…women who ‘adjust’ as housewives, who grow up wanting to be ‘just a housewife,’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps…they ate suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.
BETTY FRIEDANWho knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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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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I love newspapers. I’ve worked on newspapers, all my life. I’ve always loved it.
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It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
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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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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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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.
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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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No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
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Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women’s magazines.
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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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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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Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.
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Aging will create the music of the coming century.
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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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When I was in high school, even in college, I didn’t have any real image of a career woman or a professional woman.
BETTY FRIEDAN