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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
Like
Housewives
Housewife
Eras
Loved
House
Kids
Things
Life

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the new mystique is that women can have it all. There's a whole new generation of women today, flogging themselves to compete for success according to the male model - in a work world structured for men with wives to handle the details of life.
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A good woman is one who loves passionately, has guts, seriousness and passionate convictions, takes responsibility, and shapes society.
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[Feminist:] One who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man.
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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.
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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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Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
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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.
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You can have it all, just not all at the same time.
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No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
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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.
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The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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He's a male chauvinistic piglet.
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Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows.
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Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women's magazines.
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