Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?
BETTY FRIEDANProtectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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Aging will create the music of the coming century.
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When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.
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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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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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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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Dominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that.
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Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.
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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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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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Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.
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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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The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.
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Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.
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If women’s role in life is limited solely to housewife/mother, it clearly ends when she can no longer bear more children and the children she has borne leave home.
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Some people think I’m saying, ‘Women of the world unite — you have nothing to lose but your men. It’s not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners.
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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 knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.
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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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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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Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? Who knows what women’s intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love?
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The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.
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Aging is not “lost youth” but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
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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.
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It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
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Why the increasing emphasis by professional age experts and the media on – and public acceptance of – the nursing home as the locus of age when, in fact, more than ninety percent of those over sixty-five continue to live in the community?
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Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows.
BETTY FRIEDAN