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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
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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
Rather
Sell
Makes
Sells
Stills
Begins
Femininity
America
Victim
Heavily
Women
Depends
Dependence
Wants
Passive
Still
Call
Target
Think
American
Sexual
Thinking
More quotes by Betty Friedan
Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.
Betty Friedan
You can have it all, just not all at the same time.
Betty Friedan
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
If you were very bright and you became head of a department, as I did, of the psychology department, you were encouraged to go on to graduate work. But as a women you didn't even think about discrimination.
Betty Friedan
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.
Betty Friedan
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
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.
Betty Friedan
When [the] life span of America women is approaching eighty years having kids is not going to take it up.
Betty Friedan
Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.
Betty Friedan
Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women's magazines.
Betty Friedan
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.
Betty Friedan
American women were frustrated in just the role of housewife - but they also managed to enlarge it. And they weren't just housewives, they were community leaders.
Betty Friedan
Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?
Betty Friedan
Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.
Betty Friedan
Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.
Betty Friedan
Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.
Betty Friedan
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.
Betty Friedan
Some people think I'm saying, 'Women of the world unite -- you have nothing to lose but your men. It's not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners.
Betty Friedan
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
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
