"It’s hard to grasp now just how intoxicating it was as a young girl to hear Gloria Steinem tell us we could be anything we wanted to be."

"Or to read, during freshman year at my surprisingly progressive all-girls Catholic school, Betty Friedan’s 'The Feminine Mystique,' eight years after it was published, saying we could find meaning outside the home."

All this seemed possible because the pill had just become widely available, and for the first time women had control over whether and when they had a child. (I will never forget finding that oddly shaped, Pez-like dispenser in my mother’s bedroom right after the birth of my youngest sister; my mother called her “That’s It” for weeks before giving her a name.)

From a long WaPo article by Elsa Walsh titled "Why women should embrace a ‘good enough’ life." The quoted part describes the author's mindset, which later changed. I chose to quote that because: 1. Her mother sounds so cold, calling an infant "That's It." (A child called "It"!) and 2. The author makes her college age self sound like a nitwit. She says she was 15 when Roe v. Wade came out, so I figure she was born in 1958. I was born in 1951, and I always thought the Gloria Steinem presentation of women's liberation was a women's magazine pep talk. Friedan's book begins as a rant about the bullshit in women's magazines. If you had a brain at the time, you didn't take this stuff at face value. I don't accept Walsh's assertion that oh, if you were only there back then in the 1970s, you'd have been thoroughly intoxicated.

There were other feminist writers back then, and there were plenty of readers interested in feminism who didn't like Steinem and who didn't bother going all the way back to Freidan. When I went to college (circa 1970), the new books young women get excited about where "Sexual Politics" and "The Female Eunuch," and the older book we went back to was "The Second Sex." These books had some critical edge and were not simply cheerleading women about having a conventional middle-class life modernized with the addition of a great career and planned, delayed reproduction.

Walsh is working off a false premise about what life was like back then. She has a book to promote, and I can understand the urge to write a book that acts like it's discovered something new. But, really, the problem with the idea that you can't really "have it all" has been well-known all along.

Weird outrage over a woman getting fired for selling Girl Scout cookies at work.

And she worked in a retail store — using its retail space to sell a product and take cash that did not go into the cash register. I do not get the FoxDC presentation of this story: "Imagine being fired for selling Girl Scout Cookies at work. It happened to a woman...." Well, of course! I can't imagine thinking she doesn't deserve to be fired for this.

Quite aside from the obvious conflict with the business interests of her employer, why are adults taking over the cookie-selling that is supposed to be part of the scouts "girl-led, entrepreneurial program" (to quote Girl Scout COO Colleen Cibula)?

The fired woman's troop leader — as FoxDC puts it — is "worried" that the firing "will scare away other potential cookie moms — and end up ultimately hurting  the scouts themselves." Cookie moms?!

"A cookie mom is a self-less person. She doesn't profit from any of this in any way. She's doing it out of the goodness of her heart... I don't think anyone should be terminated for doing such a charitable thing."

Even if it is conceived of as a charity rather than an entrepreneurial program, retail workers aren't free to solicit donations for their favorite charities!

Have people lost their minds? If Girls Scouts is a good charity, it ought to be teaching the girls admirable lessons. It's bad enough that they're guilt-tripping people into eating more cookies (or buying cookies that they don't eat), but making mothers, especially working mothers, feel that they are supposed to do the work for their girls is ridiculous. Something is very wrong here.

From the comments at the link:

EVERYONE sells girl scow [sic] cookies at work! Its not safe to go door to door, and after you exhaust all your family, friends and neighbors that only leaves your co workers!

It's not safe to go door to door? Was it ever a good idea to send little girls out to be door-to-door salespersons? The cookie-selling program seems entirely unprincipled. We shouldn't even be eating cookies in the first place.

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"Scow" was an interesting Freudian slip for "scout." One definition for "scow" in the OED is: "Orkney and Shetland. ‘A big gaunt woman’... slang (chiefly U.S.). A disparaging term for a woman."

1866   T. Edmondston Etymol. Gloss. Shetland & Orkney Dial. 99   ‘A great scow of a woman’—a tall, thin, bony woman....
1960   H. Wentworth & S. B. Flexner Dict. Amer. Slang 449/2   Scow,..a large, ugly, and/or unpleasant woman.
1970   R. Lowell Notebk. 143   Often the Dutch were sacks, their women a sack, Obstinate, undefeated hull of the old scow.
1970   G. Greer Female Eunuch 265   More familiar terms in current usage refer to women as receptacles for refuse..as..scow.