Betty Friedan
Born 1921 · Died 2006
Friedan graduated summa cum laude from Smith College and had begun graduate study in psychology at the University of California when she transferred her energies toward political activism, the cause of women's rights, and eventually publishing such works as The Feminine Mystique (1963), informed by her critique of Freudian theory. - Smithsonian Institution on Flickr Commons
Quotes
“The suburban housewife — she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife — freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth, and the illnesses of her grandmother … had found true feminine fulfilment.”
The Feminine Mystique, Chapter 1 “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.”
The Feminine Mystique, Chapter 13 “The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.”
The Feminine Mystique, Chapter 13 “It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.”
The Feminine Mystique, Chapter 14 “A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man’s advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all.”
The Feminine Mystique, Chapter 14
Quotes from Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0), chosen with AI.
Books by Betty Friedan in order
Books by Betty Friedan in the order they were published, from The Feminine Mystique (1963) to Life So Far (2000).
