Betty Friedan Quotes

“You can have it all, just not all at the same time.”
― Betty Friedan

“On my desk is an appeal from the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. It asks me to become a sponsor and donor of this soon-to-be-opened institution, while an accompanying leaflet has enticing photographs of Bob Dylan, Betty Friedan, Sandy Koufax, Irving Berlin, Estee Lauder, Barbra Streisand, Albert Einstein, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. There is something faintly kitsch about this, as there is in the habit of those Jewish papers that annually list Jewish prize-winners from the Nobel to the Oscars. (It is apparently true that the London Jewish Chronicle once reported the result of a footrace under the headline 'Goldstein Fifteenth.') However, I think I may send a contribution. Other small 'races' have come from unpromising and hazardous beginnings to achieve great things—no Roman would have believed that the brutish inhabitants of the British Isles could ever amount to much—and other small 'races,' too, like Gypsies and Armenians, have outlived determined attempts to eradicate and exterminate them. But there is something about the persistence, both of the Jews and their persecutors, that does seem to merit a museum of its own.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“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

“Probably one should never feel such gaiety or such despair. Better to operate on an even keep like Friedan and Gloria and the others.”
― Kate Millett, Flying

“It meant that I and every other woman I knew had been living a lie, and all the doctors who treated us and the experts who studied us were perpetuating that lie, and our homes and schools and churches and politics and professions were built around that lie," she (Betty Friedan) wrote. "If women were really people -- no more, no less -- then all the things that kept them from being full people in our society would have to be changed. And women, once they broke through the feminine mystique and took themselves seriously as people, would see their place on a false pedestal, even their glorification as sexual objects, for the putdown it was.”
― Andrew Maraniss, Inaugural Ballers: The True Story of the First US Women's Olympic Basketball Team

“The dilemmas Friedan described were fundamentally “problems of privilege.” And those afflicted were generally quite keen to keep their privilege: Despite railing against suburban life, the women who sympathized with Friedan’s critique were generally disinterested in living in the kinds of households or communities these “other” women lived in (nor in having “others” move into their own neighborhoods). Nor did they have any interest in taking on the kinds of jobs these “other” women worked in. They wanted well-compensated and socially respected professional jobs, befitting their social status. And they ultimately achieved that goal by offloading unwanted domestic responsibilities onto other women—lower-income women, typically immigrants and women of color. Nonetheless, elite women sought to conflate their own interests with the interests of “women” writ large. The campaign to enhance the position of upper-middle-class women was (and continues to be) carried out in the name of feminism per se.”
― Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite