Top 80 Betty Friedan Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “If I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class.”

— Betty Friedan

52. “You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.”

— Betty Friedan

53. “Our daughters grow up with the same possibilities as our sons.”

— Betty Friedan

54. “I would have much rather been in the jalopy with the kids, going to Hunt’s for hamburgers. But, when I entered high school, all my friends got into sororities and fraternities and I didn’t.”

— Betty Friedan

55. “When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on women’s passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.”

— Betty Friedan

56. “Being Jewish, you didn’t get into a sorority. So I really was much more outgoing and gregarious. I really didn’t want to spend an Emily Dickinson adolescence reading poetry on gravestones, which I did.”

— Betty Friedan

57. “I realized that what I was saying was threatening, somehow, to the editors of women’s magazines. That it threatened the very world they were trying to paint, what I then called the “feminine mystique.””

— Betty Friedan

58. “American women were frustrated in just the role of housewife – but they also managed to enlarge it. And they weren’t just housewives, they were community leaders.”

— Betty Friedan

59. “There was a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform, the image that I came to call the feminine mystique.”

— Betty Friedan

60. “The insult, the real reflection on our culture’s definition of the role of women, is that as a nation we only noticed something was wrong with women when we saw its effects on their sons.”

— Betty Friedan

61. “Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women; it has often cloaked a very real prejudice, even when it is offered in the name of science.”

— Betty Friedan

62. “Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.”

— Betty Friedan

63. “Women, because they are not generally the principal breadwinners, can be perhaps most useful as the trail blazers, working along the bypaths, doing the unusual job that men cannot afford to gamble on.”

— Betty Friedan

64. “I can’t point to any major episodes of sexual discrimination in my early life. But I was so aware of the crime, the shame that there was no use of my mother’s ability and energy.”

— Betty Friedan

65. “The unpleasant image of the feminists today resembles less the feminists themselves than the image fostered by the interests who so bitterly opposed the vote for women...”

— Betty Friedan

66. “Why the increasing emphasis by professional age experts and the media on – and public acceptance of – the nursing home as the locus of age when, in fact, more than ninety percent of those over sixty-five continue to live in the community?”

— Betty Friedan

67. “There is absolutely no evidence that it is harmful to children if their mother’s health, well-being and autonomy and control of her own destiny is maximized by work outside the home.”

— Betty Friedan

68. “When I was in high school, even in college, I didn’t have any real image of a career woman or a professional woman.”

— Betty Friedan

69. “Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women’s magazines.”

— Betty Friedan

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

— Betty Friedan

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

— Betty Friedan

72. “My adolescence was quite miserable, when I look back on it, at least my early part of my adolescence. Because there was anti-Semitism in Peoria, and I didn’t feel that when I was in elementary school.”

— Betty Friedan

73. “While I had been, I guess, quite brilliant, academically, in my college years, I also had been editor of the paper, and I loved that. And, that was a much more active thing. And I missed it when I was doing graduate work.”

— Betty Friedan

74. “Woman’s sexual problems are, in this sense, by-products of the suppression of her basic need to grow and fulfill her potentialities as a human being, potentialities which the mystique of feminine fulfillment ignores.”

— Betty Friedan

75. “I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.”

— Betty Friedan

76. “Why should anyone raise an eyebrow because a latter-day Einstein’s wife expects her husband to put aside that lifeless theory of relativity and help her with the work that is supposed to be the essence of life itself: diaper the baby and don’t forge to rinse the soiled diaper in the toilet paper before putting it in the diaper pail, and then wax the kitchen floor.”

— Betty Friedan

77. “I have discovered that there is a crucial difference between society’s image of old people and ‘us’ as we know and feel ourselves to be.”

— Betty Friedan

78. “I didn’t want to be in a situation where I was broader than the boys, which I was, in the academic world.”

— Betty Friedan

79. “I also discovered that many frantically busy full-time housewives were amazed to find that they could polish off in one hour the housework that used to take them six, or was still undone at dinner time, as soon as they started studying, or working, or had some other serious interest outside the home.”

— Betty Friedan

80. “If you were very bright and you became head of a department, as I did, of the psychology department, you were encouraged to go on to graduate work. But as a women you didn’t even think about discrimination.”

— Betty Friedan

81. “I love newspapers. I’ve worked on newspapers, all my life. I’ve always loved it.”

— Betty Friedan

82. “The proportion of women attending college in comparison with men dropped from 47 per cent in 1920 to 35 per cent in 1958. A century earlier, women had fought for higher education; now girls went to college to get a husband. By the mid-fifties, 60 per cent dropped out of college to marry, or because they were afraid too much education would be a marriage bar.”

— Betty Friedan

83. “If a woman had a problem in the 1950′s and 1960′s, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself. Other women were satisfied with their lives, she thought. What kind of a woman was she if she did not feel this mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor? She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never know how many other women shared it.”

— Betty Friedan

84. “Much of what Freud believed to be biological, instinctual, and changeless has been shown by modern research to be a result of specific cultural causes.1 Much of what Freud described as characteristic of universal human nature was merely characteristic of certain middle-class European men and women at the end of the nineteenth century.”

— Betty Friedan

85. “The future homemaker trains for her role within the home, but the boy prepares for his by being given more independence outside the home, by his taking a “paper route” or a summer job. A provider will profit by independence, dominance, aggressiveness, competitiveness.8.”

— Betty Friedan

86. “There is something less than fully human in those who have never known a commitment to an idea, who have never risked an exploration of the unknown, who have never attempted the kind of creativity of which men and women are potentially capable.”

— Betty Friedan

87. “A woman who is herself only a sexual object, lives finally in a world of objects, unable to touch in others the individual identity she lacks herself.”

— Betty Friedan

88. “After the depression, after the war, Freudian psychology became much more than a science of human behavior, a therapy for the suffering. It became an all-embracing American ideology, a new religion.”

— Betty Friedan