News about Betty Friedan

At the opening of his latest Broadway show on Thursday, American Idol runner Justin Guarini was greeted by his lookalike sons and his elderly father. In One More Time, a jukebox musical full of Britney Spears' most famous hits, Justin is playing Prince Charming. Britney has supported the show, which is about fairytale princesses who read Betty Friedan's feminist masterpiece The Feminine Mystique and have their worldview reshaped. Justin posed on the red carpet with his boys William, 10, Asher, ten, whom he shares with his wife Reina Casparici, as he prepared to attend opening night. He was also joined by his gleeful father, Edrin Bell, who used to be Atlanta's police chief.

Throughout its production and promotion tour, "Don't Worry Darling" has attracted continual media attention. Although the film was intended to address feminist issues, it also generated suspicion in the aftermath of a behind-the-scenes drama involving director Olivia Wilde and its supporting cast members. Wilde referred to the film as "The Feminine Mystique" on acid in a Vogue interview. Betty Friedan's book "The Feminine Mystique" chronicles American women's dissatisfaction and was credited with a new wave of feminism at the time, which was published in 1963. With "Don't Worry Darling," Wilde drew inspiration from the book and, as she told Vogue, aimed to question, "What are you willing to sacrifice in order to do what's right?If you really think about it, are you willing to blow up the system that serves you?" Now that the film is out, the biggest question for both viewers and analysts is whether the film kept its feminist promises. Well, to answer that question, we first have to answer the question: where was KiKi Layne?

Rarely do I incite someone to comment on the back of a glossy magazine's front page. Yet, at the tail end of the 1990s, I did exactly that, prompting the biggest (and smallest) star of the day into expressly telling me in huge letters: 'I'm thin, so what?' I had been wailing in print - in my own magazine, Marie Claire, and in this issue - that Calista Flockhart, the actress of Ally McBeal, was a threat to women's wellbeing. She was the kind of Hollywood thin that made her features too wide for her face, her skull too large for her tiny body, and clad as it evidently was in a pelmet skirt that revealed her kidneys.