Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.
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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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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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.
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Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.
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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.
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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 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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I can’t point to any major episodes of sexual discrimination in my early life. But I was so aware of the crime, the shame that there was no use of my mother’s ability and energy.
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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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We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.
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It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
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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.
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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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Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.
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The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.
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I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.
BETTY FRIEDAN