60 Best Betty Friedan Quotes From The Author Of The Feminine Mystique
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Betty Friedan, in her book, believed 'The Feminine Mystique' to be a 'problem that has no name' and how it denied them their 'basic need to grow', keeping most women unhappy.
In 'The Feminist Mystique', Betty Friedan had argued that society's assumption that women can find happiness and fulfillment through simple domestic affairs only has to change. She is a woman who is hurt both professionally and personally.
Betty Friedan is believed to usher in the second wave of feminism in America. These quotes include Betty Friedan quotes from 'The Feminine Mystique, American feminist quotes, and feminism quotes.
If you like our suggestions for this, then do check out these similar Simone de Beauvoir quotesand bell hooks quotes.
Famous Betty Friedan Quotes
These quotes are the most popular quotes by Betty Friedan and widely loved by American feminists.
1. "The key to the trap is, of course, education."
-Betty Friedan.
2. "Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women."
-Betty Friedan.
3. "Aging will create the music of the coming century."
-Betty Friedan.
4. "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.
5. "Chosen motherhood is the real liberation."
-Betty Friedan.
6. "Young women today seem to find it impossible to believe that women were once not seen as equal to men, as persons in their own right."
-Betty Friedan.
7. "It is easier to live life through someone else than to become complete yourself."
-Betty Friedan.
8. "It isn't that I have stopped being a feminist, but women as a separate interest group are not my concern anymore."
-Betty Friedan.
9. "Nobody argued whether women were inferior or superior to men; they were simply different."
-Betty Friedan.
10. "Aging is not 'lost youth' but a new stage of opportunity and strength."
-Betty Friedan.
11. "You can show more of the reality of yourself instead of hiding behind a mask for fear of revealing too much."
-Betty Friedan.
12. "The suburban housewife - she was the dream image of
the young American women and the envy, it was said, 0f
women over the world."
-Betty Friedan.
13. "Who knows what women's intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love?"
-Betty Friedan.
Betty Friedan Quotes About Feminism
Betty Friedan gave momentum to the second-wave of feminism. These Betty Friedan quotes are for the feminist in you.
14. "It is society's job, and finally that of each woman alone."
-Betty Friedan.
15. "In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens."
-Betty Friedan.
16.
"For over fifteen years, the words written for women, and the words women used when they talked to each other, while their husbands sat on the other side of the room and talked shop or politics or septic tanks, were about problems with their children, or how to keep their husbands happy, or improve their children's school, or cook chicken
or make slipcovers."
-Betty Friedan.
17. "We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society."
-Betty Friedan.
18. "When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman."
-Betty Friedan.
19. "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.
20. "In 1960, the problem that has no name burst like a boil through the image of the happy American housewife."
-Betty Friedan.
21. "As we approach the millennium, I find it astonishing that I have been part of a movement that in less than forty years has transformed American society."
-Betty Friedan.
22. "You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners."
-Betty Friedan.
Betty Friedan Quotes On Feminine Mystique
These Betty Friedan quotes are for understanding the feminine mystique. A lot of these quotes from Betty Friedan are 'The Feminine Mystique' quotes from the book.
23. "I still meet women all these years later and they say, "You changed my life or it changed my life," meaning the book."
-Betty Friedan.
24. "It is not the strength of the mothers that is at fault but their weakness...that is mistaken for 'femininity'."
-Betty Friedan.
25. "The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive."
-Betty Friedan.
26. "The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary, and even dangerous."
-Betty Friedan.
27. "The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women."
-Betty Friedan.
28. "In the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future."
-Betty Friedan.
29. "If divorce has increased by one thousand percent...Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based."
-Betty Friedan.
30. "I think that education...can continue to save, American women from the greater dangers of the feminine mystique."
-Betty Friedan.
31. "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.
32. "Why aren't girls forced to grow up - to achieve somehow the core of self that will end the unnecessary dilemma, the mistaken choice between femaleness and humanness that is implied in the feminine mystique?"
-Betty Friedan.
33. "...America depends rather heavily on women's passive dependence, their femininity."
-Betty Friedan.
Betty Friedan Quotes On Women's Rights
Friedan was a firm believer in equal rights for men and women.
34. "How can any woman see the whole truth within the
bounds of her own life? How can she believe that voice inside
herself, when it denies the conventional, accepted
truths by which she has been living?"
-Betty Friedan.
35. "We need to see men and women as equal partners, but it's hard to think of movies that do that."
-Betty Friedan.
36. "The only kind of work which permits an able woman to realize her abilities fully...is the kind that was forbidden by the feminine mystique..."
-Betty Friedan.
37. "Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?"
-Betty Friedan.
38. "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.
39. "A good woman is one who loves passionately...takes responsibility, and shapes society."
-Betty Friedan.
40. "It is ridiculous to tell girls to be quiet when they enter a new field, or an old one, so the men will not notice they are there."
-Betty Friedan.
41. "A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex but neither should she adjust to prejudice and discrimination."
-Betty Friedan.
42. "It is wrong to keep spelling out unnecessary choices that make women unconsciously resist either commitment or motherhood..."
-Betty Friedan.
43. "Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell."
-Betty Friedan.
44. "The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different..."
-Betty Friedan.
Betty Friedan Quotes On Women's Suffrage.
Here's a list of Betty Friedan quotes highlighting the problems of women in society.
45. "There was no activism in that cause when I wrote The Feminine Mystique. But I realized that it was not enough just to write a book. There had to be social change."
-Betty Friedan.
46. "It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself."
-Betty Friedan.
47. "Some said it was the old problem -education: more and more women had education which naturally made them unhappy in their role as housewives"
-Betty Friedan.
48. "Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth."
-Betty Friedan.
49. Each suburban wife 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?'"
-Betty Friedan.
50. "It is no longer possible to ignore that voice, to dismiss the
desperation of so many American women. This is not what being a woman means, no matter what the experts say."
-Betty Friedan.
51. "The real joke that history played on American women is...cheap Freudian sophistication, at the dead feminists."
-Betty Friedan.
52. "Men are not the enemy, but a fellow victim. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves."
-Betty Friedan.
53. "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."
-Betty Friedan.
54. "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."
-Betty Friedan.
55. "For human suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason has
not been found because the right questions have not been
asked, or pressed far enough."
-Betty Friedan.
56. "lt is no longer possible today to blame the problem on loss of femininity: to say that education and independence and equality with men have made American women unfeminine."
-Betty Friedan.
57. "It is not possible to preserve one's identity by adjusting for any length of time to a frame of reference that is in itself destructive to it."
-Betty Friedan.
58. "We have gone on too long blaming or pitying the mothers who devour their children, who sow the seeds of progressive dehumanization because they have never grown to full humanity themselves."
-Betty Friedan.
59. "Can the problem that has no name be somehow related
to the domestic routine of the housewife?"
-Betty Friedan.
60. "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."
-Betty Friedan.
Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly quotes for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for Betty Friedan quotes then why not take a look at Audre Lorde quotes or Angela Davis quotes.
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Bachelor of Arts specializing in English, Master of Arts specializing in English
Rajnandini RoychoudhuryBachelor of Arts specializing in English, Master of Arts specializing in English
With a Master of Arts in English, Rajnandini has pursued her passion for the arts and has become an experienced content writer. She has worked with companies such as Writer's Zone and has had her writing skills recognized by publications such as The Telegraph. Rajnandini is also trilingual and enjoys various hobbies such as music, movies, travel, philanthropy, writing her blog, and reading classic British literature.
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