Betty Friedan was one of the most prominent faces of feminism in the United States. Born in 1921 in Illinois, she opined about breaking gender stereotypes and persisted that women need to grow out of their conservative role in the family.
She authored several books about feminism which inspired numerous women to follow her footprint, work towards women empowerment, and stand up for their rights. In this article, you will find 50 Betty Friedan quotes that will inspire you.
1. “Men weren’t really the enemy — they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.” -Betty Friedan
2. “Young women today seem to find it impossible to believe that women were once not seen as equal to men, as persons in their own right.” -Betty Friedan
3. “The key to the trap is, of course, education.” -Betty Friedan
4. “It isn’t that I have stopped being a feminist, but women as a separate interest group are not my concern anymore.” -Betty Friedan
5. “Who knows what women’s intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love?” -Betty Friedan
6. “Aging will create the music of the coming century.” -Betty Friedan
7. “Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.” -Betty Friedan
8. “You can show more of the reality of yourself instead of hiding behind a mask for fear of revealing too much.” -Betty Friedan
9. “For over fifteen years, the words written for women, and the words women used when they talked to each other, while their husbands sat on the other side of the room and talked shop or politics or septic tanks, were about problems with their children, or how to keep their husbands happy, or improve their children’s school, or cook chicken or make slipcovers.” -Betty Friedan
10. “Chosen motherhood is the real liberation.” -Betty Friedan
11. “In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens.” -Betty Friedan
12. “I still meet women all these years later and they say, “You changed my life or it changed my life,” meaning the book.” -Betty Friedan
13. “You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners.” -Betty Friedan
14. “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
15. “A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex but neither should she adjust to prejudice and discrimination.” -Betty Friedan
16. “It is society’s job, and finally that of each woman alone.” -Betty Friedan
17. “In 1960, the problem that has no name burst like a boil through the image of the happy American housewife.” -Betty Friedan
18. “As we approach the millennium, I find it astonishing that I have been part of a movement that in less than forty years has transformed American society.” -Betty Friedan
19. “It is not the strength of the mothers that is at fault but their weakness…that is mistaken for ‘femininity’.” -Betty Friedan
20. “It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself.” -Betty Friedan
21. “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
22. “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
23. “No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor. ” -Betty Friedan
24. “It is wrong to keep spelling out unnecessary choices that make women unconsciously resist either commitment or motherhood…” -Betty Friedan
25. “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.” -Betty Friedan
26. “Advice? I don’t offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.” -Betty Friedan
27. “We need to see men and women as equal partners, but it’s hard to think of movies that do that.” -Betty Friedan
28. “A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex but neither should she adjust to prejudice and discrimination.” -Betty Friedan
29. “Some said it was the old problem -education: more and more women had education which naturally made them unhappy in their role as housewives” -Betty Friedan
30. “We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.” -Betty Friedan
31. “The real joke that history played on American women is…cheap Freudian sophistication, at the dead feminists.” -Betty Friedan
32. “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.” -Betty Friedan
33. “Can the problem that has no name be somehow related to the domestic routine of the housewife?” -Betty Friedan
34. “The problem that has no name — which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities — is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.” -Betty Friedan
35. “The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary, and even dangerous.” -Betty Friedan
36. “The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.” -Betty Friedan
37. “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
38. “The only kind of work which permits an able woman to realize her abilities fully…is the kind that was forbidden by the feminine mystique…” -Betty Friedan
39. “It is ridiculous to tell girls to be quiet when they enter a new field, or an old one, so the men will not notice they are there.” -Betty Friedan
40. “A good woman is one who loves passionately…takes responsibility, and shapes society.” -Betty Friedan
41. “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.” -Betty Friedan
42. “Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.” -Betty Friedan
43. “The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different…” -Betty Friedan
44. “There was no activism in that cause when I wrote The Feminine Mystique. But I realized that it was not enough just to write a book. There had to be social change.” -Betty Friedan
45. “Some said it was the old problem -education: more and more women had education which naturally made them unhappy in their role as housewives.” -Betty Friedan
46. “Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.” -Betty Friedan
47. “It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.” -Betty Friedan
48. “A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man’s advance in the professions or by refusing to compete with man at all.” -Betty Friedan
49. “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
50. “Men are not the enemy, but a fellow victim. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.” -Betty Friedan
