Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgasmic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery. - Betty Friedan
Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework - an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life. - Betty Friedan
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. - Betty Friedan
You can have it all, just not all at the same time. - Betty Friedan
No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor. - Betty Friedan
Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves. - Betty Friedan
A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex but neither should she adjust to prejudice and discrimination. - Betty Friedan
It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself. - Betty Friedan
It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself. - Betty Friedan
Aging is not 'lost youth' but a new stage of opportunity and strength. - Betty Friedan
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
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
When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman. - Betty Friedan
A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, 'Who am I, and what do I want out of life?' She mustn't feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children. - Betty Friedan
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. - Betty Friedan