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

More quotes by Betty Friedan

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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.
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Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.
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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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You can have it all, just not all at the same time.
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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.
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[Feminist:] One who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man.
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There is absolutely no evidence that it is harmful to children if their mother's health, well-being and autonomy and control of her own destiny is maximized by work outside the home.
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When [the] life span of America women is approaching eighty years having kids is not going to take it up.
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I understood somehow my mother's frustration. And that it was no good not only for her, but for her children or her husband, that she didn't have a real use of her ability.
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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.
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You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.
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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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Getting older is an adventure, not a problem.
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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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.
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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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A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, 'Who am I, and what do I want out of life?' She mustn't feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children.
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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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Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.
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When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on women's passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.
Betty Friedan