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?
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.”
I never set out to write a book to change women’s lives, to change history. It’s like, ‘Who, me?’ Yes, me. I did it. And I’m not that different from other women. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman.
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.
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.
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.
The problem that has no name-which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities-is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Quote - 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.](https://minimalistquotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/i-just-decided-that-i-didnt-want-to-be-in-the-acad-683x1024.jpg)
![Betty Friedan Quote - [Feminist:] One who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man.](https://minimalistquotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/feminist-one-who-believes-in-the-liberation-of-tha-683x1024.jpg)
