The Feminine Mystique Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. Women owe Friedan an incalculable debt for The Feminine Mystique. Domesticity was not a satisfactory story of an intelligent woman's life.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

#4. In retrospect, we could see that the 1950s had been a reactionary period in America of Eisenhower blandness, of virulent anticommunism, of the 'Feminine Mystique.'

Edmund White

#5. 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

#6. Whenever I hear about the woman's trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin'-says-lovin'-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level,

Anonymous

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

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

Betty Friedan

#11. I was in a book group in 1973," she recounted. "We read The Feminine Mystique one week, and the next week everyone went out and got a job. The book group never met again.

Debora L. Spar

#12. I find the dead easier to be around than the dying. They are not in pain, not afraid of death. There are no awkward silences and conversations that dance around the obvious. They aren't scary...Cadavers, once you get used to them--and you do that quite fast--are surprisingly easy to be around.

Mary Roach

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. In my current work on global warming, I argue that the only apparent solution to the deep problem of climate change would require very large transfers of wealth from rich nations to poor nations, so that the entire world can make the transition to renewable forms of energy as fast as possible.

Philip Kitcher

#16. I've always jealously guarded my feminine mystique. I've been married twice, and neither of my husbands has ever seen me put my face on.

Laurie Graham

#17. How are you gonna make an 'idol' from the type of person you're trying to avoid in real life?

Natasha Leggero

#18. You realize how many times you have to wet your thumb when you're counting out a million?"
"You're shitting me. They must have a machine or something."
"Right. A machine that wets their thumbs.

John Godey

#19. A good scientist is a person in whom the childhood quality of perennial curiosity lingers on. Once he gets an answer, he has other questions.

Frederick Seitz

#20. I have so many people in my head, I can't keep up with the real people around me. But it's okay, I'm a writer.

Shannon Taylor Vannatter

#21. Transport a handful of earth everyday and you will make a mountain.

Confucius

#22. If only we could always say our truths--if we could name the things that haunt us--maybe they could float up from us like the kind of helium that the birds would sip in the treetops. Then they would make us laugh and laugh.

Rita Zoey Chin

#23. Brilliant ... Marriage Confidential is both laugh-out-loud funny and gasp-out-loud shocking, and nothing less than a Feminine Mystique for our time. Mark my words, your marriage will change after reading this book.

Debby Applegate

#24. Sherlock: You're exaggerating. It didn't happen that often. (in relation to Irene Adler's texts) John: 57 times in the run up to Christmas. Your pocket was moaning more than Mrs Hudson. Sherlock: Thank you for that mental image.

Guy Adams

#25. The purpose of armed struggle is not simply to kill ... its purpose is to reach a political goal.

Abu Abbas

#26. Right now, I'm living like a piano is going to come plummeting from the sky any second, and I don't know when. So it's always like, this is it. This is all you've got left.

K.K. Hendin