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.
BETTY FRIEDANAdvice? I don’t offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.
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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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He’s a male chauvinistic piglet.
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Men weren’t really the enemy – they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.
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[Feminist:] One who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
We need to see men and women as equal partners, but its hard to think of movies that do that. When I talk to people, they think of movies of forty-five years ago! Hepburn and Tracy!
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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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Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?
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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 can’t point to any major episodes of sexual discrimination in my early life. But I was so aware of the crime, the shame that there was no use of my mother’s ability and energy.
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I love newspapers. I’ve worked on newspapers, all my life. I’ve always loved it.
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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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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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The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, ‘Who am I, and what do I want out of life?’ She mustn’t feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children.
BETTY FRIEDAN