"A film made of any typical morning in my house would look like an old Marx Brothers comedy. I wash the dishes, rush the older children off to school, dash out in the yard to cultivate the chrysanthemums, run back in to make a phone call about a committee meeting, help the youngest child build a blockhouse, spend fifteen minutes skimming the newspapers so I can be well-informed, then scamper down to the washing machines where my thrice-weekly laundry includes enough clothes to keep a primitive village going for an entire year. By noon I'm ready for a padded cell. Very little of what I've done has been really necessary or important. Outside pressures lash me though the day. Yet I look upon myself as one of the more relaxed housewives in the neighborhood." - a Nebraska housewife with a Ph.D. in anthropology, in Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique.
It is quite fashionable to regard feminism as a somewhat exhausted movement. That may be, but the rescuing of many women from the constrained choices they once faced is surely one of the most important and humane changes of the last century.