“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?”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“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.”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“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”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“Chosen motherhood is the real liberation. The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different, and the choice to be generative in other ways can at last be made, and is being made by many women now, without guilt.”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“What Friedan gave to the world was, "the problem that has no name." She not only named it but dissected it. The advances of science, the development of labor-saving appliances, the development of the suburbs: all had come together to offer women in the 1950s a life their mothers had scarcely dreamed of, free from rampant disease, onerous drudgery, noxious city streets. But the green lawns and big corner lots were isolating, the housework seemed to expand to fill the time available, and polio and smallpox were replaced by depression and alcoholism. All that was covered up in a kitchen conspiracy of denial...
[i]nstead the problem was with the mystique of waxed floors and perfectly applied lipstick.”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“Over and over again, stories in women's magazines insist that women can know fulfillment only at the moment of giving birth to a child. They deny the years when she can no longer look forward to giving birth, even if she repeats the act over and over again. In the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no other way she can even dream about herself, except as her children's mother, her husband's wife.”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“We have gone on too long blaming or pitying the mothers who devour their children, who sow the seeds of progressive dehumanization, because they have never grown to full humanity themselves. If the mother is at fault, why isn't it time to break the pattern by urging all these Sleeping Beauties to grow up and live their own lives? There never will be enough Prince Charmings or enough therapists to break that pattern now. It is society's job, and finally that of each woman alone. For it is not the strength of the mothers that is at fault but their weakness, their passive childlike dependency and immaturity that is mistaken for "femininity." Our society forces boys, insofar as it can, to grow up, to endure the pains of growth, to educate themselves to work, to move on. Why aren't girls forced to grow up - to achieve somehow the core of self that will end the unnecessary dilemma, the mistaken choice between femaleness and humanness that is implied in the feminine mystique?”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“It is perhaps beside the point to remark that bowling alleys and supermarkets have nursery facilities, while schools and colleges and scientific laboratories and government offices do not.”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“...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, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“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?”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“The key to the trap is, of course, education. The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save, American women from the greater dangers of the feminine mystique.”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“It is not possible to preserve one's identity by adjusting for any length of time to a frame of reference that is in itself destructive to it. It is very hard indeed for a human being to sustain such an 'inner' split - conforming outwardly to one reality, while trying to maintain inwardly the value it denies.”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“It is wrong to keep spelling out unnecessary choices that make women unconsciously resist either commitment or motherhood--and that hold back recognition of the needed social changes.”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“The man who is extremely and dangerously hungry has no other interest but food. Capacities not useful for the satisfying of hunger are pushed into the background. 'But what happens to man's desires when there is plenty of food and his belly in chronically filled? At once, other (and higher) needs emerge and these, rather than the psychological hungers, dominate the organism.”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“The real joke that history played on American women is not the one that makes people snigger, with cheap Freudian sophistication, at the dead feminists. It is the joke that Freudian thought played on living women, twisting the memory of the feminists into the man-eating phantom of the feminine mystique, shriveling the very wish to be more than just a wife and mother.”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“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, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“Why should anyone raise an eyebrow because a latter-day Einstein’s wife expects her husband to put aside that lifeless theory of relativity and help her with the work that is supposed to be the essence of life itself: diaper the baby and don’t forge to rinse the soiled diaper in the toilet paper before putting it in the diaper pail, and then wax the kitchen floor.”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled wit it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffered Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night -she was afreaid to ask even of herself the silent question- "Is this all?”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“The future homemaker trains for her role within the home, but the boy prepares for his by being given more independence outside the home, by his taking a “paper route” or a summer job. A provider will profit by independence, dominance, aggressiveness, competitiveness.8”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“The insult, the real reflection on our culture's definition of the role of women, is that as a nation we only noticed something was wrong with women when we saw its effects on their sons.”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of suicide.”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity, she finally began to enjoy being a woman.”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“There is something less than fully human in those who have never known a commitment to an idea, who have never risked an exploration of the unknown, who have never attempted the kind of creativity of which men and women are potentially capable.”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“it is an undeniable fact that, in organizing, petitioning, and speaking out to free the slaves, American women learned how to free themselves.”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“Whenever, wherever in the world there has been an upsurge of human freedom, women have won a share of it for themselves. Sex did not fight the French Revolution, free the slaves in America, overthrow the Russian Czar, drive the British out of India; but when the idea of human freedom moves the minds of men, it also moves the minds of women. The cadences of the Seneca Falls Declaration came straight from the Declaration of Independence: When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that they have hitherto occupied. . . . We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“Gradually, without seeing it clearly for quite a while, I came to realize that something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives today.”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women; it has often cloaked a very real prejudice, even when it is offered in the name of science.”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
“The unpleasant image of the feminists today resembles less the feminists themselves than the image fostered by the interests who so bitterly opposed the vote for women...”
― Betty Friedan, quote from The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan
Born place: in Peoria, Illinois, The United States
Born date February 4, 1921
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“As I lay in the darkness with the thong around my wrist, I believed I understood Gnith's spell. The thong was more than long enough, but every time Maara moved, I felt it move with her. It kept me constantly aware of her, and if a person's thoughts are with someone, how can she break away to go with someone else? When I slept, my warriors walked in my dreams, and in my dreams, the thong that bound us was not from wrist to wrist, but from heart to heart.”
― Catherine M. Wilson, quote from The Warrior's Path
“Sprinkled across the black waters below were at least a hundred small boats set out to greet the Leviathan, their navigation lights like shifting stars. Among them loomed a glittering cruise liner, her fog horn bellowing in the night. The low groan grew into a chorus as the other great ships in the harbor joined in.
Perched on Volger's desk, Bovril attempted to imitate the horns, but wound up sounding like a badly blown tuba.
Alek smiled. "But they're already singing our praises!"
"They are Americans," Volger said. "They toot their horns for anything.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Goliath
“By the time James had dressed and made his way down to the Great Hal for breakfast, it was nearly ten o’clock. Less than a dozen students could be seen moving disconsolately among the detritus of the morning’s earlier rush. At the far corner of the Slytherin table, Zane sat hunched and squinting under a beam of sunlight. Across from him was Ralph, who saw James enter and waved him over. As James made his way across the Hal , four or five house-elves, each wearing large linen napkins with the Hogwarts crest embroidered on them, circled the tables, meandering in what at first appeared to be random paths. Occasional y, one of them would duck beneath the surface of a table and then reappear a moment later, tossing a stray fork or half a biscuit casual y onto the mess of the table. As James passed one of the elves, it straightened, raised its spindly arms, and then brought them swiftly down. The contents on the table in front of him swirled together as if caught in a miniature cyclone. With a great clattering of dishes and silverware, the corners of the tablecloth shot upwards and twisted around the pile of breakfast debris, creating a huge clanking bag floating improbably over the polished wood table. The house-elf leaped from floor to bench to tabletop, and then jumped, turning in midair and landing lightly on top of the bag. It grasped the twisted top of the bag, using the knot as if it were a set of reins, and turned the bag, driving it bobbingly toward the gigantic service doors in the side of the Hal . James ducked as the bag swooped over his head.”
― G. Norman Lippert, quote from James Potter and the Hall of Elders' Crossing
“We broke the world to make it whole...”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Other Wind
“I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.”
― Charles Baudelaire, quote from Paris Spleen
Been Down So Long it...
Ali and Nino: A Love...
Fledgling
Burning Chrome
The Front Runner
Playing with FireBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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