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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.

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
Wants
Goal
Mustn
Woman
Neurotic
Able
Selfish
Feel
Goals
Feels
Guilty
Children
Husband
Life
Outside

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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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Economic equity is an enormous empowerment of women. Having jobs that provide income means that women can be a more effective force, a more equal force, in the political process. Women with income take themselves more seriously and they are taken more seriously.
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Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
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Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women's magazines.
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Women, because they are not generally the principal breadwinners, can be perhaps most useful as the trail blazers, working along the bypaths, doing the unusual job that men cannot afford to gamble on.
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Getting older is an adventure, not a problem.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.
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Neither woman nor man lives by work, or love, alone ... The human self defines itself and grows through love and work: All psychology before and after Freud boils down to that.
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If women’s role in life is limited solely to housewife/mother, it clearly ends when she can no longer bear more children and the children she has borne leave home.
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Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.
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Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.
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Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.
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You can have it all, just not all at the same time.
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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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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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No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
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Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows.
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