Explore Quotes by Betty Friedan

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!

Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.

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.

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?

No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.

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

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.

It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself.

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.

A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man's advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all.

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.

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

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.

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

We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.'

A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty,_x000D_ 'Who am I, and what do I want out of life?' She mustn't_x000D_ feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own,_x000D_ outside of husband and children.

Some people think I'm saying, 'Women of the world unite -- you have nothing to lose but your men. It's not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners.

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.

I was at a meeting two years ago in Beijing, and I passed a bunch of women who were marching in a protest. Their signs were probably saying something I wouldn't have agreed with at all. But I was so glad to see women marching. And it's happening all over the world.

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