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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.

Betty Friedan

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Betty Friedan
Age: 85 †
Born: 1921
Born: February 4
Died: 2006
Died: February 6
Feminist
Journalist
Psychologist
Sociologist
Writer
Peoria
Illinois
Betty Naomi Goldstein
Bettye Naomi Goldstein
Men
Creative
Woman
Women
Persons
Person
Find
Work
Mystique
Way
Equality

More quotes by Betty Friedan

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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
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When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.
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The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.
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The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.
Betty Friedan
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Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.
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The suburban housewife - she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife - freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth, and the illnesses of her grandmother had found true feminine fulfillment.
Betty Friedan
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Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women's magazines.
Betty Friedan
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I just decided that I didn't want to be in the academic world, because it was [really] too easy for me at the top. But also it wasn't active enough for me.
Betty Friedan
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You can have it all, just not all at the same time.
Betty Friedan
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This idea that the employment of women, the movement of women outside the home into the work world, and their demand for equality is somehow responsible for increasing juvenile delinquency or the increase in divorce rate, is just so much bullshit.
Betty Friedan
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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
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Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.
Betty Friedan
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Aging will create the music of the coming century.
Betty Friedan
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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
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Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.
Betty Friedan
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Men, also, have in them enormous capacities that they have to repress and fear in themselves, living up to this obsolete and brutal man-eating, bear-killing, Ernest Hemingway, crewcut Prussian sadistic, napalm all the children in Vietnam, bang-bang you're dead, image of masculinity, the image of all powerful masculine superiority that is absolute.
Betty Friedan
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Getting older is an adventure, not a problem.
Betty Friedan
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Why the increasing emphasis by professional age experts and the media on - and public acceptance of - the nursing home as the locus of age when, in fact, more than ninety percent of those over sixty-five continue to live in the community?
Betty Friedan
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Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.
Betty Friedan
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life lived only for oneself does not truly satisfy men or women. There is a hunger in Americans today for larger purposes beyond the self. That is the reason for the religious revival and the new resonance of 'family.
Betty Friedan