Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.
BETTY FRIEDANIt is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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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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No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
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Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.
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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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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 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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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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A good woman is one who loves passionately, has guts, seriousness and passionate convictions, takes responsibility, and shapes society.
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I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.
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[Feminist:] One who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man.
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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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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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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.
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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.
BETTY FRIEDAN