Betty Friedan

“We couldn't possibly know where it would lead, but we knew it had to be done.”

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

“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.”

“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 an...”

“You can have it all, just not all at the same time.”

“A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biolog...”

“Woman's sexual problems are, in this sense, by-products of the suppression of her basic need to grow and fulfill her potentialities as a human being, potentialities which the mystique of fem...”

“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.”

“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...”

“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.”

“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 sm...”

“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!”

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