Betty Friedan Quotes

The real joke that history played on American women is not the one that makes people snigger, with cheap Freudian sophistication, at the dead feminists. It is the joke that Freudian thought played on living women, twisting the memory of the feminists into the man-eating phantom of the feminine mystique, shriveling the very wish to be more than just a wife and mother.

Our daughters were coming of age during a rising consciousness about gender equality. Throughout their school years - from kindergarten through graduate school, 1972 to 1992 - women were starting to take their places in areas traditionally reserved mostly for men.

It's patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman.

I've been reading The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, which is obviously very dated now but still relevant. It's so interesting to see how far we've come and how far we haven't come with all these myths that people put onto women.

Funny business, a woman's career: the things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman. It's one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we've got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we've had or wanted.

I, being born a woman and distressed By all the needs and notions of my kind.

The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness.

It would not be going too far to assert that ... conflict confronts every woman who ventures upon a career of her own and who is ... unwilling to pay for her daring with the renunciation of her femininity.

People should realize women aren't just whores or virgins, I want to see women who are real human beings.

New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage.

We are the women men warned us about.

I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.

Men should think twice before making widow hood woman's only path to power.

I started to think of Grace of Monaco as a metaphor for women in general.

No one knows what women want!

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

When I was coming of age, I remembered reading and studying the initial ideas within the feminist movement. There was this idea with my parents' generation that in order to find equality, a woman would need to behave like a man.

Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation... none was more alarming, from a feminist point of view, than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.

Emancipation of women has made them lose their mystery.

I guess I've played a lot of victims, but that's what a lot of the history of women is about.

Men are born privileged in the scale of things - I'm generalizing, but it's true. Women have to define themselves in the eyes of men. They have to fight for their rights, especially in a society that will pretend that there is no fight or no battle, that it's a cliche, that feminists are reactionary, all these things.

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

For a woman emancipation means corruption.

The world cannot evolve if girls refuse to become women.

We needed to be assertive as women in those days - assertive and aggressive - and the degree to which we had to be that way depended on where you were. I had to be.