Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.
BETTY FRIEDANMen are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
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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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Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows.
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Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?
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Aging will create the music of the coming century.
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If I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class.
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A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, ‘Who am I, and what do I want out of life?’ She mustn’t feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children.
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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!
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…women who ‘adjust’ as housewives, who grow up wanting to be ‘just a housewife,’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps…they ate suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.
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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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We broke through the feminine mystique and women who were wives, mothers and housewives began to find themselves as people. That didn’t mean they stopped, or had to stop, being mothers, wives or even liking their homes.
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Getting older is an adventure, not a problem.
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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 never set out to write a book to change women’s lives, to change history. It’s like, ‘Who, me?’ Yes, me. I did it. And I’m not that different from other women. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman.
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When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.
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By now, abortion should be obsolete. And I – and probably a lot of other feminists – wish it were obsolete, because abortion, in itself, is not a value – it is simply the right to chose, which is an essential value.
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[Feminist:] One who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man.
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It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
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Aging is not “lost youth” but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
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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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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.
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You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.
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I love newspapers. I’ve worked on newspapers, all my life. I’ve always loved it.
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If women’s role in life is limited solely to housewife/mother, it clearly ends when she can no longer bear more children and the children she has borne leave home.
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American women were frustrated in just the role of housewife – but they also managed to enlarge it. And they weren’t just housewives, they were community leaders.
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The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.
BETTY FRIEDAN