Quotes by Betty Friedan

“When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman”

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

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

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

“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”

“The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban housewife struggled 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?”

“Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is womens denigration of themselves.”

“The glorification of the womans role, then, seems to be in proportion to societys reluctance to treat women as complete human beings; for the less real function that role has, the more it is decorated with meaningless details to conceal its empt”

“Men werent 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.”

“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.”

“A woman who has no way of expressing herself and of realizing herself as a full human being has nothing else to turn to but the owning of material things”

“A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of mans advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all.”

“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 fulfillment.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The problem that has no name.”

“Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.”

“There needs to be bolder thinking, ... on how to measure the quality of life of men and women in the work force. Currently, success is measured by material advancements. We need to readjust the definition of success to account for time outside of work and satisfaction of life, not just the dollars-and-cents bottom line.”

“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 mustnt feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children.”

“Dont get into the bra-burning, anti-man, politics-of-orgasm school.”