Betty Friedan Quotes

One of the most influential feminists of the 20th century

I'm my age and I feel glorious. The only kind of work which permits an able woman to realize her abilities fully, to achieve identity in society in a life plan that can encompass marriage and motherhood, is the kind that was forbidden by the feminine mystique, the lifelong commitment to an art or science, to politics or profession. If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based. 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. 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. Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children. Neither woman nor man lives by work, or love, alone ... The human self defines itself and grows through love and work: All psychology before and after Freud boils down to that. I never set out to write a book to change women's lives, to change history. It's like, 'Who, me?' Yes, me. I did it. And I'm not that different from other women. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman. Dominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that. 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. You can show more of the reality of yourself instead of hiding behind a mask for fear of revealing too much Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities. 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. This idea that the employment of women, the movement of women outside the home into the work world, and their demand for equality is somehow responsible for increasing juvenile delinquency or the increase in divorce rate, is just so much bullshit. There is absolutely no evidence that it is harmful to children if their mother's health, well-being and autonomy and control of her own destiny is maximized by work outside the home. The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white. When [the] life span of America women is approaching eighty years having kids is not going to take it up. 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. 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.' Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women's magazines. American women were frustrated in just the role of housewife - but they also managed to enlarge it. And they weren't just housewives, they were community leaders. 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. While I had been, I guess, quite brilliant, academically, in my college years, I also had been editor of the paper, and I loved that. And, that was a much more active thing. And I missed it when I was doing graduate work. 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. I didn't want to be in a situation where I was broader than the boys, which I was, in the academic world. I won a really big fellowship to go straight on to get my Ph.D. And I went through agonies of indecision, and then I decided not to accept it. I just decided I didn't want to be an academic. When I was in high school, even in college, I didn't have any real image of a career woman or a professional woman. 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. I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy. If you were very bright and you became head of a department, as I did, of the psychology department, you were encouraged to go on to graduate work. But as a women you didn't even think about discrimination. 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.

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