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.
BETTY FRIEDANDiversity has got to be a part of modern feminism, and I think that my feminism is stronger because its an inclusive thing. I won’t be backed into a corner that polarizes me against other women. And I wished they wouldn’t be either.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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He’s a male chauvinistic piglet.
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Each woman is made to feel it is her own cross to bear if she can’t be the perfect clone of the male superman and the perfect clone of the feminine mystique.
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The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.
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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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It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
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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.
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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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?
BETTY FRIEDAN -
I wouldn’t be satisfied with a life lived solely on the barricades. I reserve my right to be frivolous.
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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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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 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.
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.
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Diversity has got to be a part of modern feminism, and I think that my feminism is stronger because its an inclusive thing. I won’t be backed into a corner that polarizes me against other women. And I wished they wouldn’t be either.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she “adjust” to prejudice and discrimination.
BETTY FRIEDAN