Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Betty Friedan

Image
All year there have been these cover stories that the women's movement is dead and about the death of feminism and the post-feminist generation of young women who don't identify with feminism - and then we have the biggest march ever of women in Washington. More people than had ever marched for anything - not only more women, but more people.
Betty Friedan
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I have discovered that there is a crucial difference between society's image of old people and 'us' as we know and feel ourselves to be.
Betty Friedan
Image
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.
Betty Friedan
Image
Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.
Betty Friedan
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Advice? I don't offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.
Betty Friedan
Image
...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
Image
When [the] life span of America women is approaching eighty years having kids is not going to take it up.
Betty Friedan
Image
The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.
Betty Friedan
Image
When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.
Betty Friedan
Image
Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? Who knows what women's intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love?
Betty Friedan
Image
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
Image
Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?
Betty Friedan
Image
Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.
Betty Friedan
Image
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
Image
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.
Betty Friedan