If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don’t blame the women’s movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based.
BETTY FRIEDANGetting older is an adventure, not a problem.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man’s advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all.
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We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.’
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Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.
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Neither woman nor man lives by work, or love, alone … The human self defines itself and grows through love and work: All psychology before and after Freud boils down to that.
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Each woman is made to feel it is her own cross to bear if she can’t be the perfect clone of the male superman and the perfect clone of the feminine mystique.
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Some people think I’m saying, ‘Women of the world unite — you have nothing to lose but your men. It’s not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners.
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Dominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that.
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There is absolutely no evidence that it is harmful to children if their mother’s health, well-being and autonomy and control of her own destiny is maximized by work outside the home.
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I can’t point to any major episodes of sexual discrimination in my early life. But I was so aware of the crime, the shame that there was no use of my mother’s ability and energy.
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It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
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The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.
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Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.
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To protest free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong.
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I realized that what I was saying was threatening, somehow, to the editors of women’s magazines. That it threatened the very world they were trying to paint, what I then called the “feminine mystique.”
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We need to see men and women as equal partners, but its hard to think of movies that do that. When I talk to people, they think of movies of forty-five years ago! Hepburn and Tracy!
BETTY FRIEDAN