Betty Friedan.

“The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—‘Is this all?’”

This is the opening paragraph of The Feminine Mystique (W.W. Norton, 592 pp., $25.95), which the late Betty Friedan published 50 years ago this month. The feminine mystique, she wrote, “says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity.” This was, Friedan argued, what kept a generation of educated women at home, raising children in the suburbs, endlessly cleaning house, tranquilizing themselves with new kitchen appliances, alcohol and affairs in order to kill the existential dread this emptiness brought on. It was, according to Friedan, propagated by psychologists, sociologists, ad men, magazine editors, religious leaders and college presidents. And, if her interviews with women were to be believed, it was widespread and suffocating. Rise up and throw it over, Friedan said. Get to work, and stop viewing college as a marriage market.

Well, we did. Friedan and the women’s movement of the ’60s and ’70s helped create a world where women see a fulfilling profession as an inalienable right. This book, then, should seem thrillingly, relievedly quaint. It does not. But it is surprisingly boring in spots—there are many moments where you can see the women’s magazine writer in Friedan giving herself over to breathless exhortation—and astoundingly homophobic. At one point Friedan rails against “the homosexuality that is spreading like a murky smog over the American scene.” Friedan has been criticized for not being as careful a researcher, or as honest a storyteller, or as civil-rights-minded as she could have been. But perhaps these criticisms are somewhat beside the point. There are numerous passages that, if you did not know their provenance, could be mistaken for sentences written in judgment of the present day.

Here is one from the book’s first pages: “Experts told [women] how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry ... how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with your own hands ...”

Exchange “building a swimming pool with your own hands” for “building a seven-tier wedding cake with your own hands,” and one may think immediately of the hundreds of blogs that address cooking, mothering, decorating and dressing, and then wonder if, despite these blogs’ cheerful tone, a version of the feminine mystique isn’t now being perpetrated through ostensibly real, ostensibly relatable women soft-focusing their sailor tee’d baby bumps through Instagram.

And here, substitute “an evolutionary purpose” for the mention of Freud: “It was easier to look for Freudian sexual roots in man’s behavior, his ideas and his wars than to look critically at his society and act constructively to right its wrongs.”

When Friedan writes that early feminists “had to prove that women were human,” it is hard not to feel a shock of recognition and indict our own moment as well, especially after the election that just passed. But American women still find themselves struggling against a strangely virulent, insidious misogyny. If our culture truly thought women were human, 19 states would not have enacted provisions to restrict abortion last year. There would be no question whether to renew the Violence Against Women Act. Women would not make 77 cents to every man’s dollar, and make less than our male counterparts even in fields where we dominate. We wouldn’t have terms like “legitimate rape” or “personhood.” Women who decided not to have children would not be called “selfish,” as if they were themselves children who had a problem with sharing. If our culture truly allowed them to have strong, complex, contradictory feelings and believed they were sexual creatures for whom pleasure was a biological right, perhaps adult women would not be escaping en masse into badly written fantasy novels about teenage girls being ravished by vampires.

Friedan called the mystique “the problem with no name.” Fifty years later, we are able to spot a problem, name it and speak up to change it, or stop it. But when a woman broadcasts her dissatisfaction, her yearning, it is now likely to be dismissed as whining, because if she’s eating three meals a day and doesn’t have cancer, what’s her problem? Such is progress.

Even The New York Times’s Gail Collins, in her introduction to this anniversary edition, is guilty of this attitude. Ms. Collins quotes Friedan’s famous first paragraph, and then writes: “It sounds, in retrospect, a little whiny, but at the time it was an earthshaking query.” How disappointing that Ms. Collins, the Times’s eminently sensible resident feminist, reached for the pejorative language so often used when a person not benefiting from the patriarchy or capitalism dares to question the order of things. (“Women are angry,” went a recent column about the “War on Men” on the Fox News website. “They’re also defensive, though often unknowingly.”) In America, there are no systemic problems, just poor choices.

This kind of thinking is doubtless what’s stalling forward movement in addressing the dire need for better family policy. It would be a shame if women—and men—had to wait 50 more years before our capitalist mystique went the way of the feminine mystique. It would be terrible if it required smuggling that idea into a vampire novel for it to go viral.

editorial@observer.com

As the two journalists tried to explain the persistent wage and power gap between men and women in America, their conversation returned again and again to our more progressive friends in California and Scandinavia.

Ms. Rosin asked Ms. Collins—whose feminist history America’s Women she called “her bible”—if there was an era in history when women held true political power.

“No,” Ms. Collins deadpanned, to laughter. Generally speaking, women had fared best in new societies, “where things are being started and everyone really has to chip in and work together to get stuff done.”

That might explain the better-than-average gender equality Ms. Rosin found in Silicon Valley, where she said companies have figured out the “domestic puzzle” of balancing child-rearing and work.

“They work really hard and they work really flexibly,” she said, “because the companies are fairly new and don’t have structures in place.” One female Google executive told Ms. Rosin she had gotten the company to agree to pay for her nanny and baby to accompany her on all business trips for the first two years.

But Ms. Collins was skeptical about how high Californian equality goes. Facebook's board of directors, she said, resembles the Backstreet Boys.

Ms. Rosin said that in Norway, a law had been passed requiring major corporations to have boards that were 40% women.

“It’s always Norway,” Ms. Collins replied.

“Or Sweden,” they said, in unison.

Sweden had, in fact, been the site of another experiment of interest to Ms. Rosin, which offered financial incentives for men to take paternity leave. Women stayed home during the child’s first year or so of life, and then men took over for the toddling years, congregating in big indoor playgrounds and generally behaving like the mommy mobs of Prospect Park.

“You expect the guys would be talking about football,” Ms. Rosin said, “but they’re like, ‘What kind of stroller you got?’”

But back to Norway.

One year after the board of directors law was enacted, it turned out that companies with gender-equal boards were—gasp—less profitable than the male-dominated ones.  They had been less reactive in the face of the recession, reducing salaries and hours across the board instead of laying off trained workers.

“Not the Bain Capital way of doing it,” said Ms. Collins, a noted Mitt Romney-watcher.

It remains to be seen whether the female-led companies will do better in the long run.

One audience member wondered if there was any hard data on “Swedenification” of gender roles. Were their children, the boys and the girls, doing better? Did it make anybody happier?

“I always get the impression Swedes are very unhappy,” Ms. Collins said. “It’s a very cold country.”

“There are saunas,” the audience member pointed out.

But according to Ms. Rosin, one nice thing about “The End of Men” is that men—well, Swedish ones, anyway—are learning that there are worse things than having to be the woman in the relationship.

“They forced it on them and now they’re into it,” she said. “It turns out to be not so bad.”

Off the Record had called to inquire about a prominent leitmotif in Ms. Collins bi-weekly op-ed columns, known to her followers as “dog on the roof,” or “Crate Gate.”

The allusion appeared yesterday, as it does just about any time the columnist writes about G.O.P. primary candidate Mitt Romney. She wrote that Mr. Romney’s latest shot at rival Newt Gingrich—“Zany is not what we need in a president”—was a safe stance, seeing as no one could characterize the glaringly square Mormon as such.

“Unless it was when he drove to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of the station wagon. (‘Hey, Mister, you got an Irish setter on top of your car. What are you, zany or something?’),” she wrote.

With political coverage dominating the op-ed page on the eve of the GOP primary, even casual readers remark upon how frequently Ms. Collins deploys the anecdote, transforming it from a biographical footnote to an emasculating epithet. Fellow Times employees have certainly noticed—a handful have posted pictures of the dog to her office wall, she said.

The anecdote first captivated Ms. Collins when it was published in The Boston Globe during the former Massachusetts governor’s first primary bid in 2007.

On a family road trip to Canada, the story goes, Mr. Romney strapped the family Irish setter Seamus’s crate to the roof, inducing doggie diarrhea that soiled the back windshield and sent the Romney boys into hysterics.

Compromising his anal-retentive itinerary, Mr. Romney “coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station,” the Globe wrote.

“There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway.”

Ms. Collins was less outraged by the possible animal abuse than she was “tickled” by the way the way the story had been cast politically.

“One of his sons told this story as an example of his organizational skills,” she explained.

Seamus has long since passed on, but Ms. Collins carries his torch in her columns, where she has mentioned the incident no less than 30 times since its August 2007 debut (“Haunted by Seamus,” the column was aptly titled) and virtually every time Mr. Romney’s name appears.

She is dead set on bringing it up in every Romney discussion until the primary is over, she told Off the Record.

“Then I cannot do it anymore,” she said.

Not that anyone is stopping her. Op-ed columnists get little more than a copy edit before going to print, Ms. Collins explained.

“[Opinions editor] Andy Rosenthal has not expressed any remorse,” she said.

“Dog on the roof” has even become a jokey refrain in The Conversation, her weekly transcribed chats with David Brooks. He has conspired with Ms. Collins to work it in.

In one particularly whimsical installment, the two envisioned Mr. Romney and Rick Perry trapped in a snowy cave in the White Mountains of New Hampshire—the only circumstances in which Jon Huntsman could feasibly win the state—lounging in animal skins and making cave paintings.

“Romney would paint saber-tooth tigers, riding in cages on the top of his car. (There, got that in),” Mr. Brooks wrote.

“Thanks,” Ms. Collins replied, “I was wondering where I could fit in the dog on the roof.”

Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. did mention Crate Gate once, Ms. Collins admitted, when he noted that she had revived the tale for Mr. Romney’s second bid for the GOP nomination, despite having vowed in print not to mention it again.

(Ms. Collins remembered no such promise, but did lament losing her excuse to bring it up when Mr. Romney dropped out of the 2008 race. “Worst of all, I’m going to have to get through the rest of the year without ever again referring to the fact that Romney once drove to Canada with the family dog, Seamus, strapped to the roof of the car,” she wrote at the time.)

“He felt that was a breach,” she said.

To Ms. Collins’ mind, the running gag brings levity to the election grind, which, given the state of things, can get a little grim.

“If you bring in animals it does cheer people up,” she noted.

Each May, the city's colleges compete to attract the brightest celebrity wattage to their commencement ceremonies. How did they fare this year? You be the judge.

VIEW SLIDESHOW > SAGESSE FROM THE STARS

Commencement follows four women in a world which, according to Ms. Sullivan, finds feminist ideals “quaint and silly.” The book has been pegged as an harbinger of a new wave (yes, another) of feminism. However, the social dynamic of the party adopted a “separate, but equal” mantra, as the few male guests huddled together by the bar. 

Times columnist Nicholas Kristof praised the novel, but admitted to being “shocked by the debauchery” of same-sex institutions depicted in Commencement.  Did Eugene Sullivan, the author’s father, have any reservations about sending his firstborn to a women’s college where transgender debates rage and girls are called SLUGS (Smith Lesbians Until Graduation)?  Quite the opposite, claimed Mr. Sullivan, who has sported a "Smith Dad hat" for the past 10 years; he felt his daughter was “empowered” at the college.

The Transom asked Ms. Sullivan about her thoughts on the militant feminism sometimes associated with women’s institutions. “I was once on a rooftop bar drinking margaritas, and I ended up reading aloud to the man beside me from Andrea Dworkin," said the doe-eyed brunette with a laugh, "so I’m probably not the person to ask.”

However, her bosses at The Times claimed to have looked to the author for feminist inspiration over the past few years.  Said Ms. Collins, author of the upcoming When Everything Changed, a book about the last 50 years of feminism in America:  “I’ve gotten so extremely old, by the time I was doing the book, I always had this trouble when I got to the 2000s.  I had no idea what the hell I was writing about … and Courtney really was the one who took me through it all.”  Mr. Herbert agreed about his assistant’s authority on the subject:  “She would actually raise my consciousness to just how much sexism permeated ordinary, everyday society, and she encouraged me to pay closer attention even than I was paying to women’s issues.”  Success at The Times aside, Mr. Herbert was quick to note that “the novel is her novel, and she’s a great writer, and I think that it’s wonderful for her to have this fantastic success.”  Ms. Sullivan, giggling and quaffing white wine with old Smith friends, seemed as if she hadn’t had this much fun since her halcyon days in Northampton.

Many media outlets--including us!--only have a handful of the Floor passes, so reporters have to trade off so the Floor Pass and the Hall Pass can circulate around. According to Rick Berke, assistant managing editor of the Times, who was wearing a perimeter pass, that's exactly what the paper of record is doiing. And Gail Collins, with her perimeter pass in hand, was wondering aloud who she could do a trade-off with.

"I've been carrying around the laptop for 2 hours today wandering through the city," she said. "The laptop is in there, and it's not moving. It stays there for the rest of the convention. I'll be moving, but not the laptop. After walking three miles in the sun—it's a presence in your life you'd like to eliminate."

So two days ago, current Op-Ed columnist (and former editorial page editor) Gail Collins wrote into Mr. Hoyt’s reader's response column to respond: "When the public editor laces into an opinion page columnist for making fun of a controversial political figure, it sounds like a suggestion that all of us tone things down. I hope I’m hearing wrong."

So was he telling them to tone it down?

"No," he said to Media Mob. "It was a comment on a single aspect of a columnist’s work from a columnist I greatly admire. It was not a message for other columnists to tone it down. If I had meant to say that I would have said it directly."

Then what was the point of Mr. Hoyt’s column in the first place: to express frustration over Ms. Dowd’s specific opinions about Mrs. Clinton? Or for the public editor to muse about the role of a columnist more generally?

"I was dealing with a set of columns and the language in them," he said. "I think it is the public editor’s role to comment on Op-Ed columns when there is either an issue of fact, which there wasn’t in this case, or an issue of tone, which I think there was in this case. It’s not about the opinions expressed. The language in this line of columns was over the top, it was repetitive and it was relentless."

Mr. Rosenthal was discussing the newspaper’s opinion content on the Web—whether from name-brand op-ed columnists or outside contributors, blogs or video.

“We’ve got composers, astronomers—the guy from Queen,” Mr. Rosenthal said by phone April 9. He was referring to two recent blogs, The Score and Across the Universe. The latter features onetime doctoral student Brian May, whose previous writings include “We Will Rock You.”

In the three months since he took over the top editorial-page job from Gail Collins, Mr. Rosenthal has been waving his TimesSelect banner all over the place. “College kids are writing for us—who are about to graduate,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “Gawker, which insists it never reads TimesSelect, did an item on one of our college bloggers.”

As the opinion staff prepares to vacate its 10th-floor offices on 43rd Street for the lucky 13th floor of the Times Tower, Mr. Rosenthal is shoveling resources toward the Internet—and toward the opinion section’s much-debated online pay-to-read section.

“Andy is so incredibly smart about the Web,” Ms. Collins said. “He’s way more attuned than I was.”

In July, Ms. Collins is due to go back to a previous job, as a twice-weekly op-ed columnist. As editor, she helped herd the pundits—accustomed to free distribution and domination of the Most E-Mailed List—behind the TimesSelect pay wall. “Nobody likes it,” Ms. Collins said. “But I was always grateful that when we started the first time, that the columnists who hated it were so reasonable about the Times experimenting with this.”

Now? “I’m in that grumpy-but-understanding state the columnists were in,” Ms. Collins said.

And Mr. Rosenthal is smitten with his premium-paying—or, in the latest paywall gap, .edu-address-having—readers. “They tend to post with greater frequency than elsewhere,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “It’s extremely good. A lot of them post with their full name.”

“You don’t wonder, when it says ‘Joe Blow,’ whether there’s a Joe Blow at the other end,” Mr. Rosenthal said.

According to The Times’ figures, there are about 218,000 Joe Blows who’ve signed up to read TimesSelect online (another 414,000 get it thrown in with their paper subscriptions). Mr. Rosenthal has assigned deputy op-ed editor George Kalogerakis—the Robin Gibb of Spy magazine—to take a more active role with TimesSelect, bringing in top contributors. Current TimesSelect staff editor Mary Duenwald will take on a matching deputy-editor job, concentrating more on the print side.

In December, Mr. Rosenthal set up another dual-role arrangement, bringing in a pair of deputy editorial-page editors: David Shipley to focus on the Web and Carla Anne Robbins to concentrate on print and to run the page when Mr. Rosenthal is away.

Both Mr. Kalogerakis and Ms. Duenwald will report to Mr. Shipley. “David’s been given a big mandate to do Internet stuff,” Mr. Rosenthal said.

Mr. Rosenthal said he envisions print and the Web complementing one another, with “stuff that starts online and continues in the paper, or stuff that starts in the paper and goes online.”

Certain contributors are straddling the formats: Deadspin editor Will Leitch, who has written for the print op-ed page, wrote an NCAA basketball blog last month for TimesSelect. And Stanley Fish, the Florida International University law and humanities professor, has been through three permutations—print op-eds that are free online, guest print columns for the vacationing Maureen Dowd that are TimesSelect online, and Web-only TimesSelect pieces.

Mr. Fish said his involvement at The Times “has been gradually increasing” over the last 12 years. In late 2006, as Mr. Rosenthal was preparing to take over the top job, Mr. Fish signed a one-year renewable contract to write a once-a-week Web column.

“The primary difference between TimesSelect and the op-ed page is the restriction in length,” Mr. Fish said. “It’s quite specific when you’re writing for the op-ed page. It’s about 730 words—800 if they feel generous.”

“They say the proposition of hanging clarifies the mind,” Mr. Fish said. “Saying something significant in 730 words also clarifies the mind.”

On TimesSelect, Mr. Fish has written a piece stretching to some 2,200 words.

And there’s nothing wrong with that, Mr. Rosenthal said. “Going into the Internet business,” he said, “there was this holy writ that no one would read past the screen. I think that’s proven to not be true.”

After writing a 1,300-word column on the 2008 election, posted late on the evening of April 8, Mr. Fish said he has already received enough feedback that he’s planning to write a response on the Web.

Even more recursively, TimesSelect includes an opinion blog about opinion, called The Opinionator. The blog’s author, Chris Suellentrop, has been working from Boston as a contract writer. He is scheduled to join the full-timers as a staff editor in late May, just after the three-block move. The position he’s taking is one due to be vacated on May 4 by Laura Secor. Ms. Secor, who wrote 5,000 words for the Times Magazine on Iran in January, is off to write a book on the subject of Iranian reform and democracy movements.

Mr. Rosenthal said that he currently plans for Mr. Suellentrop to keep writing The Opinionator, though that may prove difficult with his new duties.

“We’re moving forward,” Mr. Rosenthal said. Also westward! He will be giving up what he calls an “incredible office,” which includes two rooms and a private bath—and a building full of memories, where his father, the late A.M. Rosenthal, was executive editor.

“We’ve been in this building a long time,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “The nostalgia started to wear off when it stopped smelling like ink.”

To Arms! Shareholders Gird For Battle With Sulzbergers

I’ve spoken to Hassan Elmasry at Morgan Stanley,” said Paul Munn, the commercial director of Hermes Equity Ownership Services. “We broadly feel that the points he’s making are correct.”

Mr. Munn’s London-based firm owns just over 31,000 shares of the New York Times Company. While not a significant holder, Hermes advises major investors and met with The Times in late 2006, according to Mr. Munn. He was on the phone April 10, two weeks before the Times Company’s annual meeting.

Last year, Mr. Elmasry used the meeting to stage a shareholder revolt, in which nearly 30 percent of voters withheld their ballots for the company’s Class A directors. It was a protest against the dual-class stock structure—which gives ultimate power to the Class B shareholders of the Ochs-Sulzberger family trust—and the corporate governance that has followed from it.

That means the leadership of chairman and publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.

“We generally try not to withhold votes against directors,” Mr. Munn said. “We’re still weighing things up. We’ve yet to come to a conclusion.”

Mr. Elmasry, on the other hand, appears to be set on another round of punching. He has spent the past year continuing to criticize the company’s structure, in letters to the Times Company if not on-the-record press interviews. And other disaffected investors are following his lead. This month, two proxy advisors called for a repeat of last year’s non-vote: On April 5, Institutional Shareholder Services issued a report, with Glass Lewis & Co. weighing in four days later.

“Those [Class A] directors that receive the high withhold should take that as a signal that they should prod the [Class B] directors into making changes,” said Robert McCormick, a vice president at Glass Lewis, by phone from San Francisco.

“It’s obviously unrealistic for a minority group of directors in a family-owned structure to force change,” Mr. McCormick said. However, he added, the Class A directors “are not fostering improved corporate governance.”

Although I.S.S. and Glass Lewis are “fierce competitors,” as Mr. McCormick put it, both firms have also called for disallowing one person to serve as both publisher and chairman, as Mr. Sulzberger does now. Glass Lewis, however, is not recommending changing the stock structure that allows the family to choose nine of 13 board members.

“The newspaper industry is going through a very challenging time, a transformation that’s unlike any other—at least in my lifetime,” said Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis, in response to the two reports. “Shareholders are concerned about the future.”

Ms. Mathis noted that The Times is the Web’s leading news site. “The difference between No. 1 and No. 2 has widened over time,” Ms. Mathis said.

Additionally, Ms. Mathis said that the company had reduced its expense base and increased its dividend since last year. And she said it was bringing the Class A investors deeper into governance: “At least one member of the audit, nominating and governance, and compensation committees is always on the Class A slate,” Ms. Mathis said. “All of our independent directors rotate through the Class A slate once every three years.”

But will people be willing to participate in the election?

“Some of these smaller things; they have been important steps,” Mr. Munn said. “But there is clearly a skepticism amongst investors that is felt at a deep level. I get the impression that what’s been addressed are easy wins.”

Both Mr. Sulzberger and C.E.O. Janet Robinson are expected to address the meeting, which is scheduled for April 24 at the New Amsterdam Theatre.

And how! The release describes Rosenthal's journalistic background, including stints as a Washington correspondent, Denver bureau reporter and AP sports stringer. It does not mention his earliest connection with the profession--and the Times: his birth, in 1956, to a celebrated young foreign correspondent named A.M. Rosenthal.

Collins will depart for book leave, according to the release, and will return as an op-ed columnist.