I'd like to say I'm understanding, I can see the other side, yes, it's OK to buy a $600 stroller and none of my business -- but I am APPALLED. Not only that, it IS MY BUSINESS. It's EVERYBODY'S BUSINESS.

The reason this is EVERYBODY'S BUSINESS is that, as liberals, we complain endlessly about how people could be so STUPID as to vote against their interests, believe that Al-Qaida is living with the Arab couple next door, and so on. But nobody connects the dots between the culture of kiddie-consumerism we grow up in and the very political ways we assuage our anxieties when we're adults. Think it's far-fetched that Bush tells us we are defending "our American way of life" by going to war to assure endless material goods? Gosh almighty, where in the world did we learn that? Chistmas morning 1971?

And now we're raising a new generation of little tyrants. "Children have been reduced to accessories," but it's for their own good, isn't it? They might as well learn early how the world works. The term for this kind of upbringing is "socializing." Teach your kids to get along with the world by conforming to it, dominating it, and trashing it with designer one-upmanship, and you, too, can be a progressive parent. The problem is, this is progressive parenting of half a century ago. It is tantamount to child abuse in 2006.

Truly progressive parenting of the current century has already moved on to "helping." Helping our kids find themselves in all the clutter of modern life. Helping them reconnect to instinctual ways that are natural to them. Evolution: we are animals, in a good way -- peaceful, tranquil, cooperative, fulfilled by the songs of the birds and the sounds of our own creative voices in this world. Read "The Continuum Concept" and then give your kid a hug.

And don't tell me it's about buying politically correct educational wooden pull-toys instead of plastic junk. As long as we're on the topic of yuppie-bashing, how about those hip-hippie parents? Talk about your "consumption communities." $75 hemp shirts and $200 Birkenstock sandals. Hardwood furniture and floors for that "natural" look that unfortunately takes out a big chunk of a rainforest somewhere, when the plastic patio furniture that's out there right now would last a lifetime if you let it.

Yeah, your kids ARE my business. The personal is political. Live with this, or just don't have kids. Send that $600 you were going to spend on the stroller or the eco-friendly tot clothes to support your local YWCA parenting class, the prenatal care for underprivileged moms, or the after-school programs at that struggling public school up the street from your tastefully restored brownstone. THEN tell me about all the advantages you're giving your baby.

Thanks, Joan, for saying that feminism "was far more interested in defending my right NOT to have children than in building a world that would let me have them without giving up my amibition or my sanity." Whatever happened to VOTING among the cutting-edge feminist avant-garde?

Betty Friedan was never, to my mind, a conservative feminist. She was the most radical of them all because she hit us right at home instead of contemplating the problems of Playboy bunnies. She never resorted to navel-gazing but saw that we were all in this together. She inspires me to this day to realize that, at the end of my imperfect day, it's not really all about me.

Which brings me to kids. Talk about being not all about me, or you, or anybody. Raising our kids is too important a job to be debated. Taking time to raise children is not the same thing as getting an orgasm from a clean floor (but what's wrong with a clean floor?). It's our kids who should motivate our votes and our policies--and I would argue that our kids need a feminist future. Betty Friedan argued that they need a collectivist future rather than one lost in "privatism."

When I first read "The Feminine Mystique" in 1983, I was 20 years old and thought I had it all figured out. (Do the math and you'll see that I was born in 1963, the publishing year of "Mystique.") The book threw me into total, but wonderful, confusion. Confusion is a good place to be.

It's too bad that Friedan's warnings about "career women" becoming the next mystique have been thrown out with just about everything else in "The Second Stage." She was right on target. Women don't want jobs or careers for their own sake; we want to contribute creatively to society. The career mystique is as much a detour as the shiny kitchen floor once was. And, I might add, no one will remember nitpicky little Susan Faludi (who once complained that Victoria's Secret lingerie was designed by its true consumers, men--the brutes!). Betty Friedan lives among the titans of memory.