at the founding of NOW, which Friedan headed for many years, wrote Friedan: "You have done for women what Rachel Carson did for birds and trees." But, Lerner had a legitimate complaint: "I have one reservation about your treatment of your subject: you address yourself solely to the problems of middle class, college-educated women. This approach was one of the shortcomings of the suffragette movementa.Working women, especially Negro women, labor not only under the disadvantages imposed by the feminine mystique, but under the more pressing disadvantages of economic discrimination. To leave them out of consideration of the problem or to ignore the contributions they can make toward a solution, is something we simply cannot afford to do (Horowitz, p. 22).
Is feminism really a philosophy, or a means of righting the inequality of gender in the modern world? Feminism should be defined merely as a movement to achieve equality in all aspects of human life- social, economic, psychological, social. Femininity is merely a differentiation in character and behavior, even in physiological differences, between the genders. The cynic would say Feminists are strident. Femininity is complaisant. Feminism is activist. Femininity is passive, but not in an unpleasant sense. "In her classic essay, 'A gender diary', the critic Ann Snitow (1992) writes of a 'central divide' among feminists about the value of femininity. She contrasts two women's responses
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