“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.”

When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.

Dominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that.

Each woman is made to feel it is her own cross to bear if she can’t be the perfect clone of the male superman and the perfect clone of the feminine mystique.

Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.

If I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class.

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.

Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.

A good woman is one who loves passionately, has guts, seriousness and passionate convictions, takes responsibility, and shapes society.

While 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.

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.

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!

When I was in high school, even in college, I didn’t have any real image of a career woman or a professional woman.

Who 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?

We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.’

Getting older is an adventure, not a problem.

It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.