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Betty Friedan Quotes - Page 5

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American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if ... the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but

American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if ... the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realize one's full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror.

Betty Friedan
Brain, Full Potential, Needs
BETTY FRIEDAN (1963). “The Feminine Mystique”

Having expressed the rage against the laws and conditions that oppressed them - maybe even excess anger in the beginning was directed at men they came in contact with, because it had been pent up too long - women now come from a new position of easier, more comfortable self-affirmation and empowerment. Women are given to tolerance and are more able to love. I hope it happens also to men.

Betty Friedan
Men, Law, Self

It is perhaps beside the point to remark that bowling alleys and supermarkets have nursery facilities, while schools and colleges and scientific laboratories and government offices do not.

Betty Friedan
School, College, Government
BETTY FRIEDAN (1963). “The Feminine Mystique”

Chosen motherhood is the real liberation. The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different, and the choice to be generative in other ways can at last be made, and is being made by many women now, without guilt.

Betty Friedan
Children, Real, Motherhood

My adolescence was quite miserable, when I look back on it, at least my early part of my adolescence. Because there was anti-Semitism in Peoria, and I didn't feel that when I was in elementary school.

Betty Friedan
School, Looks, Miserable
Source: www.pbs.org

Being Jewish, you didn't get into a sorority. So I really was much more outgoing and gregarious. I really didn't want to spend an Emily Dickinson adolescence reading poetry on gravestones, which I did.

Betty Friedan
Reading, Sorority, Want
Source: www.pbs.org

I would have much rather been in the jalopy with the kids, going to Hunt's for hamburgers. But, when I entered high school, all my friends got into sororities and fraternities and I didn't.

Betty Friedan
Kids, School, Hamburgers
Source: www.pbs.org

What had really caused the women's movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women's life expectancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn't live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was "the problem that had no name." Realizing that it was not some freakish personal fault but our common problem as women had enabled us to take the first steps to change our lives.

Betty Friedan
Motherhood, Years, Names
"The Fountain of Age". Book by Betty Friedan, Preface, 1993.

Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework --an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.

Betty Friedan
Mother, Children, Pain
"The Feminine Mystique". Book by Betty Friedan, Ch. 1 "The Problem That Has No Name", 1963.

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 smother her son that he cannot compete at all.

Betty Friedan
Husband, Home, Son
BETTY FRIEDAN (1963). “The Feminine Mystique”

If you were very bright and you became head of a department, as I did, of the psychology department, you were encouraged to go on to graduate work. But as a women you didn't even think about discrimination.

Betty Friedan
Thinking, Psychology, Goes On
Source: www.pbs.org

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