“We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.”

Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.

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.

Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.

A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she “adjust” to prejudice and discrimination.

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.

You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.

No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.

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.

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.

Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?

The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.

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.”

It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question ‘who am I’ except the voice inside herself.

This idea that the employment of women, the movement of women outside the home into the work world, and their demand for equality is somehow responsible for increasing juvenile delinquency or the increase in divorce rate, is just so much bullshit.

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.

Aging is not “lost youth” but a new stage of opportunity and strength.

To be liberated, woman must feel free to be herself, not in rivalry to man but in the context of her own capacity and her personality.

The act of sex, gratifying as it may be, is God’s joke on humanity. It is man’s last desperate stand at superintendency.

It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.

If you have knowledge and see a man weak, do not condemn him. Go to his level and help him if you can. He must grow.

When a man is perfect, he sees perfection in others. When he sees imperfection, it is his own mind projecting itself.

Onward, my brave boys – money or no money – men or no men! Have you love? Have you God? Onward and forward to the breach, you are irresistible.

Men become much more attractive when they start looking older. But it doesn’t do much for women, though we do have an advantage: make-up.

None of us have yet seen an ideally perfect man, and yet without that ideal we cannot progress.