Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows.
BETTY FRIEDANWho 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?
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
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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.
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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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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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I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.
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We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.
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Aging will create the music of the coming century.
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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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Some 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.
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Dominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that.
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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.
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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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Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.
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Men weren’t really the enemy – they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.
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A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she “adjust” to prejudice and discrimination.
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Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgasmic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery.
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A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, ‘Who am I, and what do I want out of life?’ She mustn’t feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children.
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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 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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He’s a male chauvinistic piglet.
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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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The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.
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You can have it all, just not all at the same time.
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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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If women’s role in life is limited solely to housewife/mother, it clearly ends when she can no longer bear more children and the children she has borne leave home.
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Getting older is an adventure, not a problem.
BETTY FRIEDAN