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 FRIEDANI 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.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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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 -
Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women’s magazines.
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Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
American women were frustrated in just the role of housewife – but they also managed to enlarge it. And they weren’t just housewives, they were community leaders.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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 -
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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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 FRIEDAN -
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.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
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 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 -
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.
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 -
It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
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 -
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 -
Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
It is perhaps beside the point to remark that bowling alleys and supermarkets have nursery facilities, while schools and colleges and scientific laboratories and government offices do not.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Neither woman nor man lives by work, or love, alone … The human self defines itself and grows through love and work: All psychology before and after Freud boils down to that.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
[Feminist:] One who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
To protest free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
We broke through the feminine mystique and women who were wives, mothers and housewives began to find themselves as people. That didn’t mean they stopped, or had to stop, being mothers, wives or even liking their homes.
BETTY FRIEDAN -
A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she “adjust” to prejudice and discrimination.
BETTY FRIEDAN