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...women who 'adjust' as housewives, who grow up wanting to be 'just a housewife,' are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps...they ate suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.

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
Much
Danger
Housewives
Mind
Grow
Housewife
Millions
Adjust
Grows
Camps
Suffering
Walked
Death
Concentration
Spirit
Wanting
Women
Slow

More quotes by Betty Friedan

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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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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
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[Feminist:] One who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man.
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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Getting older is an adventure, not a problem.
Betty Friedan
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Women today have choices and demand choices, choices to have kids or not and the reproductive technology thereto. And it is a fact [that] most women continue to chose to have children.
Betty Friedan
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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
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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.
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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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I never set out to write a book to change women's lives, to change history. It's like, 'Who, me?' Yes, me. I did it. And I'm not that different from other women. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman.
Betty Friedan
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Diversity has got to be a part of modern feminism, and I think that my feminism is stronger because its an inclusive thing. I won't be backed into a corner that polarizes me against other women. And I wished they wouldn't be either.
Betty Friedan
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The media and even, to some degree, leaders of women's organizations don't understand that the women's movement is an absolute part of society now. It is in the consciousness, it is taken for granted. It is part of the way women look at themselves, and women are looked at.
Betty Friedan
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A good woman is one who loves passionately, has guts, seriousness and passionate convictions, takes responsibility, and shapes society.
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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Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.
Betty Friedan
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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.
Betty Friedan
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Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.
Betty Friedan
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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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Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
Betty Friedan
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Aging will create the music of the coming century.
Betty Friedan