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 FRIEDANDominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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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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I just decided that I didn’t want to be in the academic world, because it was [really] too easy for me at the top. But also it wasn’t active enough for me.
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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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To protest free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong.
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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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.
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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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We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.
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I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.
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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 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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When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.
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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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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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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