Betty Friedan 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.

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

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

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?''.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The problem that has no name.

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.

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.

Don't get into the bra-burning, anti-man, politics-of-orgasm school.

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.

Public Policy and the Search for Flexibility, Fairness and Prosperity.

You see, ... you don't want to let them polarize family issues and benefits to split the workers. I think there's more usefulness in a benefits package that serves both.

[(CNN) --] Women are certainly moving, ... Every day you read about women in the most God-awful, unforeseen places. I think it's really happening. And for women in many countries, it's a new experience to be organizing.

I have never been able to watch an episode. Because she's just so pathetic. I thought it was kind of funny when was it Time or Newsweek that ran the cover: .