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
Betty Friedan quotes about
I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.
Being Jewish, you didn't get into a sorority. So I really was much more outgoing and gregarious. I really didn't want to spend an Emily Dickinson adolescence reading poetry on gravestones, which I did.
I didn't want to be in a situation where I was broader than the boys, which I was, in the academic world.
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.
When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on women's passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.
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.
Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.
Diversity has got to be a part of modern feminism, and I think that my feminism is stronger because its an inclusive thing. I won't be backed into a corner that polarizes me against other women. And I wished they wouldn't be either.
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?
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.
If I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class.
What had really caused the women's movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women's life expectancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn't live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was "the problem that had no name." Realizing that it was not some freakish personal fault but our common problem as women had enabled us to take the first steps to change our lives.
I think it's tremendously important that women continue to be full participants in the corporate environment, and that they continue to seek the same responsibilities, opportunities and rewards in that environment that in the past have only been available to men.
Certain signs, some of them visible to the layman as well as the scientist, indicate that we have been watching an ice age approach for some time without realizing what we are seeing... Scientists predict that it will cause great snows which the world has not seen since the last ice age thousands of years ago.