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 FRIEDANA woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, ‘Who am I, and what do I want out of life?’ She mustn’t feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children.
More Betty Friedan Quotes
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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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Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows.
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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 wouldn’t be satisfied with a life lived solely on the barricades. I reserve my right to be frivolous.
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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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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!
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Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?
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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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No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
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Aging is not “lost youth” but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
BETTY FRIEDAN