Betty Friedan Quotes

The insult, the real reflection on our culture's definition of the role of women, is that as a nation we only noticed something was wrong with women when we saw its effects on their sons.

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

It is both an irony and an indictment of the feminine mystique that it often forced the unhappy ones, the ugly ducklings, to find themselves, while girls who fitted the image became adjusted 'happy' housewives and have never found out who they are.

Rights” have a dull sound to people who have grown up after they have been won.

The real joke that history played on American women is not the one that makes people snigger, with cheap Freudian sophistication, at the dead feminists. It is the joke that Freudian thought played on living women, twisting the memory of the feminists into the man-eating phantom of the feminine mystique, shriveling the very wish to be more than just a wife and mother.

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.

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.

As I listened to them, a German phrase echoed in my mind — “Kinder, Kuche, Kirche,” the slogan by which the Nazis decreed that women must once again be confined to their biological role. But this was not Nazi Germany. This was America. The whole world lies open to American women. Why, then, does the image deny the world? Why does it limit women to “one passion, one role, one occupation?” Not long ago, women dreamed and fought for equality, their own place in the world. What happened to their dreams; when did women decide to give up the world and go back home?

Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.

In self-actualizing people, the orgasm is simultaneously more important and less important than in average people. It is often a profound and even mystical experience, and yet the absence of sexuality is more easily-tolerated by these people. Loving at a higher-need level makes the lower needs and their frustrations and satisfactions less important, less central, more easily neglected. But it also makes them more whole-heartedly enjoyed when gratified. Food is simultaneously enjoyed and yet regarded as relatively unimportant in the total scheme of life. Sex can be whole-heartedly enjoyed, enjoyed far beyond the possibility of the average person, even at the same time that it does not play a central role in the philosophy of life.

You're never finished.

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.

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

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.

Each suburban wife struggles 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?