Betty Friedan

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.

Over and over again, stories in women's magazines insist that women can know fulfillment only at the moment of giving birth to a child. They deny the years when she can no longer look forward to giving birth, even if she repeats the act over and over again. In the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no other way she can even dream about herself, except as her children's mother, her husband's wife.

Advice? I don't offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.

We need to see men and women as equal partners, but it's 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!

No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.

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.

Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?

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.

It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.

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

The key to the trap is, of course, education. The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save, American women from the greater dangers of the feminine mystique.

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

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

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?

Getting older is an adventure, not a problem.

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

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.

Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows.

I wouldn't be satisfied with a life lived solely on the barricades. I reserve my right to be frivolous.

He's a male chauvinistic piglet.

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