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.
BETTY FRIEDANIf I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she “adjust” to prejudice and discrimination.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
life lived only for oneself does not truly satisfy men or women. There is a hunger in Americans today for larger purposes beyond the self. That is the reason for the religious revival and the new resonance of ‘family.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgasmic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Advice? I don’t offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
You can have it all, just not all at the same time.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Why the increasing emphasis by professional age experts and the media on – and public acceptance of – the nursing home as the locus of age when, in fact, more than ninety percent of those over sixty-five continue to live in the community?
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
I just decided that I didn’t want to be in the academic world, because it was [really] too easy for me at the top. But also it wasn’t active enough for me.
BETTY FRIEDAN