Betty Friedan quotes

Betty Friedan was an American feminist, writer, and activist, best known for her groundbreaking book "The Feminine Mystique." Her work helped ignite the second wave of feminism and brought attention to issues facing women in society. She became a leading voice for gender equality and co-founded the National Organization for Women. Here are 43 of her quotes:

It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself. (Betty Friedan)
Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength. View quote
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. View quote
Betty Friedan
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. View quote
Betty Friedan
Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves. View quote
Betty Friedan
A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she "adjust" to prejudice and discrimination. View quote
Betty Friedan
No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor. View quote
Betty Friedan
The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive. View quote
Betty Friedan
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. View quote
Betty Friedan
Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework - an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life. View quote
Betty Friedan
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! (Betty Friedan)
Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgastic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery. View quote
Betty Friedan
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. View quote
Betty Friedan
American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if ... the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realize one's full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror. View quote
Betty Friedan
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. View quote
Betty Friedan
The suburban housewife - she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife - freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth, and the illnesses of her grandmother ... had found true feminine fulfilment. View quote
Betty Friedan
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. There is no other way. View quote
Betty Friedan
"Do you object to the celebration of sexuality in our pictorials? View quote
Betty Friedan
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. View quote
Betty Friedan
Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? View quote
Betty Friedan
You can have it all, just not all at the same time. (Betty Friedan)
The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained. View quote
Betty Friedan
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. View quote
Betty Friedan
It is perhaps beside the point to remark that bowling alleys and supermarkets have nursery facilities, while schools and colleges and scientific laboratories and government offices do not. View quote
Betty Friedan
Chosen motherhood is the real liberation. The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different, and the choice to be generative in other ways can at last be made, and is being made by many women now, without guilt. View quote
Betty Friedan