Betty Friedan Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

To protest free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong.

Getting older is an adventure, not a problem.

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!

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

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.

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

We couldn't possibly know where it would lead but we knew it had to be done.

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.

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.

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...