Betty Friedan
...women who 'adjust' as housewives, who grow up wanting to be 'just a housewife,' are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps...they ate suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.Collection: Growing Up
Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women's magazines.Collection: Editors
I think it's tremendously important that women continue to be full participants in the corporate environment, and that they continue to seek the same responsibilities, opportunities and rewards in that environment that in the past have only been available to men.Collection: Responsibility
the new mystique is that women can have it all. There's a whole new generation of women today, flogging themselves to compete for success according to the male model - in a work world structured for men with wives to handle the details of life.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Agony
Why the increasing emphasis by professional age experts and the media on - and public acceptance of - the nursing home as the locus of age when, in fact, more than ninety percent of those over sixty-five continue to live in the community?Collection: Home
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.Collection: Sex
Advice? I don't offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.Collection: Advice
life lived only for oneself does not truly satisfy men or women. There is a hunger in Americans today for larger purposes beyond the self. That is the reason for the religious revival and the new resonance of 'family.Collection: Religious
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."Collection: Editors
I'm against suppression of pornography. If you suppress guns - yes; if you want to suppress poverty - yes. These are the obscenities, the real brutalization of people. I am almost more outraged by ads for blue jeans or cars that sort of blatantly depict women not only as sex objects, but women that look younger than the age of consent, looking like they've just been raped or asking to be raped-utterly passive sex objects.Collection: Sex
Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.Collection: Children
Being Jewish, you didn’t get into a sorority. So I really was much more outgoing and gregarious. I really didn’t want to spend an Emily Dickinson adolescence reading poetry on gravestones, which I did.Collection: Reading