Betty Friedan Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“Men, also, have in them enormous capacities that they have to repress and fear in themselves, living up to this obsolete and brutal man-eating, bear-killing, Ernest Hemingway, crewcut Prussian sadistic, napalm all the children in Vietnam, bang-bang you're dead, image of masculinity, the image of all powerful masculine superiority that is absolute.”
-- Betty Friedan

#Children #Powerful #Men

“Economic equity is an enormous empowerment of women. Having jobs that provide income means that women can be a more effective force, a more equal force, in the political process. Women with income take themselves more seriously and they are taken more seriously.”
-- Betty Friedan

#Jobs #Taken #Mean

“Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.”
-- Betty Friedan

#Birthday #Inspiring #Uplifting

“There's increasing consciousness that a "command and control" style of management which one associates with a male model isn't necessarily what works anymore, especially with small to medium sized companies. There's increasing evidence that a more flexible management style, where responsibility is distributed up and down the line, is what works best. And that kind of management style is one that will allow individual workers more flexibility - men and women.”
-- Betty Friedan

#Responsibility #Men #Style

“It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself.”
-- Betty Friedan

#Strength #Freedom #Voice

“I think it's tremendously important that women continue to be full participants in the corporate environment, and that they continue to seek the same responsibilities, opportunities and rewards in that environment that in the past have only been available to men.”
-- Betty Friedan

#Responsibility #Past #Opportunity

“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.”
-- Betty Friedan

#Women #Diversity #Enemy

“There's no question that the black middle class has benefited greatly by the civil rights movement. But there is a large black underclass that does not have access to jobs. If there's no clear road to income and status except crime, we should expect social problems. You can't solve this problem without addressing the economic issues, and the same is true with gender.”
-- Betty Friedan

#Jobs #Rights #Class

“You can have it all, just not all at the same time.”
-- Betty Friedan

“Each suburban wife struggles 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

#Husband #Children #Struggle

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

#Women #Being A Woman #Enjoy

“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?”
-- Betty Friedan

“Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?”
-- Betty Friedan

#Justice #Social Justice

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

#Women #History #Alive

“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

#Sex #America #Promise

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

#Real #Women #Memorable

“No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.”
-- Betty Friedan

#Shining #Kitchen

“The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.”
-- Betty Friedan

#Women #Creative #Way

“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

#Children #Husband #Selfish

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

#Girl #Sex #Justice

“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 is, a longing] that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban [house]wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries ... she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question - 'Is this all?”
-- Betty Friedan

#Years #Wife #House

“I'm my age and I feel glorious.”
-- Betty Friedan

#Age #Middle Ages #Feels

“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

#Sex #Divorce #Justice

“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

#Book #Writing #Different

“The real joke that history played on American women is not the one that makes people snigger, with cheap Freudian sophistication, at the dead feminists. It is the joke that Freudian thought played on living women, twisting the memory of the feminists into the man-eating phantom of the feminine mystique, shriveling the very wish to be more than just a wife and mother.”
-- Betty Friedan

#Mother #Memories #Real

“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

#Mother #Children #Pain

“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!”
-- Betty Friedan

#Men #Thinking #Years

“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.”
-- Betty Friedan

#Inspirational #Men #Self

“There needs to be bolder thinking, ... on how to measure the quality of life of men and women in the work force. Currently, success is measured by material advancements. We need to readjust the definition of success to account for time outside of work and satisfaction of life, not just the dollars-and-cents bottom line.”
-- Betty Friedan

#Men #Thinking #Quality

“life lived only for oneself does not truly satisfy men or women. There is a hunger in Americans today for larger purposes beyond the self. That is the reason for the religious revival and the new resonance of 'family.”
-- Betty Friedan

#Religious #Men #Self