Chapter 21 Summary and Analysis

The lion's share of this chapter is devoted to Kay's awakening to the women's movement, heretofore only tangentially touched upon. Kay agrees with an article about her in 1969 that she accepts responsibility more often than she asserts authority. She has gained some business sense, but through the 1970s, her expectations exceed her accomplishments. She feels like a pretender on the throne and a perennial test-taker. Some of her insecurity is bred into her generation of women, who buy into the assumption that men are intellectually superior and more capable of managing everything outside the house and children. Women develop a non-businesslike, apologetic, indecisive way of speaking, which makes them precisely what they most fear: boring to their husbands, who contribute to the syndrome and then move on to greener pastures. Women in charge of even small companies are so rare that...