Home > Work > The Feminine Mystique

The Feminine Mystique QUOTES

The Feminine Mystique QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of suicide. "

― Betty Friedan , The Feminine Mystique

3 " Woman's sexual problems are, in this sense, by-products of the suppression of her basic need to grow and fulfill her potentialities as a human being, potentialities which the mystique of feminine fulfillment ignores. "

― Betty Friedan , The Feminine Mystique

4 " The unpleasant image of the feminists today resembles less the feminists themselves than the image fostered by the interests who so bitterly opposed the vote for women... "

― Betty Friedan , The Feminine Mystique

5 " There is something less than fully human in those who have never known a commitment to an idea, who have never risked an exploration of the unknown, who have never attempted the kind of creativity of which men and women are potentially capable. "

― Betty Friedan , The Feminine Mystique

6 " 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

7 " It is perhaps beside the point to remark that bowling alleys and supermarkets have nursery facilities, while schools and colleges and scientific laboratories and government offices do not. "

― Betty Friedan , The Feminine Mystique

8 " The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained. "

― Betty Friedan , The Feminine Mystique

9 " It is not possible to preserve one's identity by adjusting for any length of time to a frame of reference that is in itself destructive to it. It is very hard indeed for a human being to sustain such an 'inner' split - conforming outwardly to one reality, while trying to maintain inwardly the value it denies. "

― Betty Friedan , The Feminine Mystique

10 " 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

11 " It is wrong to keep spelling out unnecessary choices that make women unconsciously resist either commitment or motherhood--and that hold back recognition of the needed social changes. "

― Betty Friedan , The Feminine Mystique

12 " 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. "

― Betty Friedan , The Feminine Mystique

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

― Betty Friedan , The Feminine Mystique

14 " If a woman had a problem in the 1950's and 1960's, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself. Other women were satisfied with their lives, she thought. What kind of a woman was she if she did not feel this mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor? She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never know how many other women shared it. "

― Betty Friedan , The Feminine Mystique

15 " Why should anyone raise an eyebrow because a latter-day Einstein’s wife expects her husband to put aside that lifeless theory of relativity and help her with the work that is supposed to be the essence of life itself: diaper the baby and don’t forge to rinse the soiled diaper in the toilet paper before putting it in the diaper pail, and then wax the kitchen floor. "

― Betty Friedan , The Feminine Mystique

16 " 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. "

― Betty Friedan , The Feminine Mystique

17 " The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity. "

― Betty Friedan , The Feminine Mystique

18 " The key to the trap is, of course, education. The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save, American women from the greater dangers of the feminine mystique. "

― Betty Friedan , The Feminine Mystique

19 " The man who is extremely and dangerously hungry has no other interest but food. Capacities not useful for the satisfying of hunger are pushed into the background. 'But what happens to man's desires when there is plenty of food and his belly in chronically filled? At once, other (and higher) needs emerge and these, rather than the psychological hungers, dominate the organism. "

― Betty Friedan , The Feminine Mystique

20 " To limit one’s field of inquiry to the function of an institution in a given social system, with no alternatives considered, provides an infinite number of rationalizations for all the inequalities and inequities of that system. "

― Betty Friedan , The Feminine Mystique