I understood somehow my mother’s frustration. And that it was no good not only for her, but for her children or her husband, that she didn’t have a real use of her ability.
BETTY FRIEDANNo woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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To protest free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong.
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Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?
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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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No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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[Feminist:] One who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man.
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Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.
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I won a really big fellowship to go straight on to get my Ph.D. And I went through agonies of indecision, and then I decided not to accept it. I just decided I didn’t want to be an academic.
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I love newspapers. I’ve worked on newspapers, all my life. I’ve always loved it.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.
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You can have it all, just not all at the same time.
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A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she “adjust” to prejudice and discrimination.
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The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.
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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