Best Quotes by Betty Friedan (Top 10)

  1. No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
  2. Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
  3. 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.
  4. Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.
  5. 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.
  6. Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?
  7. When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.
  8. A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she "adjust" to prejudice and discrimination.
  9. 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.
  10. The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.

More Betty Friedan Quotes