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.
BETTY FRIEDANWhile 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.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.
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 -
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.
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 -
Aging will create the music of the coming century.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?
BETTY FRIEDAN -
I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Getting older is an adventure, not a problem.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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.
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 -
To protest free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.’
BETTY FRIEDAN -
I wouldn’t be satisfied with a life lived solely on the barricades. I reserve my right to be frivolous.
BETTY FRIEDAN