Betty Friedan Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Betty Friedan
Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?

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

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

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
Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.

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

Betty Friedan
Men had to be supermen: stoic, responsible meal tickets. Dominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that.

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

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
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
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 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
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
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
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 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
If women's role in life is limited solely to housewife/mother, it clearly ends when she can no longer bear more children and the children she has borne leave home.

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
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
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