Betty Friedan – Quotes

I just decided that

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

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. Betty Friedan

I didn’t want to

I didn’t want to be in a situation where I was broader than the boys, which I was, in the academic world. Betty Friedan

When I was in

When I was in high school, even in college, I didn’t have any real image of a career woman or a professional woman. Betty Friedan

When [the] life span

When [the] life span of America women is approaching eighty years having kids is not going to take it up. Betty Friedan

What had really caused

What had really caused the women’s movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women’s life expectancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn’t live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was “the problem that had no name.” Realizing that it … Read more

It is better for

It is better for a woman to compete impersonally in society, as men do, than to compete for dominance in her own home with her husband, compete with her neighbors for empty status, and so smother her son that he cannot compete at all. Betty Friedan

Women today have choices

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. Betty Friedan

My adolescence was quite

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

Chosen motherhood is the

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