There are two important distinctions Pat Mainardi draws in her essay. The first one – between the Liberated Woman and Women’s Liberation; the second – between the Politics with capital “P” and the politics of everyday life. The pair of dichotomies in question are interconnected. A Liberated Woman is a person who has achieved parity with men in the world of Politics, that is to say, in such spheres as career, voting rights, and freedom of speech. It often goes without saying that this new state of affairs should not affect the world of everyday existence – the allocation of household chores, the matters of sexual behavior or the distribution of income within the family or other forms of partnership. Additionally, a liberated woman is nearly always used in the singular, because it is silently assumed that her particular biographic circumstances have nothing to do with the conditions other women find themselves in. In the actual social landscape, both juxtapositions are misleading, as Mainardi clearly demonstrates. Right to the contrary, a Liberated Woman is in the best position to advance the cause of Women’s Liberation. Having mustered the resources of the economy and political order she is able not only to raise her voice and advocate for her female comrades that were robbed of such possibility. She is also capable of leveraging her emancipated style of life to transform not only Politics but the politics of everyday life as well.

The articles of Mainardi and Anne Koedt add two specific examples to the dictum about the ultimately political nature of the realm of personal life. The former demonstrates that even in the “progressive” households the legacy of the patriarchal domination largely determines what the notions of “appropriate” behavior or “important” work are. The latter expands the sphere of politics even further showcasing that not only sex but even the body is mapped and regulated by hegemonic ideologies.