It is perhaps beside the point to remark that bowling alleys and supermarkets have nursery facilities, while schools and colleges and scientific laboratories and government offices do not.
BETTY FRIEDANThe problem that has no name-which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities-is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
-
-
Dominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
If you were very bright and you became head of a department, as I did, of the psychology department, you were encouraged to go on to graduate work. But as a women you didn’t even think about discrimination.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
…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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Getting older is an adventure, not a problem.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Men weren’t really the enemy – they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
[Feminist:] One who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man.
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 -
A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she “adjust” to prejudice and discrimination.
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 -
It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
While I had been, I guess, quite brilliant, academically, in my college years, I also had been editor of the paper, and I loved that. And, that was a much more active thing. And I missed it when I was doing graduate work.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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 FRIEDAN -
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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
He’s a male chauvinistic piglet.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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.
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 -
If I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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 FRIEDAN -
It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question ‘who am I’ except the voice inside herself.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Diversity has got to be a part of modern feminism, and I think that my feminism is stronger because its an inclusive thing. I won’t be backed into a corner that polarizes me against other women. And I wished they wouldn’t be either.
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 -
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