Quote

The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.

Betty Friedan

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Men
Comparable
Worker
Boss
Workers
Situation
White
Black

More quotes by Betty Friedan

Image
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
Image
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
Image
No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
Betty Friedan
Image
Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.
Betty Friedan
Image
Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.
Betty Friedan
Image
You can have it all, just not all at the same time.
Betty Friedan
Image
...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
Image
Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.
Betty Friedan
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Betty Friedan
Image
A good woman is one who loves passionately, has guts, seriousness and passionate convictions, takes responsibility, and shapes society.
Betty Friedan
Image
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
Image
Advice? I don't offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.
Betty Friedan
Image
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
Image
Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.
Betty Friedan
Image
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.
Betty Friedan
Image
I just decided that I didn't want to be in the academic world, because it was [really] too easy for me at the top. But also it wasn't active enough for me.
Betty Friedan
Image
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
Image
Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?
Betty Friedan