she has odd blind spots around lesbianism, race, culture, and ecology, and she extrapolates from the present in a rather linear way. She is, however, aware of the extent to which the megainstitutions like the State and Capitalism have gone haywire, and that makes for a fairly meaningful larger context.
