I loved my kids. And I loved my house, and I loved a lot of things about my life in the 1950s. But there were a lot like me in that era, very overeducated housewives.

There are some die-hard male chauvinist pigs and there are some Neanderthal women who are threatened by equality - but the great majority, polls say 65% to 75% of women of America, of all ages, absolutely identify with the complete agenda of the women's movement: equal opportunity for jobs, education, professional training, the right to control your own body - your own reproductive process, freedom of choice, child care-the whole agenda.

I realized that what I was saying was threatening, somehow, to the editors of women's magazines. That it threatened the very world they were trying to paint, what I then called the "feminine mystique."

Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.

Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.

I was at a meeting two years ago in Beijing, and I passed a bunch of women who were marching in a protest. Their signs were probably saying something I wouldn't have agreed with at all. But I was so glad to see women marching. And it's happening all over the world.

Economic equity is an enormous empowerment of women. Having jobs that provide income means that women can be a more effective force, a more equal force, in the political process. Women with income take themselves more seriously and they are taken more seriously.