Betty Friedan - The Fountain of Age (1993)

5 Sourced Quotes

View all Betty Friedan Quotes

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

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

Why the increasing emphasis by professional age experts and the media on — and public acceptance of — the nursing home as the locus of age when, in fact, more than ninety percent of those over sixty-five continue to live in the community?

Betty Friedan

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

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