Top 92 Betty Friedan Quotes
#1. 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.
Betty Friedan
#2. We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.'
Betty Friedan
#3. 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.
Betty Friedan
#4. 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
#5. The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.
Betty Friedan
#6. I love newspapers. I've worked on newspapers, all my life. I've always loved it.
Betty Friedan
#7. 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.
Betty Friedan
#8. You can show more of the reality of yourself instead of hiding behind a mask for fear of revealing too much
Betty Friedan
#9. Aging is not 'lost youth' but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
Betty Friedan
#10. 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.
Betty Friedan
#11. 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.
Betty Friedan
#12. 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.
Betty Friedan
#13. 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.
Betty Friedan
#14. The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.
Betty Friedan
#15. If I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class.
Betty Friedan
#16. 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.
Betty Friedan
#17. The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.
Betty Friedan
#18. Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.
Betty Friedan
#19. 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.
Betty Friedan
#20. 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.
Betty Friedan
#21. 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.
Betty Friedan
#22. 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.
Betty Friedan
#23. 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!
Betty Friedan
#24. 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.
Betty Friedan
#25. Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women's magazines.
Betty Friedan
#26. 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.
Betty Friedan
#27. You can have it all, just not all at the same time.
Betty Friedan
#28. 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.
Betty Friedan
#29. 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.
Betty Friedan
#30. 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.
Betty Friedan
#31. Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.
Betty Friedan
#32. You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.
Betty Friedan
#33. 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 Friedan
#34. The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.
Betty Friedan
#35. 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.
Betty Friedan
#36. Dominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that.
Betty Friedan
#37. We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.
Betty Friedan
#38. I wouldn't be satisfied with a life lived solely on the barricades. I reserve my right to be frivolous.
Betty Friedan
#39. I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.
Betty Friedan
#40. 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.
Betty Friedan
#41. 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.
Betty Friedan
#42. 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.
Betty Friedan
#43. Aging will create the music of the coming century.
Betty Friedan
#44. 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.
Betty Friedan
#45. 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?
Betty Friedan
#46. 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.
Betty Friedan
#47. 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.
Betty Friedan
#48. 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.
Betty Friedan
#49. Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.
Betty Friedan
#51. Advice? I don't offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.
Betty Friedan
#52. 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.
Betty Friedan
#53. Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.
Betty Friedan
#54. Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows.
Betty Friedan
#55. 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 Friedan
#56. 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.
Betty Friedan
#57. 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?
Betty Friedan
#58. With increasing skill, the ads glorify her "role" as an American housewife-knowing that her very lack of identity in that role will make her fall for whatever they are selling.
Betty Friedan
#59. 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."
Betty Friedan
#60. 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.
Betty Friedan
#61. When [the] life span of America women is approaching eighty years having kids is not going to take it up.
Betty Friedan
#62. 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.
Betty Friedan
#63. 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.
Betty Friedan
#65. It is easier to live life through someone else than to become complete yourself.
Betty Friedan
#66. 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.
Betty Friedan
#67. No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
Betty Friedan
#68. There is something less than fully human in those who have never known a commitment to an idea, who have never risked an exploration of the unknown, who have never attempted the kind of creativity of which men and women are potentially capable.
Betty Friedan
#69. 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.
Betty Friedan
#70. Gradually, without seeing it clearly for quite a while, I came to realize that something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives today.
Betty Friedan
#71. 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.
Betty Friedan
#72. [Feminist:] One who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man.
Betty Friedan
#73. 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.
Betty Friedan
#74. To protest free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong.
Betty Friedan
#75. 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.
Betty Friedan
#76. 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.
Betty Friedan
#77. When I was in high school, even in college, I didn't have any real image of a career woman or a professional woman.
Betty Friedan
#78. It is wrong to keep spelling out unnecessary choices that make women unconsciously resist either commitment or motherhood
and that hold back recognition of the needed social changes.
Betty Friedan
#79. When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.
Betty Friedan
#80. Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.
Betty Friedan
#81. Woman's sexual problems are, in this sense, by-products of the suppression of her basic need to grow and fulfill her potentialities as a human being, potentialities which the mystique of feminine fulfillment ignores.
Betty Friedan
#82. A good woman is one who loves passionately, has guts, seriousness and passionate convictions, takes responsibility, and shapes society.
Betty Friedan
#83. 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.
Betty Friedan
#84. 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.
Betty Friedan
#85. 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.
Betty Friedan
#86. 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.
Betty Friedan
#87. 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.
Betty Friedan
#88. The unpleasant image of the feminists today resembles less the feminists themselves than the image fostered by the interests who so bitterly opposed the vote for women...
Betty Friedan
#89. Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.
Betty Friedan
#90. A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of suicide.
Betty Friedan
#91. 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.
Betty Friedan
#92. I didn't want to be in a situation where I was broader than the boys, which I was, in the academic world.
Betty Friedan
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