Betty Friedan Quotes

"It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself."
-Betty Friedan

"I never set out to write a book to change women's lives, to change history. It's like, 'Who, me?' Yes, me. I did it. And I'm not that different from other women. ... Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman."
-Betty Friedan in Change quotes.

"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 in Country quotes.

"A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex but neither should she adjust to prejudice and discrimination."
-Betty Friedan in Prejudice quotes.

"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 in Boredom quotes.

"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 in America quotes.

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

"The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive."
-Betty Friedan

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

"A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, 'Who am I, and what do I want out of life?' She mustn't feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children."
-Betty Friedan in Goals quotes.

"If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based."
-Betty Friedan in Divorce quotes.

"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 in Home quotes.

"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."
-Betty Friedan in Society quotes.