Top 114 Quotes & Sayings by Betty Friedan
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American activist Betty Friedan.
Last updated on December 3, 2024.
The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.
It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
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.
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.
Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
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.
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.
Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.
Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.
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!
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.
Each woman is made to feel it is her own cross to bear if she can't be the perfect clone of the male superman and the perfect clone of the feminine mystique.
You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.
Men, also, have in them enormous capacities that they have to repress and fear in themselves, living up to this obsolete and brutal man-eating, bear-killing, Ernest Hemingway, crewcut Prussian sadistic, napalm all the children in Vietnam, bang-bang you're dead, image of masculinity, the image of all powerful masculine superiority that is absolute.
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.
Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?
Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.
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.
All year there have been these cover stories that the women's movement is dead and about the death of feminism and the post-feminist generation of young women who don't identify with feminism - and then we have the biggest march ever of women in Washington. More people than had ever marched for anything - not only more women, but more people.
Aging will create the music of the coming century.
To protest free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong.
No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
Getting older is an adventure, not a problem.
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!
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.
There's no question that the black middle class has benefited greatly by the civil rights movement. But there is a large black underclass that does not have access to jobs. If there's no clear road to income and status except crime, we should expect social problems. You can't solve this problem without addressing the economic issues, and the same is true with gender.
Dominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that.
We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.
Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.
When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.
A good woman is one who loves passionately, has guts, seriousness and passionate convictions, takes responsibility, and shapes society.
The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.
Aging is not "lost youth" but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
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.
We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.'
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.
Over and over again, stories in women's magazines insist that women can know fulfillment only at the moment of giving birth to a child. They deny the years when she can no longer look forward to giving birth, even if she repeats the act over and over again. In the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no other way she can even dream about herself, except as her children's mother, her husband's wife.
Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-- 'Is this all?
The only kind of work which permits an able woman to realize her abilities fully, to achieve identity in society in a life plan that can encompass marriage and motherhood, is the kind that was forbidden by the feminine mystique, the lifelong commitment to an art or science, to politics or profession. If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based.
Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.
It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself.
You can have it all, just not all at the same time.
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.
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.
I 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.
A 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.
In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens. It would be a great service to tell girls who plan to work in society to expect this subtle, uncomfortable discrimination-tell them not to be quiet, and hope it will go away, but fight it. A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she "adjust" to prejudice and discrimination.
It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself.
Economic equity is an enormous empowerment of women. Having jobs that provide income means that women can be a more effective force, a more equal force, in the political process. Women with income take themselves more seriously and they are taken more seriously.
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.
Feminism or the family? Carried to excess maybe. I have insisted that women cannot be defined solely in those terms. But for a great many women - not all, because we are only beginning to realize and affirm the diversity of women themselves - choosing motherhood makes motherhood itself a liberating choice.
Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows.
[Feminist:] One who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man.
I wouldn't be satisfied with a life lived solely on the barricades. I reserve my right to be frivolous.
The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.
If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based.
A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she "adjust" to prejudice and discrimination.
Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? Who knows what women's intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love?
The key to the trap is, of course, education. The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save, American women from the greater dangers of the feminine mystique.
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.
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