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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

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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
Differences
Age
Society
Feel
Crucial
Feels
Aging
People
Discovered
Image
Difference

More quotes by Betty Friedan

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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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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.
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I would have much rather been in the jalopy with the kids, going to Hunt's for hamburgers. But, when I entered high school, all my friends got into sororities and fraternities and I didn't.
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Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women's magazines.
Betty Friedan
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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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A good woman is one who loves passionately, has guts, seriousness and passionate convictions, takes responsibility, and shapes society.
Betty Friedan
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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
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[Feminist:] One who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man.
Betty Friedan
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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.
Betty Friedan
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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
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This idea that the employment of women, the movement of women outside the home into the work world, and their demand for equality is somehow responsible for increasing juvenile delinquency or the increase in divorce rate, is just so much bullshit.
Betty Friedan
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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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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
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Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.
Betty Friedan
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No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
Betty Friedan
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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
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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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Advice? I don't offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.
Betty Friedan
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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.
Betty Friedan
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Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.
Betty Friedan