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Betty Friedan

27 quotes

“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.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted by The Christian Science Monitor (April 1, 1974) This has sometimes appeared paraphrased: "Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.
“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!”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in People magazine (March 7-14, 1994) p. 49.
“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.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interviews with Betty Friedan, Janann Sherman, ed. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2002, , p. x.
“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 twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban housewife struggled 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?”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When women take their education and their abilities seriously and put them to use, ultimately they have to compete with men. 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.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex but neither should she 'adjust' to prejudice and discrimination.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Do you object to the celebration of sexuality in our pictorials?”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Friedan: There was a masculine mystique, too.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Playboy: What was it?”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Friedan: Men had to be supermen: stoic, responsible meal tickets. Dominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Playboy: What's behind the current's men's movement?”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Friedan: I think it's partly a reaction against feminism, partly envy of feminism, and partly partly a real need of men to evolve through the burden of the masculine mystique, the burden of machismo.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Am I saying that women must be liberated from motherhood? No. I am saying that motherhood will only be a joyous and responsible human act when women are free to make, with full conscious choice and full human responsibility, the decisions to become mothers. Then, and only then, will they be able to embrace motherhood without conflict, when they will be able to define themselves not just the somebody's mother, not just as servants of children, not just is breeding receptacles, but as people for whom motherhood is a freely chosen part of life, freely celebrated while it lasts, but for whom creativity has many more dimensions, as it has for men.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Abortion: A Woman's Civil Right". Speech at the First National Conference for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, 1969.
“Men will not be free to be all they can be as long as they must live up to an image of masculinity that disallows all the tenderness and sensitivity in a man, all that might be considered feminine. Men have an enormous capacity in them that they have to repress and fear in order to live up to the obsolete, brutal, bear-killing, Ernest Hemingway, crewcut Prussian, napalm-all-the-children-in-Vietnam, bang-bang-you're-dead image of masculinity. Men are not allowed to admit that they are sometimes afraid. They are not allowed to express their own sensitivity, their own need to be passive sometimes and not always active. Men are not allowed to cry. So they're only half-human, as women are only half-human, until we can go this next step forward.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Friedan: A celebration of women's bodies is all right with me so long as there is no denial of the personhood of women. I suppose sometimes women are sex objects -- and men are too, by the way. It's the definition of women just as sex objects that bothers me. Women can celebrate themselves as sex objects, they can celebrate their own sexuality and can enjoy the sexuality of men as far as I'm concerted. Let's have men centerfolds. [..] Playboy's centerfold is fine. It's holding onto your own anachronism and it is not pornographic, though many of my sisters would disagree. It's harmless. [...] Playboy strikes me as an odd mixture of sex -- sometimes juvenile --- and forward intellectual thoughts.”
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source