Quotes from Betty Friedan

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

Since, beginning with the same premise and examining the same body of anthropological evidence, she now arrives at a slightly different sexual role for women, one might seriously question the basis upon which she decides the roles a woman should play -- and finds it so easy to change the rules of the game from one decade to the next.

Henry's girl! She smiled. No, she was not Henry's girl. She was Sarah. And that was sufficient. And with such a late start it would be some time before she got to know herself. Half in a dream now, she wondered if at the end of that time she would need someone else and who it would be.

With increasing skill, the ads glorify her role as an American housewife-knowing that her very lack of identity in that role will make her fall for whatever they are selling.

The old frontiers have been conquered, and the boundaries of the new are not so clearly marked.

It seemed to mean doing something, being somebody yourself, not just existing in and through others.

Women who had once wanted careers were now making careers out of having babies.

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.

The problem is always being the children's mommy, or the minister's wife and never being myself.

To limit one's field of inquiry to the function of an institution in a given social system, with no alternatives considered, provides an infinite number of rationalizations for all the inequalities and inequities of that system.

For human suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason has not been found because the right questions have not been asked, or pressed far enough.

I was at a meeting two years ago in Beijing, and I passed a bunch of women who were marching in a protest. Their signs were probably saying something I wouldn't have agreed with at all. But I was so glad to see women marching. And it's happening all over the world.

I love newspapers. I've worked on newspapers, all my life. I've always loved it.

I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.

I won a really big fellowship to go straight on to get my Ph.D. And I went through agonies of indecision, and then I decided not to accept it. I just decided I didn't want to be an academic.

I just decided that I didn't want to be in the academic world, because it was [really] too easy for me at the top. But also it wasn't active enough for me.

We couldn't possibly know where it would lead, but we knew it had to be done.

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

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

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

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

Some people think I'm saying, 'Women of the world unite -- you have nothing to lose but your men. It's not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners.

We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.

Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? Who knows what women's intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love?