Betty Friedan Quotes (16 Quotes)


    The glorification of the 'woman's role, then, seems to be in proportion to society's reluctance to treat women as complete human beings for the less real function that role has, the more it is decorated with meaningless details to conceal its empt

    Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.

    It is better for a woman to compete impersonally in society, as men do, than to compete for dominance in her own home with her husband, compete with her neighbors for empty status, and so smother her son that he cannot compete at all.

    Even if he did what he's alleged to have done, what's the big deal To have our will overthrown by a bunch of dirty old white men trying to use sexual issues wrongly ... to impeach a president, this is really a disgrace to Washington, to the Congress, to.

    The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.


    Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.

    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.

    The suburban housewife -- she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife -- freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth, and

    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.

    Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgasmic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery.

    Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework --an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.

    There needs to be bolder thinking, ... on how to measure the quality of life of men and women in the work force. Currently, success is measured by material advancements. We need to readjust the definition of success to account for time outside of work and satisfaction of life, not just the dollars-and-cents bottom line.

    I was at a meeting two years ago in Beijing, and I passed a bunch of women who were marching in a protest. Their signs were probably saying something I wouldn't have agreed with at all. But I was so glad to see women marching. And it's happening all over the world.

    We need to see men and women as equal partners, but it's 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!

    Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.

    It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.


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