Quotes from Betty Friedan

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.

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

We need to see men and women as equal partners, but its 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!

We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.'

The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.

Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.

I'm my age and I feel glorious.

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

Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.

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.

You can show more of the reality of yourself instead of hiding behind a mask for fear of revealing too much

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 fulfillment.

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.

The glorification of the 'woman's role, then, seems to be in proportion to society's reluctance to treat women as complete human beings; for the less real function that role has, the more it is decorated with meaningless details to conceal its empt.

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.

When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.