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 FRIEDANYou have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.
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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.
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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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Aging is not “lost youth” but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
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The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.
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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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Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.
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You can have it all, just not all at the same time.
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I wouldn’t be satisfied with a life lived solely on the barricades. I reserve my right to be frivolous.
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When I was in high school, even in college, I didn’t have any real image of a career woman or a professional woman.
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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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He’s a male chauvinistic piglet.
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I’m my age and I feel glorious.
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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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Getting older is an adventure, not a problem.
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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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…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 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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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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Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women’s magazines.
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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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It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question ‘who am I’ except the voice inside herself.
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Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows.
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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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Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.
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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