Betty Friedan Quotes
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I was at a meeting two years ago in Beijing, and I passed a bunch of women who were marching in a protest. Their signs were probably saying something I wouldn't have agreed with at all. But I was so glad to see women marching. And it's happening all over the world.
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Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.
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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.
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Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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The suburban housewife - she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife - freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth, and the illnesses of her grandmother … had found true feminine fulfilment.
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Friedan: I thought it was absolutely outrageous that the Silence of the Lambs won four Oscars. ... I'm not saying that the movie shouldn't have been shows. I'm not denying the movie was an artistic triumph, but it was about the evisceration, the skinning alive of women. That is what I find offensive. Not the Playboy centerfold.
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The problem that has no name (which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities) is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.
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The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.
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It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
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Friedan: There was a masculine mystique, too.
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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.
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Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework - an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self- sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.
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'Do you object to the celebration of sexuality in our pictorials?
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A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex but neither should she 'adjust' to prejudice and discrimination.
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Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
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Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgastic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery.
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Playboy: What's behind the current's men's movement?
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Men weren't really the enemy - they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.
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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.
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American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if … the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realize one’s full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror.