Quotes from Betty Friedan

If a woman had a problem in the 1950's and 1960's, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself. Other women were satisfied with their lives, she thought. What kind of a woman was she if she did not feel this mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor? She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never know how many other women shared it.

Much of what Freud believed to be biological, instinctual, and changeless has been shown by modern research to be a result of specific cultural causes.1 Much of what Freud described as characteristic of universal human nature was merely characteristic of certain middle-class European men and women at the end of the nineteenth century.

Our daughters grow up with the same possibilities as our sons

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

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

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.

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

The one lesson a girl could hardly avoid learning, if she went to college between 1945 and 1960, was not to get interested, seriously interested, in anything besides getting married and having children, if she wanted to be normal, happy, adjusted, feminine, have a successful husband, successful children, and a normal, feminine, adjusted, successful sex life.

I also discovered that many frantically busy full-time housewives were amazed to find that they could polish off in one hour the housework that used to take them six, or was still undone at dinner time, as soon as they started studying, or working, or had some other serious interest outside the home.

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 call the feminine mystique.

Gradually, without seeing it clearly for quite a while, I came to realize that something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives today.

The concept "penis envy," which Freud coined to describe a phenomenon he observed in women—that is, in the middle-class women who were his patients in Vienna in the Victorian era—was seized in this country in the 1940's as the literal explanation of all that was wrong with American women.

If one interprets 'penis envy' as other Freudian concepts have been reinterpreted, in the light of our new knowledge that what Freud believed to be biological was often a cultural reaction, one sees simply that Victorian culture gave women many reasons to envy men: the same conditions, in fact, that the feminists fought against.

Why is it never said that the really crucial function, the really important role that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house .

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.

A woman who is herself only a sexual object, lives finally in a world of objects, unable to touch in others the individual identity she lacks herself.

where other conditions are equal, the children of mothers who work because they want to are less likely to be disturbed, have problems in school, or to "lack a sense of personal worth" than housewives' children. The early studies of children of working mothers were done in an era when few married women worked, at day nurseries which served working mothers who were without husbands due to death, divorce or desertion.

At the present historical moment, the best adjusted girl is probably one who's intelligent enough to do well in school, but not so brilliant as to get all As. Capable, but not in an area relatively new to women. Able to stand on her own two feet and to earn a living, but not so good a living so as to compete with men. Capable of doing some job well --In case she doesn't marry or otherwise has to work-- but not so identified with the profession as to need it for her happiness.

Girls started going steady at twelve and thirteen, in junior high. Manufacturers put out brassieres with false bosoms of foam rubber for little girls of ten. And an advertisement for a child's dress, sizes 3–6x, in the New York Times in the fall of 1960, said: "She Too Can Join the Man-Trap Set.

In the sympathetic words of the New York Times: "All admit to being deeply frustrated at times by the lack of privacy, the physical burden, the routine of family life, the confinement of it. However, none would give up her home and family if she had the choice to make again.

After the depression, after the war, Freudian psychology became much more than a science of human behavior, a therapy for the suffering. It became an all-embracing American ideology, a new religion.

She was, after all, an American woman, an irreversible product of a culture that stops just short of giving her a separate identity. He was, after all, an American man whose respect for individuality and freedom of choice are his nation's pride.

A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she 'adjust' to prejudice and discrimination.

Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women; it has often cloaked a very real prejudice, even when it is offered in the name of science.