Top 114 Quotes & Sayings by Betty Friedan - Page 2

I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.

the new mystique is that women can have it all. There's a whole new generation of women today, flogging themselves to compete for success according to the male model - in a work world structured for men with wives to handle the details of life.

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.

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.

I think it's tremendously important that women continue to be full participants in the corporate environment, and that they continue to seek the same responsibilities, opportunities and rewards in that environment that in the past have only been available to men.

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 the illnesses of her grandmother had found true feminine fulfillment.

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?

The media and even, to some degree, leaders of women's organizations don't understand that the women's movement is an absolute part of society now. It is in the consciousness, it is taken for granted. It is part of the way women look at themselves, and women are looked at.

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.

The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.

He's a male chauvinistic piglet.

If I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class.

I didn't want to be in a situation where I was broader than the boys, which I was, in the academic world.

Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.

Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women's magazines.

While I had been, I guess, quite brilliant, academically, in my college years, I also had been editor of the paper, and I loved that. And, that was a much more active thing. And I missed it when I was doing graduate work.

The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban housewife struggled 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?"

I'm my age and I feel glorious.

When I was in high school, even in college, I didn't have any real image of a career woman or a professional woman.

If you were very bright and you became head of a department, as I did, of the psychology department, you were encouraged to go on to graduate work. But as a women you didn't even think about discrimination.

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.

...women who 'adjust' as housewives, who grow up wanting to be 'just a housewife,' are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps...they ate suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.

There are some die-hard male chauvinist pigs and there are some Neanderthal women who are threatened by equality - but the great majority, polls say 65% to 75% of women of America, of all ages, absolutely identify with the complete agenda of the women's movement: equal opportunity for jobs, education, professional training, the right to control your own body - your own reproductive process, freedom of choice, child care-the whole agenda.

Women today have choices and demand choices, choices to have kids or not and the reproductive technology thereto. And it is a fact [that] most women continue to chose to have children.

Being Jewish, you didn't get into a sorority. So I really was much more outgoing and gregarious. I really didn't want to spend an Emily Dickinson adolescence reading poetry on gravestones, which I did.

You can show more of the reality of yourself instead of hiding behind a mask for fear of revealing too much

Aging is not 'lost youth,' but a new stage of opportunity and strength. It's a different stage of life, and if you are going to pretend it's youth, you are going to miss it. You are going to miss the surprises, the possibilities, and the evolution that we are just beginning to know about because there are no role models, no guideposts, and no signs.

There's increasing consciousness that a "command and control" style of management which one associates with a male model isn't necessarily what works anymore, especially with small to medium sized companies. There's increasing evidence that a more flexible management style, where responsibility is distributed up and down the line, is what works best. And that kind of management style is one that will allow individual workers more flexibility - men and women.

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."

The real joke that history played on American women is not the one that makes people snigger, with cheap Freudian sophistication, at the dead feminists. It is the joke that Freudian thought played on living women, twisting the memory of the feminists into the man-eating phantom of the feminine mystique, shriveling the very wish to be more than just a wife and mother.

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.

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.

I loved my kids. And I loved my house, and I loved a lot of things about my life in the 1950s. But there were a lot like me in that era, very overeducated housewives.

Having expressed the rage against the laws and conditions that oppressed them - maybe even excess anger in the beginning was directed at men they came in contact with, because it had been pent up too long - women now come from a new position of easier, more comfortable self-affirmation and empowerment. Women are given to tolerance and are more able to love. I hope it happens also to men.

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.

When [the] life span of America women is approaching eighty years having kids is not going to take it up.

American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if ... the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realize one's full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror.

The man who is extremely and dangerously hungry has no other interest but food. Capacities not useful for the satisfying of hunger are pushed into the background. 'But what happens to man's desires when there is plenty of food and his belly in chronically filled? At once, other (and higher) needs emerge and these, rather than the psychological hungers, dominate the organism.

Certain signs, some of them visible to the layman as well as the scientist, indicate that we have been watching an ice age approach for some time without realizing what we are seeing... Scientists predict that it will cause great snows which the world has not seen since the last ice age thousands of years ago.

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.

This idea that the employment of women, the movement of women outside the home into the work world, and their demand for equality is somehow responsible for increasing juvenile delinquency or the increase in divorce rate, is just so much bullshit.

What had really caused the women's movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women's life expectancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn't live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was "the problem that had no name." Realizing that it was not some freakish personal fault but our common problem as women had enabled us to take the first steps to change our lives.

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.

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 love newspapers. I've worked on newspapers, all my life. I've always loved it.

I would have much rather been in the jalopy with the kids, going to Hunt's for hamburgers. But, when I entered high school, all my friends got into sororities and fraternities and I didn't.

Chosen motherhood is the real liberation. The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different, and the choice to be generative in other ways can at last be made, and is being made by many women now, without guilt.

I'm against suppression of pornography. If you suppress guns - yes; if you want to suppress poverty - yes. These are the obscenities, the real brutalization of people. I am almost more outraged by ads for blue jeans or cars that sort of blatantly depict women not only as sex objects, but women that look younger than the age of consent, looking like they've just been raped or asking to be raped-utterly passive sex objects.

My adolescence was quite miserable, when I look back on it, at least my early part of my adolescence. Because there was anti-Semitism in Peoria, and I didn't feel that when I was in elementary school.

Advice? I don't offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.

It is perhaps beside the point to remark that bowling alleys and supermarkets have nursery facilities, while schools and colleges and scientific laboratories and government offices do not.

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.

Development can indeed continue beyond childhood and youth, beyond the seventies. It can continue until the very end of life, given purposes that challenge and use our human abilities. . . . In sum, our development does not necessarily end at any age. We can continue to develop into our eighties, even to our nineties.

It was the era that I later analyzed, the "feminine mystique" era, [when] "career woman" was a dirty word. And so I didn't want a career anymore. [But] I had to do something. So I started freelancing for women's magazines.