Latest Betty Friedan Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Betty Friedan

  Children, Kids, Technology

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.

  Betty Friedan

  Children, Responsibility, Years

  Source: www.pbs.org

• There is absolutely no evidence that it is harmful to children if their mother's health, well-being and autonomy and control of her own destiny is maximized by work outside the home.

  Betty Friedan

  Mother, Children, Home

  Source: www.pbs.org

• This idea that the employment of women, the movement of women outside the home into the work world, and their demand for equality is somehow responsible for increasing juvenile delinquency or the increase in divorce rate, is just so much bullshit.

  Betty Friedan

  Home, Divorce, Ideas

• The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.

  Betty Friedan

  Black And White, Men, Boss

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I loved my kids. And I loved my house, and I loved a lot of things about my life in the 1950s. But there were a lot like me in that era, very overeducated housewives.

  Betty Friedan

  Kids, House, Eras

  Source: www.pbs.org

• When [the] life span of America women is approaching eighty years having kids is not going to take it up.

  Betty Friedan

  Kids, Years, America

• Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women's magazines.

  Betty Friedan

  Editors, Magazines, Offended

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I realized that what I was saying was threatening, somehow, to the editors of women's magazines. That it threatened the very world they were trying to paint, what I then called the "feminine mystique."

  Betty Friedan

  Editors, Trying, Magazines

• American women were frustrated in just the role of housewife - but they also managed to enlarge it. And they weren't just housewives, they were community leaders.

  Betty Friedan

  Community, Leader, Frustrated

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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.

  Betty Friedan

  Dirty, Careers, Want

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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.

  Betty Friedan

  College, Years, Editors

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I didn't want to be in a situation where I was broader than the boys, which I was, in the academic world.

  Betty Friedan

  Boys, World, Want

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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.

  Betty Friedan

  World, Want, Academic

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I won a really big fellowship to go straight on to get my Ph.D. And I went through agonies of indecision, and then I decided not to accept it. I just decided I didn't want to be an academic.

  Betty Friedan

  Agony, Fellowship, Want

• I understood somehow my mother's frustration. And that it was no good not only for her, but for her children or her husband, that she didn't have a real use of her ability.

  Betty Friedan

  Mother, Husband, Children

  Source: www.pbs.org

• When I was in high school, even in college, I didn't have any real image of a career woman or a professional woman.

  Betty Friedan

  Real, School, College

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.

  Betty Friedan

  Want, One Thing

  Source: www.pbs.org

• If you were very bright and you became head of a department, as I did, of the psychology department, you were encouraged to go on to graduate work. But as a women you didn't even think about discrimination.

  Betty Friedan

  Thinking, Psychology, Goes On

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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.

  Betty Friedan

  Reading, Sorority, Want

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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.

  Betty Friedan

  Kids, School, Hamburgers

  Source: www.pbs.org

• My adolescence was quite miserable, when I look back on it, at least my early part of my adolescence. Because there was anti-Semitism in Peoria, and I didn't feel that when I was in elementary school.

  Betty Friedan

  School, Looks, Miserable

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I can't point to any major episodes of sexual discrimination in my early life. But I was so aware of the crime, the shame that there was no use of my mother's ability and energy.

  Betty Friedan

  Mother, Energy, Use

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I love newspapers. I've worked on newspapers, all my life. I've always loved it.

  Betty Friedan

  Newspapers

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Having expressed the rage against the laws and conditions that oppressed them - maybe even excess anger in the beginning was directed at men they came in contact with, because it had been pent up too long - women now come from a new position of easier, more comfortable self-affirmation and empowerment. Women are given to tolerance and are more able to love. I hope it happens also to men.

  Betty Friedan

  Men, Law, Self