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 FRIEDANThis idea that the employment of women, the movement of women outside the home into the work world, and their demand for equality is somehow responsible for increasing juvenile delinquency or the increase in divorce rate, is just so much bullshit.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.
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You can have it all, just not all at the same time.
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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.
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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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Advice? I don’t offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.
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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.
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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.
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I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.
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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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The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.
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Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.
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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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We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.’
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Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?
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[Feminist:] One who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man.
BETTY FRIEDAN