Happy Birthday Betty Friedan

“No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor. ”
― Betty Friedan

“Aging is not 'lost youth' but a new stage of opportunity and strength.”
― 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

“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, The Feminine Mystique

“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, The Feminine Mystique

“Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.”
― Betty Friedan

“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”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“You can have it all, just not all at the same time.”
― Betty Friedan

“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.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique