Betty Friedan
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.Collection: Society
Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.Collection: Age
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!Collection: Movies
Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.Collection: Women
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.Collection: Society
The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.Collection: Women
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 easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.
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.
Aging is not "lost youth" but a new stage of opportunity and strength.Collection: Birthday
A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she "adjust" to prejudice and discrimination.Collection: Girl
Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?Collection: Justice
A good woman is one who loves passionately, has guts, seriousness and passionate convictions, takes responsibility, and shapes society.Collection: Responsibility
Getting older is an adventure, not a problem.Collection: Adventure
In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens. It would be a great service to tell girls who plan to work in society to expect this subtle, uncomfortable discrimination-tell them not to be quiet, and hope it will go away, but fight it. A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she "adjust" to prejudice and discrimination.Collection: Girl
You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.Collection: Needs
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.Collection: Motivational
No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.Collection: Shining
When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.Collection: Women
The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.Collection: Feminist
You can have it all, just not all at the same time.Collection: Time Management
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.Collection: Thinking
Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-- 'Is this all?Collection: Children
Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows.Collection: Adventure
We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.Collection: Family
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?Collection: Knows
We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.'Collection: Children
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.Collection: Abortion
Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.Collection: Light
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.Collection: Women
Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.Collection: Doors
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.Collection: Mother
I love newspapers. I've worked on newspapers, all my life. I've always loved it.Collection: Newspapers
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.Collection: College
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.Collection: Home
There are some die-hard male chauvinist pigs and there are some Neanderthal women who are threatened by equality - but the great majority, polls say 65% to 75% of women of America, of all ages, absolutely identify with the complete agenda of the women's movement: equal opportunity for jobs, education, professional training, the right to control your own body - your own reproductive process, freedom of choice, child care-the whole agenda.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Community
Aging is not 'lost youth,' but a new stage of opportunity and strength. It's a different stage of life, and if you are going to pretend it's youth, you are going to miss it. You are going to miss the surprises, the possibilities, and the evolution that we are just beginning to know about because there are no role models, no guideposts, and no signs.Collection: Opportunity
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.Collection: Country
Development can indeed continue beyond childhood and youth, beyond the seventies. It can continue until the very end of life, given purposes that challenge and use our human abilities. . . . In sum, our development does not necessarily end at any age. We can continue to develop into our eighties, even to our nineties.Collection: Childhood
I'm my age and I feel glorious.Collection: Age
If I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class.Collection: Spiritual
Certain signs, some of them visible to the layman as well as the scientist, indicate that we have been watching an ice age approach for some time without realizing what we are seeing... Scientists predict that it will cause great snows which the world has not seen since the last ice age thousands of years ago.Collection: Years
There's increasing consciousness that a "command and control" style of management which one associates with a male model isn't necessarily what works anymore, especially with small to medium sized companies. There's increasing evidence that a more flexible management style, where responsibility is distributed up and down the line, is what works best. And that kind of management style is one that will allow individual workers more flexibility - men and women.Collection: Responsibility
The real joke that history played on American women is not the one that makes people snigger, with cheap Freudian sophistication, at the dead feminists. It is the joke that Freudian thought played on living women, twisting the memory of the feminists into the man-eating phantom of the feminine mystique, shriveling the very wish to be more than just a wife and mother.Collection: Mother
I didn't want to be in a situation where I was broader than the boys, which I was, in the academic world.Collection: Boys
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.Collection: World
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.Collection: Dirty