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 FRIEDANIf divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don’t blame the women’s movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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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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A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she “adjust” to prejudice and discrimination.
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Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.
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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.
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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 realized that what I was saying was threatening, somehow, to the editors of women’s magazines. That it threatened the very world they were trying to paint, what I then called the “feminine mystique.”
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Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women’s magazines.
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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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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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Advice? I don’t offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.
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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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It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
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I wouldn’t be satisfied with a life lived solely on the barricades. I reserve my right to be frivolous.
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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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We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.
BETTY FRIEDAN