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 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 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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We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.
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Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.
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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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Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?
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Aging will create the music of the coming century.
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No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
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The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.
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Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.
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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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Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.
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Men weren’t really the enemy – they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.
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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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Women, because they are not generally the principal breadwinners, can be perhaps most useful as the trail blazers, working along the bypaths, doing the unusual job that men cannot afford to gamble on.
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Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.
BETTY FRIEDAN