Quotes from Betty Friedan

I can't point to any major episodes of sexual discrimination in my early life. But I was so aware of the crime, the shame that there was no use of my mother's ability and energy.

I understood somehow my mother's frustration. And that it was no good not only for her, but for her children or her husband, that she didn't have a real use of her ability.

A good woman is one who loves passionately, has guts, seriousness and passionate convictions, takes responsibility, and shapes society.

If I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class.

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

Aging is not "lost youth" but a new stage of opportunity and strength.

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.

I wouldn't be satisfied with a life lived solely on the barricades. I reserve my right to be frivolous.

Advice? I don't offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.

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.

Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.

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?

It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself.

This uneasy sense of battles won, only to be fought over again, of battles that should have been won, according to all the rules, and yet are not, of battles that suddenly one does not really want to win, and the weariness of battle altogether—how many women feel it?

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.

No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.

Aging is not 'lost youth' but a new stage of opportunity and strength.

It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself.

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?

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.

You can have it all, just not all at the same time.

Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.

In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens. It would be a great service to tell girls who plan to work in society to expect this subtle, uncomfortable discrimination--tell them not to be quiet, and hope it will go away, but fight it. A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she "adjust" to prejudice and discrimination

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.