Betty Friedan Quotes

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

— 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.”

— Betty Friedan

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

— 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.”

— Betty Friedan

“Over and over again, stories in women's magazines insist that women can know fulfillment only at the moment of giving birth to a child. They deny the years when she can no longer look forward to giving birth, even if she repeats the act over and over again. In the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no other way she can even dream about herself, except as her children's mother, her husband's wife.”

— 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.

— Betty Friedan

“We have gone on too long blaming or pitying the mothers who devour their children, who sow the seeds of progressive dehumanization, because they have never grown to full humanity themselves. If the mother is at fault, why isn't it time to break the pattern by urging all these Sleeping Beauties to grow up and live their own lives? There never will be enough Prince Charmings or enough therapists to break that pattern now. It is society's job, and finally that of each woman alone. For it is not the strength of the mothers that is at fault but their weakness, their passive childlike dependency and immaturity that is mistaken for "femininity." Our society forces boys, insofar as it can, to grow up, to endure the pains of growth, to educate themselves to work, to move on. Why aren't girls forced to grow up - to achieve somehow the core of self that will end the unnecessary dilemma, the mistaken choice between femaleness and humanness that is implied in the feminine mystique?”

— 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.

— Betty Friedan

“The key to the trap is, of course, education. The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save, American women from the greater dangers of the feminine mystique.”

— Betty Friedan

“The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.”

— Betty Friedan

“It is not possible to preserve one's identity by adjusting for any length of time to a frame of reference that is in itself destructive to it. It is very hard indeed for a human being to sustain such an 'inner' split - conforming outwardly to one reality, while trying to maintain inwardly the value it denies.”

— Betty Friedan

“The man who is extremely and dangerously hungry has no other interest but food. Capacities not useful for the satisfying of hunger are pushed into the background. 'But what happens to man's desires when there is plenty of food and his belly in chronically filled? At once, other (and higher) needs emerge and these, rather than the psychological hungers, dominate the organism.”

— 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.

— 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.

— 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.”

— Betty Friedan

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.

— Betty Friedan

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 mustn't
feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own,
outside of husband and children.

— Betty Friedan

“Men, also, have in them enormous capacities that they have to repress and fear in themselves, living up to this obsolete and brutal man-eating, bear-killing, Ernest Hemingway, crewcut Prussian sadistic, napalm all the children in Vietnam, bang-bang you're dead, image of masculinity, the image of all powerful masculine superiority that is absolute.”

— Betty Friedan

“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.”

— Betty Friedan

“Economic equity is an enormous empowerment of women. Having jobs that provide income means that women can be a more effective force, a more equal force, in the political process. Women with income take themselves more seriously and they are taken more seriously.”

— Betty Friedan

“The media and even, to some degree, leaders of women's organizations don't understand that the women's movement is an absolute part of society now. It is in the consciousness, it is taken for granted. It is part of the way women look at themselves, and women are looked at.”

— Betty Friedan

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.

— Betty Friedan

“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.”

— Betty Friedan

I didn't want to be in a situation where I was broader than the boys, which I was, in the academic world.

— Betty Friedan

“The only kind of work which permits an able woman to realize her abilities fully, to achieve identity in society in a life plan that can encompass marriage and motherhood, is the kind that was forbidden by the feminine mystique, the lifelong commitment to an art or science, to politics or profession. If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based.”

— Betty Friedan

“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.”

— Betty Friedan

“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.”

— 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.”

— Betty Friedan

“You can show more of the reality of yourself instead of hiding behind a mask for fear of revealing too much”

— Betty Friedan

“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.”

— Betty Friedan

“You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.”

— Betty Friedan

“I have discovered that there is a crucial difference between society's image of old people and 'us' as we know and feel ourselves to be.”

— Betty Friedan

“We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.'”

— 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.”

— Betty Friedan

“I'm my age and I feel glorious.”

— Betty Friedan

Neither woman nor man lives by work, or love, alone ... The human self defines itself and grows through love and work: All psychology before and after Freud boils down to that.

— Betty Friedan

“I never set out to write a book to change women's lives, to change history. It's like, 'Who, me?' Yes, me. I did it. And I'm not that different from other women. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman.”

— Betty Friedan

“Getting older is an adventure, not a problem.”

— 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.”

— Betty Friedan

“The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.”

— Betty Friedan

“There is absolutely no evidence that it is harmful to children if their mother's health, well-being and autonomy and control of her own destiny is maximized by work outside the home.”

— 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.”

— Betty Friedan

“Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.”

— Betty Friedan

“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.”

— Betty Friedan

“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.”

— Betty Friedan

“I would have much rather been in the jalopy with the kids, going to Hunt's for hamburgers. But, when I entered high school, all my friends got into sororities and fraternities and I didn't.”

— Betty Friedan

“I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.”

— Betty Friedan

Diversity has got to be a part of modern feminism, and I think that my feminism is stronger because its an inclusive thing. I won't be backed into a corner that polarizes me against other women. And I wished they wouldn't be either.

— Betty Friedan

“When I was in high school, even in college, I didn't have any real image of a career woman or a professional woman.”

— Betty Friedan

“I understood somehow my mother's frustration. And that it was no good not only for her, but for her children or her husband, that she didn't have a real use of her ability.”

— Betty Friedan