Betty Friedan Quotes

Thus far women have been the mere echoes of men. Our laws and constitutions, our creeds and codes, and the customs of social life are all of masculine origin. The true woman is as yet a dream of the future. A just government, a humane religion, a pure social life await her coming.

For a woman emancipation means corruption.

You're going to women? Don't forget your whip!

the backlash convinced the public that women's 'liberation' was the true contemporary American scourge - the source of an endless laundry list of personal, social, and economic problems.

Women had first to convince the world that they had souls and then that they had minds and then it came on to this matter of political entity and the end is not yet.

Women are a new race, recreated since the world received Christianity.

Whether we regard the Women's Liberation movement as a serious threat, a passing convulsion, or a fashionable idiocy, it is a movement that mounts an attack on practically everything that women value today and introduces the language and sentiments of political confrontation into the area of personal relationships.

Women have been held back and limited throughout the centuries. Creation could not have been rendered, not even considered, let alone be brought into manifestation without woman. She is principal, a powerful energy. She is first.

We fought very hard for feminism, for women's rights. What I'm seeing today is a very opposite thing. I don't know why, but I see women being put back in their place. And I hate it. We're losing all we worked so hard for.

Feminism is a transformational force, an individual and social force. It is a way of looking at the world-a questioning of power/domination issues, an affirmation of women's energy.

I would gladly admit women are superior to men if only they would stop trying to be the same as us.

I don't think there should be anything that women are embarrassed to talk about in the 21st century, because for the last 100,000 years, men have said everything that's on their minds and described everything they have done.

Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.

I'm not a misogynist, so you can dispense with that. I think I've done wonders for the feminist movement.

I used to not like being called a 'woman architect': I'm an architect, not just a woman architect. Guys used to tap me on the head and say, 'You are okay for a girl.' But I see the incredible amount of need from other women for reassurance that it could be done, so I don't mind that at all.

I believe and support the feminist movement, but I am not generally interested in considering women's rights in relation to equality with men, or in a competition with men, but rather within their own rights and feminine space.

If there's specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can't change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies.

It's a little bit late in the day for men to object that women are getting outside their proper sphere.

Despite the fact that feminists say they're not getting a fair deal, women are still very powerful.

I think today women are very scared to celebrate themselves, because then they just get labeled.

Women say that my election represents a cultural break with the past - a past of sexism, of misogyny.

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

Once women got the right to vote, the kind of relaxed about everything. It was not until after World War II that women discovered that they did not have equal opportunity in the workplace.... The result was almost a revolution.

Women have to stand up to tremendous discriminatory practices, whether inherited traditions, whether imposed norms, male perceptions of power and control. The women always have to go through that and cannot take any privilege for granted.

Feminism, like Boston, is a state of mind. It is the state of mind of women who realize that their whole position in the social order is antiquated, as a woman cooking over an open fire with heavy iron pots would know that her entire housekeeping was out of date.