Betty Friedan - Years Quotes

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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
The women's movement has for years been the scapegoat for the rage of threatened, insecure housewives who can no longer count on husbands for lifelong support.

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