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.
BETTY FRIEDANProtectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
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I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.
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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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There is absolutely no evidence that it is harmful to children if their mother’s health, well-being and autonomy and control of her own destiny is maximized by work outside the home.
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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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Advice? I don’t offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.
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Aging will create the music of the coming century.
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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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The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.
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I realized that what I was saying was threatening, somehow, to the editors of women’s magazines. That it threatened the very world they were trying to paint, what I then called the “feminine mystique.”
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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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We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.
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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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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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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