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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

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.
BETTY FRIEDAN

Beginning Break Feminism Finding Home Mom Mystery People Stop Wife Women
The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.
BETTY FRIEDAN

Alive Burying Feminism History Lost Youth Millions Mystique Succeeded Women
I have discovered that there is a crucial difference between society’s image of old people and ‘us’ as we know and feel ourselves to be.
BETTY FRIEDAN

Age Crucial Differences Discover Feel Image Know Ourselves People Society
…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

Adjust Ambition Death Growth Slow Suffering Wife Women
To protest free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong.
BETTY FRIEDAN

Freedom Protest Speech Wrong
The 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.
BETTY FRIEDAN

Fact Growth Mental Health Name Problem Simplicity Women
Women, because they are not generally the principal breadwinners, can be perhaps most useful as the trail blazers, working along the bypaths, doing the unusual job that men cannot afford to gamble on.
BETTY FRIEDAN

Earn Gamble Job Men Principal Support Women Work
Getting older is an adventure, not a problem.
BETTY FRIEDAN

Adventure Old One Liner Perspective Problem
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

Children Control Evidence Harm Health Home Mother
Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.
BETTY FRIEDAN

Enemy Fellow Men Victim Women
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

Fear Head Realization Scare Voice Women
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.
BETTY FRIEDAN

Competition Handicapped Man Pattern Profession Sex Slave Society Women
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

Destroy Discrimination Feminist Image Old Prejudice Woman
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.
BETTY FRIEDAN

Divorce Employment Equality Home Ideas Responsible Security Support Women Work World
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

Blame Divorce Increase Justice Marriage Percent Reason Role Sex
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.”
BETTY FRIEDAN

Editor Feminism Magazine Myself Realization Threatening

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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