The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive. — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
“The feminine mystique, elevated by Freudian theory into a scientific religion, sounded a single, overprotective, life-restricting, future-denying note for women. Girls who… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
Over and over again, stories in women's magazines insist that women can know fulfillment only at the moment of giving birth to… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
Each woman is made to feel it is her own cross to bear if she can't be the perfect clone of the… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
I realized that what I was saying was threatening, somehow, to the editors of women's magazines. That it threatened the very world… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
We broke through the feminine mystique and women who were wives, mothers and housewives began to find themselves as people. That didn't… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
“The insights, interpretations both of theory and fact, and the implicit values of this book are inevitably my own. But whether or… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
The only kind of work which permits an able woman to realize her abilities fully, to achieve identity in society in a… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgasmic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
“It would be half-wrong to say it started with Sigmund Freud. It did not really start, in America, until the 1940s. And… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
“It is both an irony and an indictment of the feminine mystique that it often forced the unhappy ones, the ugly ducklings,… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
“We have gone on too long blaming or pitying the mothers who devour their children, who sow the seeds of progressive dehumanization,… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
The real joke that history played on American women is not the one that makes people snigger, with cheap Freudian sophistication, at… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
The key to the trap is, of course, education. The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
It was the era that I later analyzed, the "feminine mystique" era, [when] "career woman" was a dirty word. And so I… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
The problem that has no name-which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities-is… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens. It would… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
“It is my thesis that the core of the problem for women today is not sexual but a problem of identity --… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
It is easier to live life through someone else than to become complete yourself. — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
This idea that the employment of women, the movement of women outside the home into the work world, and their demand for equality is… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
A good woman is one who loves passionately, has guts, seriousness and passionate convictions, takes responsibility, and shapes society. — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
...women who 'adjust' as housewives, who grow up wanting to be 'just a housewife,' are in as much danger as the millions who walked… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women. — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
“The problem is always being the children’s mommy, or the minister’s wife and never being myself.” — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
“The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
The man who is extremely and dangerously hungry has no other interest but food. Capacities not useful for the satisfying of hunger are pushed… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? Who knows what women's intelligence will contribute when it can… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
If women’s role in life is limited solely to housewife/mother, it clearly ends when she can no longer bear more children and the children… — Betty Friedan Copy Share Image
