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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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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
Housewife
Eras
Loved
House
Kids
Things
Life
Like
Housewives

More quotes by Betty Friedan

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I understood somehow my mother's frustration. And that it was no good not only for her, but for her children or her husband, that she didn't have a real use of her ability.
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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.
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Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.
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Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
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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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...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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You can have it all, just not all at the same time.
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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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Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?
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Advice? I don't offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.
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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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Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women's magazines.
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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.
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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.
Betty Friedan
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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.
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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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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.
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Certain signs, some of them visible to the layman as well as the scientist, indicate that we have been watching an ice age approach for some time without realizing what we are seeing... Scientists predict that it will cause great snows which the world has not seen since the last ice age thousands of years ago.
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The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.
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You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.
Betty Friedan