Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.
BETTY FRIEDANProtectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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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.
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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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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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A good woman is one who loves passionately, has guts, seriousness and passionate convictions, takes responsibility, and shapes society.
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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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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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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.
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Dominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that.
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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 situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.
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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.
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Aging will create the music of the coming century.
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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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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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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.
BETTY FRIEDAN






