Top Betty Friedan Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Betty Friedan Biography

Betty Friedan (/ˈfriːdən, friːˈdæn, frɪ-/ February 4, 1921 – February 4, 2006) was an American writer, activist, and feminist. A leading figure in the women's movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century. In 1966, Friedan co-founded and was elected the first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), which aimed to bring women "into the mainstream of American society now [in] fully equal partnership with men."

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Betty Friedan Quotes

When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on women's passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.

America, Depends, Heavily, Target, Thinking

Neither woman nor man lives by work, or love, alone. . . The human self defines itself and grows through love and work: All psychology before and after Freud boils down to that.

Freud, Inspirational, Lives, Men, Self, Woman

Chosen motherhood is the real liberation. The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different, and the choice to be generative in other ways can at last be made, and is being made by many women now, without guilt.

Children, Different, Motherhood, Real, Women

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.

Children, Driving, Mother, Mothers, Pain

It is easier to live life through someone else than to become complete yourself.

Become, Easier, Life, Live Life, Lost Youth, Women

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.

American, Brain, Causes, Empty, Satisfaction, Sense

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.

Expectancy, Groping, Motherhood, Names, Women, Years

No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.

Feminist, Gets, Kitchen, Shining

Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.

Children, Family, Responsibility, Today, Workforce, Years

When I was in high school, even in college, I didn't have any real image of a career woman or a professional woman.

Career, College, Real, School

the new mystique is that women can have it all. There's a whole new generation of women today, flogging themselves to compete for success according to the male model - in a work world structured for men with wives to handle the details of life.

According, Compete, Details Of Life, Flogging, Men, Wife

Women today have choices and demand choices, choices to have kids or not and the reproductive technology thereto. And it is a fact [that] most women continue to chose to have children.

Children, Choices, Continue, Kids, Technology, Women

The man who is extremely and dangerously hungry has no other interest but food. Capacities not useful for the satisfying of hunger are pushed into the background. 'But what happens to man's desires when there is plenty of food and his belly in chronically filled? At once, other (and higher) needs emerge and these, rather than the psychological hungers, dominate the organism.

Desire, Dominate, Men, Needs, Psychological, Satisfying

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.

Copying, Handicaps, Man, Men, Pattern, Sex

I loved my kids. And I loved my house, and I loved a lot of things about my life in the 1950s. But there were a lot like me in that era, very overeducated housewives.

Kids, House, Eras, Loved, Like

My adolescence was quite miserable, when I look back on it, at least my early part of my adolescence. Because there was anti-Semitism in Peoria, and I didn't feel that when I was in elementary school.

Looks, Miserable, Part, Peoria, Quite, School

Women, because they are not generally the principal breadwinners, can be perhaps most useful as the trail blazers, working along the bypaths, doing the unusual job that men cannot afford to gamble on.

Afford, Blazers, Jobs, Men, Trail, Unusual

Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows.

Adventure, Inspirational Birthday, Joy, Joys, Regardless, Sorrows

Dominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that.

Dominance, Honest, Men

life lived only for oneself does not truly satisfy men or women. There is a hunger in Americans today for larger purposes beyond the self. That is the reason for the religious revival and the new resonance of 'family.

Men, Oneself, Purposes, Religious, Revival, Self

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