Betty Friedan Quotes

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

Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?

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

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

A good woman is one who loves passionately, has guts, seriousness and passionate convictions, takes responsibility, and shapes society.

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.

When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.

We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.

Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.

The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.

The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.

It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself.

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 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.

Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.

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.

Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows.

Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.

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.

You can have it all, just not all at the same time.

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!

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.

[Feminist:] One who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man.

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

We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.'

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

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.

Aging will create the music of the coming century.

He's a male chauvinistic piglet.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

I wouldn't be satisfied with a life lived solely on the barricades. I reserve my right to be frivolous.

You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.

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.

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

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.

Dominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that.

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

I'm my age and I feel glorious.

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

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

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

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.

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.