Betty Friedan
Betty Friedan
Betty Friedanwas an American writer, activist, and feminist. A leading figure in the women's movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century. In 1966, Friedan co-founded and was elected the first president of the National Organization for Women, which aimed to bring women "into the mainstream of American society now fully equal partnership with men."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth4 February 1921
CityPeoria, IL
CountryUnited States of America
life lived only for oneself does not truly satisfy men or women. There is a hunger in Americans today for larger purposes beyond the self. That is the reason for the religious revival and the new resonance of 'family.
the new mystique is that women can have it all. There's a whole new generation of women today, flogging themselves to compete for success according to the male model - in a work world structured for men with wives to handle the details of life.
Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.
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.
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
Development can indeed continue beyond childhood and youth, beyond the seventies. It can continue until the very end of life, given purposes that challenge and use our human abilities. . . . In sum, our development does not necessarily end at any age. We can continue to develop into our eighties, even to our nineties.
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.
Why the increasing emphasis by professional age experts and the media on - and public acceptance of - the nursing home as the locus of age when, in fact, more than ninety percent of those over sixty-five continue to live in the community?
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.
You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.
American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if ... the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realize one's full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror.