You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.
BETTY FRIEDANNo woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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I have discovered that there is a crucial difference between society’s image of old people and ‘us’ as we know and feel ourselves to be.
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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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No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
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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.
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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.
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Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women’s magazines.
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By now, abortion should be obsolete. And I – and probably a lot of other feminists – wish it were obsolete, because abortion, in itself, is not a value – it is simply the right to chose, which is an essential value.
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[Feminist:] One who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man.
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The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.
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It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question ‘who am I’ except the voice inside herself.
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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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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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To protest free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong.
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I’m my age and I feel glorious.
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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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We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.
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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 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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While I had been, I guess, quite brilliant, academically, in my college years, I also had been editor of the paper, and I loved that. And, that was a much more active thing. And I missed it when I was doing graduate work.
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Neither woman nor man lives by work, or love, alone … The human self defines itself and grows through love and work: All psychology before and after Freud boils down to that.
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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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When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on women’s passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.
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Getting older is an adventure, not a problem.
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Dominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that.
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He’s a male chauvinistic piglet.
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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.
BETTY FRIEDAN