Betty Friedan - Woman Quotes

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When women take their education and their abilities seriously and put them to use, ultimately they have to compete with men. It is better for a woman to compete impersonally in society, as men do, than to compete for dominance in her own home with her husband, compete with her neighbors for empty status, and so smother her son that he cannot compete at all.

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
A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, 'Who am I, and what do I want out of life?'

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
It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself.

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
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