the “ambitious woman,” who fancied herself the equal of men, constituted “an internal threat to freedom, worming its way into the heart of our society.” Although countless male commentators of the 1950s lamented that the new postwar suburban America had become a matriarchy in which men formed an “oppressed minority,” as Riencourt put it, feminism by any definition reached its lowest point in the twentieth century. Misogyny functioned as a cold war virtue.
