Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.
BETTY FRIEDANI 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.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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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?
BETTY FRIEDAN -
If I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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 -
I wouldn’t be satisfied with a life lived solely on the barricades. I reserve my right to be frivolous.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
By now, abortion should be obsolete. And I – and probably a lot of other feminists – wish it were obsolete, because abortion, in itself, is not a value – it is simply the right to chose, which is an essential value.
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 -
[Feminist:] One who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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 -
He’s a male chauvinistic piglet.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Advice? I don’t offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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 -
Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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 -
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 -
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!
BETTY FRIEDAN -
When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on women’s passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
A good woman is one who loves passionately, has guts, seriousness and passionate convictions, takes responsibility, and shapes society.
BETTY FRIEDAN