Quotes: Betty Friedan
Quotes 1 till 15 of 24.
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A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex but neither should she 'adjust' to prejudice and discrimination.
Source: The Feminine Mystique Ch. 1 The Problem That Has No Name
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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.
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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.
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Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
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Friedan: I think it's partly a reaction against feminism, partly envy of feminism, and partly partly a real need of men to evolve through the burden of the masculine mystique, the burden of machismo.
Source: The Playboy Interview
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Friedan: Men had to be supermen: stoic, responsible meal tickets. Dominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that.
Source: The Playboy Interview
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If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based.
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If I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class. This is female chauvinism. Friedan, Betty. 1998.
Source: It Changed My Life: Writings on the Womens Movement
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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.
Source: The Fountain of Age
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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.
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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.
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It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
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Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.
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Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.
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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.
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