Quotes by Betty Friedan

A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex but neither should she adjust to prejudice and discrimination. (Betty Friedan)

Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength. (Betty Friedan)

If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the womens movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based. (Betty Friedan)

Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgasmic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery. (Betty Friedan)

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)

It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself. (Betty Friedan)

Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is womens denigration of themselves. (Betty Friedan)

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)

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)

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)