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 FRIEDANSome 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.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.
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Advice? I don’t offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.
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Dominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that.
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A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she “adjust” to prejudice and discrimination.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man’s advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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 -
Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows.
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It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
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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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Neither woman nor man lives by work, or love, alone … The human self defines itself and grows through love and work: All psychology before and after Freud boils down to that.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women’s magazines.
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I wouldn’t be satisfied with a life lived solely on the barricades. I reserve my right to be frivolous.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
life lived only for oneself does not truly satisfy men or women. There is a hunger in Americans today for larger purposes beyond the self. That is the reason for the religious revival and the new resonance of ‘family.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.
BETTY FRIEDAN