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Quotes of the Day for 4 February 2005 - Betty Friedan

Elizabeth Naomi Goldstein was born at Peoria, Illinois on this day in 1921. She attended Smith College where she edited a campus newspaper and graduated with honors in 1942. She spent a year at the University of California at Berkeley doing graduate work in psychology, then served as editor for several leftist and union publications. She married Carl Friedan in 1947. At her 15th college reunion she polled the other women from her class and found that many were disappointed with their lives and the limited growth they had seen since graduation. She published "The Feminine Mystique" in 1963 and cofounded the National Organization of Women in 1966, serving as its first president. It has been said that what Martin Luther King, Jr was to blacks, Betty Friedan was to women.

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

If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based.

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.

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. There is no other way.

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

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.
     - All from Betty Friedan

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