Betty Friedan Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

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

Betty Friedan
Life lived only for oneself does not truly satisfy men or women. There is a hunger in Americans today for larger purposes beyond the self. That is the reason for the religious revival and the new resonance of 'family'.

Betty Friedan
Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.

Betty Friedan
When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on women's passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.

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 need to break through the age mystique by continuing to grow, solving problems, making social changes. We need to see our age as an uncharted adventure.

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
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
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.

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.

Betty Friedan
Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.

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
To do the work that you are capable of doing is the mark of maturity.

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.

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

Betty Friedan
I thought it was absolutely outrageous that the Silence of the Lambs won four Oscars. [...] I'm not saying that the movie shouldn't have been shows. I'm not denying the movie was an artistic triumph, but it was about the evisceration, the skinning alive of women. That is what I find offensive. Not the Playboy centerfold.

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.

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
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
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?

Betty Friedan
A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex but neither should she 'adjust' to prejudice and discrimination.

Betty Friedan
When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.

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
Say no to the fountain of youth and turn on the fountain of age.

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.

Betty Friedan
What had really caused the women's movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women's life expectancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn't live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was the problem that had no name. Realizing that it was not some freakish personal fault but our common problem as women had enabled us to take the first steps to change our lives.

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
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
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