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Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.

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
Sound
Culture
Often
Protectiveness
Women
Muffled
Closing
Diversity
Doors
Justice

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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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By now, abortion should be obsolete. And I - and probably a lot of other feminists - wish it were obsolete, because abortion, in itself, is not a value - it is simply the right to chose, which is an essential value.
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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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When [the] life span of America women is approaching eighty years having kids is not going to take it up.
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Advice? I don't offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.
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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.
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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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The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.
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Aging will create the music of the coming century.
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Development can indeed continue beyond childhood and youth, beyond the seventies. It can continue until the very end of life, given purposes that challenge and use our human abilities. . . . In sum, our development does not necessarily end at any age. We can continue to develop into our eighties, even to our nineties.
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A good woman is one who loves passionately, has guts, seriousness and passionate convictions, takes responsibility, and shapes society.
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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.
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Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women's magazines.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself.
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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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...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.
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