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.
BETTY FRIEDAN…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.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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 -
We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.’
BETTY FRIEDAN -
He’s a male chauvinistic piglet.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Advice? I don’t offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women’s magazines.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
…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 FRIEDAN