There was a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform, the image that I came to … - Betty Friedan

...women who 'adjust' as housewives, who grow up wanting to be 'just a housewife,' are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps...they ate suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.

The feminine mystique, elevated by Freudian theory into a scientific religion, sounded a single, overprotective, life-restricting, future-denying note for women. Girls who grew up playing baseball, baby-sitting, mastering geometry — almost independent enough, almost resourceful enough, to meet the problems of the fission-fusion era — were told by the most advanced thinkers of our time to go back and live their lives as if they were Noras, restricted to the doll's house by Victorian prejudice. And their own respect and awe for the authority of science — anthropology, sociology, psychology share that authority now — kept them from questioning the feminine mystique.

The unpleasant image of the feminists today resembles less the feminists themselves than the image fostered by the interests who so bitterly opposed the vote for women...