Suddenly women’s lib had made me feel my life had been wasted.

The line expresses a backlash some women of Barbara Bush’s generation felt when second‑wave feminism reframed domestic life as lesser or “unfulfilled.” Read this way, the quote is less a rejection of women’s rights than a description of emotional whiplash: a cultural movement that expanded options could also, unintentionally, cast prior choices—marriage, child‑rearing, unpaid caregiving—as wasted or naïve. The sentence captures the tension between individual satisfaction and shifting social narratives about what counts as meaningful work, and it hints at the guilt and self-doubt that can arise when public ideals change faster than private lives.