Betty Friedan quotes

No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
- Betty Friedan

Aging is not 'lost youth' but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
- Betty Friedan

Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.
- Betty Friedan

All year there have been these cover stories that the women's movement is dead and about the death of feminism and the post-feminist generation of young women who don't identify with feminism - and then we have the biggest march ever of women in Washington. More people than had ever marched for anything - not only more women, but more people.
- Betty Friedan

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

He's a male chauvinistic piglet.
- Betty Friedan

Each woman is made to feel it is her own cross to bear if she can't be the perfect clone of the male superman and the perfect clone of the feminine mystique.
- Betty Friedan

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

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.
- Betty Friedan

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

Certain signs, some of them visible to the layman as well as the scientist, indicate that we have been watching an ice age approach for some time without realizing what we are seeing... Scientists predict that it will cause great snows which the world has not seen since the last ice age thousands of years ago.
- Betty Friedan

Neither woman nor man lives by work, or love, alone ... The human self defines itself and grows through love and work: All psychology before and after Freud boils down to that.
- Betty Friedan

Economic equity is an enormous empowerment of women. Having jobs that provide income means that women can be a more effective force, a more equal force, in the political process. Women with income take themselves more seriously and they are taken more seriously.
- Betty Friedan

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

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

A good woman is one who loves passionately, has guts, seriousness and passionate convictions, takes responsibility, and shapes society.
- Betty Friedan

Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
- Betty Friedan

Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.
- Betty Friedan

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.
- Betty Friedan

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