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When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.
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
Women
Conform
Conventional
Stopped
Began
Finally
Picture
Enjoy
Conforming
Woman
Femininity
More quotes by Betty Friedan
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.
Betty Friedan
Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?
Betty Friedan
You can have it all, just not all at the same time.
Betty Friedan
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
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
I loved my kids. And I loved my house, and I loved a lot of things about my life in the 1950s. But there were a lot like me in that era, very overeducated housewives.
Betty Friedan
Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.
Betty Friedan
No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
Betty Friedan
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
Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.
Betty Friedan
You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.
Betty Friedan
Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.
Betty Friedan
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?
Betty Friedan
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.
Betty Friedan
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
Getting older is an adventure, not a problem.
Betty Friedan
[Feminist:] One who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man.
Betty Friedan
...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
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
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.
Betty Friedan
