Kevin Drum writes about an ill-informed opinion piece by David Gelerntner, in which Gelerntner argues,

In those long-ago days, more college women used to plan on staying home to rear children. Those women had other goals than careers in mind, by definition. They saw learning as worth having for its own sake; otherwise why bother with a college education, if you weren't planning on a big-deal career?

But then came feminism:

But all that changed with feminism's decision to champion the powerful and successful working woman.

And what do liberals think?

Some liberals imagine that conservatives spend their time trying to set the clock back. That's a foolish caricature. We're not going back to 1960 (before careerist feminism took off). . .

The point that Gelerntner is making is not entirely clear to me, but his conclusions (whatever they may be) don't seem be based on very much besides memories of older, better days. The Bureau of Labor Statistics maintains information about the participation of women in the workforce. I've turned some data in a table from infoplease into a simple graphic below. It shows women in the workforce, from 1900 through 2000, as a percentage of all women 16 or over and as a percentage of all people 16 or over in the workforce.

We see a steady increase in women's participation over the entire century, with no significant blips. It starts to take off not at 1960 (as can be told by differencing the data, which I haven't shown) but rather between 1940 and 1950, which is as we might expect from what we know about women coming into the workforce to help with the war effort, and staying afterwards. Did feminism have something to do with this? Perhaps, but it's not the post-60s brand of feminism that Gelerntner rails against in his column. Are the careerist feminists that Gelernter writes about different from the overall population of women in the workforce? Again, perhaps, but that case hasn't been made.