I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.
BETTY FRIEDANMost of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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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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Advice? I don’t offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.
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If I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class.
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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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No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
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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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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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…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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I understood somehow my mother’s frustration. And that it was no good not only for her, but for her children or her husband, that she didn’t have a real use of her ability.
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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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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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Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.
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To protest free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong.
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I never set out to write a book to change women’s lives, to change history. It’s like, ‘Who, me?’ Yes, me. I did it. And I’m not that different from other women. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman.
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It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
BETTY FRIEDAN