Betty Friedan Quotes

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

The problem that has no name – which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to ‘full human stature’.

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

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

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

We have to be at hand to challenge and debate any statement that sex roles are biologically determined.

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.

Men and women are not two separate species, with incompatible designs on each other.

No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.

Women’s liberation is the only liberation in history that was ever bra-burningly fun.

The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women.

We are becoming part of history, participating in one of the most dramatic revolutions ever!

It’s good to be the first but better to be the second or third!

You are not born a woman—you become one.

Men are no longer the enemy, but fellow victims.

A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly conforming to the feminine mystique, or by bravely and defiantly defying it.

Our society prescribes the feminine characteristics as signs of maturity.

The age of homemakers is gone, with its lack of challenge, stimulation, creative outlet.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries…she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—’Is this all?’

The minute we got married and set up housekeeping, the women’s magazines began running stories like ‘How to Cook Gourmet Meals in Fifteen Minutes’ instead of ‘How to Apply this Week’s Eyeshadow in Fifteen Minutes’.

A woman must go on duty in her home thirty-five years, perhaps to the end of her life.

The problem with no name is the shared awareness of an unwelcome condition.

Work is fundamental to an individual, to his sense of identity as a man.

Time, feels, attitudes, aspirations of so many American women. They were silent and silenced.

Only meaningful work can be satisfying.

Our culture doesn’t like the sight of happier women.

American women are kept from growing to full human stature.

The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of women.

The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more…more swiftly and cheaply.

Females transformed into work animals.

The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person.

A woman just didn’t have the drive to fulfill her self in ‘assigned roles.’

There was no flattering light thrown back from women’s eyes.

The only way for a woman to know herself as a person is by creative work of her own.

They lost the courage even to ask themselves questions.

Only if women shed their mystique – and with it, the mystique of men would the battle for genuine equality begin.

Women’s self-esteem must be lifted from the distortions of the feminine mystique.

If women loon downstairs in their shoes and are supportive of their men, the whole world changes.

The problem that has no name had gone unspoken for many years.

Sexual identity allows each individual to find his own strengths, his talents, and his particular ways of expressing excellence in his personal life as well as his work.

The suburban housewife’, in fact, is an invention of the last hundred years.

Self-fulfillment is defined in terms of being sexually desirable to men – the only path to female identity in our culture.

The mistake lay in thinking that a woman could find herself through sexual passivity.

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

In a time when nothing seems to have any meaning, no passion, no belief.

American women are kept from growing to full human stature.

Men weren’t really the enemy – they were fellow victims in the struggle with the forces of evil.

A civilized society marked by a male culture was harshly oppressive of women.

Men did what they had done for centuries.