Betty Friedan

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

No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.

It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself

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

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.

You can have it all, just not all at the same time.

In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens. It would be a great service to tell girls who plan to work in society to expect this subtle, uncomfortable discrimination--tell them not to be quiet, and hope it will go away, but fight it. A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she "adjust" to prejudice and discrimination.

he 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.

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