Betty Friedan Quotes

The problem that has no name – which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities.

Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims.

It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before.

Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries … she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — ‘Is this all?’

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 20th century in the United States.

Men are not the enemy, but neither are they the saviors. They are fellow victims, walking the way with us.

Modern women are just fed up with being oppressed, abused, exploited, lied to, and generally treated like second-class citizens.

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.

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.

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

Hundreds of thousands of educated women are still condemned to live as if they were Stovetop Spinach, because their femininity stands between them and say, the two months’ training necessary to get work they would actually enjoy.

We do not accept the old ideological boundaries that have simply defined women as inferior beings.

The deep need today is not for compromisers, but for rebels.

America is now in the midst of a third revolution – the revolution in human rights.

No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.

In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens.

What is important is to be strong, do not be afraid of failures, learn from them and go on.

We know ourselves intellectually, as workers, as scientists, as mothers, as individuals in a difficult and competitive society. We do not know ourselves emotionally at all.

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.

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

Man’s world has become infected with a new evil; new to us, evil to us, for we are seeing it in the mirror for the first time.

Men will not allow women needlessly to work hard and to become geniuses, with the full pangs of labor and birth for their thoughts, which are illegitimate.

Feeling well in yourself … being honest about yourself, has to be an integral part of transforming society.

So women are constantly transformed into certain types of people – women – as fast as little girls used to be transformed into women by magic fairy dust.

It was as if American women had deliberately betrayed what was unique about each other in order to join life as a kind of vast imitation of men.

It’s terrifying to see how easily, in a society where men are encouraged to be free and independent, women can become a member of the herd, the obedient, the soulless.

Men think that self-awareness is a burden, when it is not the burden but the light.

When a woman accepts the fact that a man will always, in some way, be dependent on her, and in some sense must always be higher than her, then in all other respects she has an equal relationship.

A woman is screwed both ways, as it is even difficult for her physically to find sexual satisfaction, because men are not trained to understand her.

The trouble is that, strictly and objectively, women should not want to have careers, they should play the heroine in a man’s career.

Male erotization of female appliance, of female vagina both, as cow, and as woman.

Women are not as good at creating works of genius, for just the reason that they have their periods of creativity.

Unfortunately, what unites women today is what divides them. Each of them wants to be joined with man and hence each of them can only be joined with him, as the housewife of a man.

Women are half people, and it is hard to believe that such idiots exist.

The problem that has no name is not only women’s emptiness, but the recoiling from their new beauty.

Unfortunately, what unites women today is what divides them. Each of them wants to be joined with man, which is why each of them can only be joined with him, like a wife to husband.

Surviving the shock of the feminine mystique is not understanding quite what it was, but pushing faculties open, to feel how bad it must have been.

To solve the problem, we need to understand what it is.

Maybe the maternal breast should be introduced between women.

And we Americans are the enemy, for I am a protected male, and my business and house needs are my wife’s soul.

Male interest in his wife is predatory.

And sex is the mind’s giant toy, which it may seize on at will, and change, or not, or adulterate forever.

Sex is the nakedness of women, for love they are gods.

Society wants to shape the emotions of women and leave men free to be men, attached to their female angels, but resplendent as ever.

A man is not supposed to be truly human until he is a part of human society. A woman is not supposed to be truly human, indeed, her name is coincidental.