It's been 50 years since Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique was published, so I'm reading it (for the first time) and taking faithful margin notes on how to resent men more. But since I'm no longer in school and thus don't have a discussion group to debate the strengths and failures of the text half a century on, I'm also researching criticisms about the book. Which brings me to today's great Atlantic read presenting a reader's digest of the book's racist, classist, homophobic, and fabricated roots:

In 1984, black feminist theorist bell hooks introduced her own book, From Margin to Center, with a searing indictment of The Feminine Mystique: Though Friedan's book had spawned what came to be known as the second-wave feminist movement, it focused on what wasn't a universal female problem but rather a problem endured only by white, upper- and middle-class mothers and wives. According to hooks, Friedan had written myopically, as though women of other races and classes—those who, she argued, were most victimized by sexist oppression—simply didn't exist.

hooks was by no means the first to have a problem with Friedan's white-girl-problems worldview. But her delivery of this particular criticism ranks among the most withering...