I’m my age and I feel glorious.
BETTY FRIEDANProtectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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Advice? I don’t offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.
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We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.
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Getting older is an adventure, not a problem.
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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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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.
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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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…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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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.
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I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.
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Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?
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Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women’s magazines.
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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.
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I love newspapers. I’ve worked on newspapers, all my life. I’ve always loved it.
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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.
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You can have it all, just not all at the same time.
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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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No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
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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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We need to see men and women as equal partners, but its hard to think of movies that do that. When I talk to people, they think of movies of forty-five years ago! Hepburn and Tracy!
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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.
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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.”
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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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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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Dominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that.
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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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Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? Who knows what women’s intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love?
BETTY FRIEDAN