"It is pointless to construct a hierarchy of who hurt more, and whether one kind of pain was more or less justified than another. And I say this as someone whose first reaction was to dismiss the pain of the middle-class hosuewives as less "real" than that of their working-class sisters."
Well, finally. I'm hoping she'll next observe that women after FM looking back at the women described in FM and complaining about how they were a bunch of educated, white, middle-class whiners are _just piling onto an oppressed minority_. However, that is probably overly optimistic.
Sure enough, Coontz next says that when she was doing the research, she was dismayed "at how few of the black and working-class women I interviewed had read Friedan. I was distressed that the book's appeal seemed to be concentrated among such a relatively privileged section of women."
I call this the Sesame Street error. It is true, Sesame Street has very limited adult appeal. But that's a really dumb complaint to make about Sesame Street.
all of the above near location 2040ish
