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 FRIEDANWe 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!
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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He’s a male chauvinistic piglet.
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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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Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.
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The problem that has no name-which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities-is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.
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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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Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.
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Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?
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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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…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.
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Women, because they are not generally the principal breadwinners, can be perhaps most useful as the trail blazers, working along the bypaths, doing the unusual job that men cannot afford to gamble on.
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It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
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The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.
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Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women’s magazines.
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You can have it all, just not all at the same time.
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When I was in high school, even in college, I didn’t have any real image of a career woman or a professional woman.
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To protest free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong.
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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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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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I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.
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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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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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Aging is not “lost youth” but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
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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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If I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class.
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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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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