Betty Friedan
Betty Friedan
Betty Friedanwas an American writer, activist, and feminist. A leading figure in the women's movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century. In 1966, Friedan co-founded and was elected the first president of the National Organization for Women, which aimed to bring women "into the mainstream of American society now fully equal partnership with men."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth4 February 1921
CityPeoria, IL
CountryUnited States of America
Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgasmic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery.
Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.
When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.
You can have it all, just not all at the same time.
Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-- 'Is this all?
Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? Who knows what women's intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love?
It was the era that I later analyzed, the "feminine mystique" era, [when] "career woman" was a dirty word. And so I didn't want a career anymore. [But] I had to do something. So I started freelancing for women's magazines.
Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?
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.
No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
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.
Some people think I'm saying, 'Women of the world unite -- you have nothing to lose but your men. It's not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners.
In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens. It would be a great service to tell girls who plan to work in society to expect this subtle, uncomfortable discrimination-tell them not to be quiet, and hope it will go away, but fight it. A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she "adjust" to prejudice and discrimination.
I realized that what I was saying was threatening, somehow, to the editors of women's magazines. That it threatened the very world they were trying to paint, what I then called the "feminine mystique."