“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
See more on GoodReads
“You never know. Maybe he was cuckolded by a Jewish beauty when he was young. Don’t they say there’s always a woman’s finger behind everything? Cherchez la femme!” Muhlis”
― Ayşe Kulin, quote from Last Train to Istanbul
“You have to drive! You think I trust that big blue knucklehead to get us there?”
― Matt Myklusch, quote from Jack Blank and the Imagine Nation
“From an evolutionary perspective, nothing could be worse for a male than to eliminate his own progeny. It’s assumed, therefore, that nature has provided males with a rule of thumb to attack only infants of mothers with whom they have had no recent sex. This may seem foolproof for the males, but it opens the door for a brilliant female counterstrategy. By accepting the advances of many males, a female can buffer herself against infanticide because none of her mates can discard the possibility that her infant is his. In other words, it pays to sleep around.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We are Who We Are
“Repetition rewires the brain and breeds habits. When”
― quote from Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life
“Mary?” The sound of a grunt came from the far corner, jolting fear through him. It wasn’t feminine. “Damn,” his uncle said from across the room. “What the hell is this? We need light.” Solomon’s breaths blasted as hurried along the wall to where she kept the lantern above the fireplace. Putting his gun on the ledge, he located the matches. “Jesus,” his uncle whispered. “Don’t put on a light!” The match hissed and flared and Solomon turned just as his father flew at him and blew it out. “Something’s happened here,” his dad barely said even as Solomon stared into the returning darkness. His eyes were wide with the horror of what he’d seen in those few seconds before the light vanished. Blood. So much blood. “Christ,”
― Lucian Bane, quote from Desecrating Solomon 3
The Children Act
A Whole New World
The Vanishing Throne
The Selected Poetry...
On Stranger TidesBookQuoters 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.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
