Betty Friedan

Women who adjust as housewives who grow up wanting to be just a housewife are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps ... they ate suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.

Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.

Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.

It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.

We need to see men and women as equal partners, but it's hard to think of movies that do that. When I talk to people, they think of movies of forty-five years ago! Hepburn and Tracy!

It is better for a woman to compete impersonally in society, as men do, than to compete for dominance in her own home with her husband, compete with her neighbors for empty status, and so smother her son that he cannot compete at all.

I was at a meeting two years ago in Beijing, and I passed a bunch of women who were marching in a protest. Their signs were probably saying something I wouldn't have agreed with at all. But I was so glad to see women marching. And it's happening all over the world.

It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question who am I except the voice inside herself.

When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.

Men weren't really the enemy - they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.

Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.

No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.

Advice? I don't offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.

The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.

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.