Why Jeanne Dielman is a feminist classic

Chantal Akerman's 1975 very long Belgian movie, Jeanne Dielman, is considered a feminist classic, and though I have trouble with some aspects of the ending (there will be a spoiler[ I will alert you) I have to say it lives up to its reputation and then some - but this is not a film for all viewers. It's almost 3.5 hours long, covering 3 days in the life of the eponymous Jeanne, all shots taken from a still camera with a fixed frame than Jeanne passes through as the "action" proceeds. There are only 2 characters, for the mos part, Jeanne and her sullen, androgynous teenage son, and very little dialogue other than the forced politeness of a few conversations w/ shopkeepers. The point is that Jeanne, a 40ish widow, lives a life of quiet desperation, like so many others, and what makes hers out of the norm is that she makes her living by prostitution - each day, a man shows up for what seems to be a weekly tryst, they have sex in her bedroom (we don't see this, at least for the first two men) and then quietly pay and depart, a cold, clinical, slightly shameful transaction. One of the peculiarities of the movie is that we never have any idea how or why she got into this profession; one of the strengths is that it's so believable and sorrowful - there have been other movies about prostitutes, Nights of Cabiria and Belle de Jour and Klute to name 3, but those are very male-centric - this is one of the few to stay close to the woman's point of view. Akerman's photo compositions are astonishingly beautiful, each a work of art - of a very particular kind: Jeann's apartment is dowdy and chintzy, with opressive wallpaper and the big ugly wooden furniture that was well out of date by the '70s. Her technique of telling the narrative in single takes has been carried forward today esp by some Asian filmmakers - as in El Norte and Stray Dogs. And in turn she was influenced by Asian filmmakers of a generation earlier, notably Ozu with his "tatami mat point of view." So what happens in this movie? Until the very end, almost nothing, but by the 3rd day we begin to see more of Jeanne's pent-up rage as she rushes through some of the domestic chores that make up her day: she is a careless sitter for a neighbor's infant, for example. Her main interaction is w/ her very strange son - the long silent dinner in day one is especially painful, and he's just a troubled but nasty young man, can't even say thanks to his mother for waiting on him hand and foot, much less do anything to help. (BTW, what's the walk they take each night about?) So at the end - here's the spoiler - should we be rooting for Jeanne as she stabs to death the 3rd guy she has sex with? I'm sure it's been argued that she is striking that man for all or women and for all womanhood, but I just can't buy that - she's partly in a hell of her own making, and her isolation from all friends and family, her strained relationship w/ her difficult son, may be, mus be, deeply painful to her but they don't give her the right to take the life of an innocent man (he's crude and callous in his sex, but there's no sense that he injured or abused her). So the ending just adds a further provocative touch to a film worth watching even for 3+ hours. (You can easily watch it in 3 segments, one for each day, and maybe that's the best way to do so.)