Feminism has come a long way -- it has absolutely revolutionized the way gender shapes our lives. The restrictions placed on my mother's generation have little bearing on mine. But sexism hasn't disappeared, it's simply adapted to the successes of feminism. Sexism today is often more subtle, less in your face, but still a very real part of our daily lives. Instead of being shut out of the board room, women are welcomed in, but when ...

The 50th anniversary of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique provides an opportunity to assess the impact of the feminist movement in the United States over the past half-century. Women could not have entered the professional workforce in significant numbers without the liberal feminist movement’s insistence on the opening up of formerly male bastions, such as finance. Rarely do we link the world of feminism with the world of Wall Street. But the feminist movement shaped the ...

Of all the goals that feminists have been working towards for the past five decades, arguably they’ve made the most progress in the realm of sexual freedom. Contrary to popular belief, the sexual revolution was well underway when “women’s libbers" came around, but feminists demanded and largely succeeded in convincing the public that, in the interest of fairness, women had to have the same freedom to plot their own sexual destinies as men. Technological and legal ...

This week we celebrate both the 50th anniversary of Betty Friedan’s important book, The Feminine Mystique, and the premier of Makers: Women Who Made America a new three-hour documentary that tells the story of how women have shaped America over the past 50 years. But when it comes to women and media, even though we know women are more than half of the population, we still don’t see or hear them in equal numbers to men. This holds for bylines by gender ...

Our time is now. I was 18 when I arrived at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts as a foreign student from Kolkata, India. One of the first books I read was The Feminine Mystique. Friedan challenged the domestication of women and created a firestorm that linked the personal and political. More than three decades later, I am happy to report that women -- whether in South Hadley or New Delhi -- remain on the front lines ...