It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
Category Archive: Betty Friedan
Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.
The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.
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.
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!
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.
Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
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.
Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.
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.