If I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class.
BETTY FRIEDANNo woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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This 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.
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He’s a male chauvinistic piglet.
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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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When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.
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The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.
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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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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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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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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 wouldn’t be satisfied with a life lived solely on the barricades. I reserve my right to be frivolous.
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…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.
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Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women’s magazines.
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Aging is not “lost youth” but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
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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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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 FRIEDAN