Betty Friedan Women Quotations

The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.

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.

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

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!

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

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

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.

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