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.
BETTY FRIEDANIf women’s role in life is limited solely to housewife/mother, it clearly ends when she can no longer bear more children and the children she has borne leave home.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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[Feminist:] One who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
If 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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
I won a really big fellowship to go straight on to get my Ph.D. And I went through agonies of indecision, and then I decided not to accept it. I just decided I didn’t want to be an academic.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
It is perhaps beside the point to remark that bowling alleys and supermarkets have nursery facilities, while schools and colleges and scientific laboratories and government offices do not.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
If women’s role in life is limited solely to housewife/mother, it clearly ends when she can no longer bear more children and the children she has borne leave home.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
I never set out to write a book to change women’s lives, to change history. It’s like, ‘Who, me?’ Yes, me. I did it. And I’m not that different from other women. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman.
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 -
Why the increasing emphasis by professional age experts and the media on – and public acceptance of – the nursing home as the locus of age when, in fact, more than ninety percent of those over sixty-five continue to live in the community?
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Getting older is an adventure, not a problem.
BETTY FRIEDAN