Betty Friedan - Mystique Quotes

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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
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.

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

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