Independent Women?

     During breakfast today I was reading an excerpt from a play in The New York Times Magazine (I know, I was a day behind and read Saturday's edition yesterday) entitled Rust.  The play, written by a professor at Grand Valley State University, here in Michigan, is a nonfiction drama about the closing of a GM plant in Wyoming, MI.  The play itself sounds interesting and I enjoyed the excerpt, but what caught my eye was something a character said.  The character is "Academic" and plays a historian and guide to the playwright, also a character.  He is explaining the rise of the automobile factories and the effect of the car on American culture.  He says, "Women became independent, they go from producers of food and clothing to consumers of food and clothing."  This was meant as an earnest, praiseworthy point.
    I would counter with "How far we've fallen."  To say that a woman (or a man) is independent because she has moved from producer to consumer seems to me a bit diabolical.  So, freedom comes not from being able to sustain your own life (and by extension, your family's) but from buying things to sustain that life?  Really?  No longer possessing the ability to truly provide goods for yourself, but being able to purchase goods made by others is freedom?  How so?  Granted, there can be drudgery in having to make every good for yourself, but I don't see how not being able to do that, by shifting that to a proxy is some great leap forward.  It seems to me you've just enslaved yourself to a job, a corporation, an economy.  Help me out here, people.