Nancy Pace

“What courses are people excited about now? I asked a blonde senior in cap and gown. Nuclear physics, maybe? Modern art? Civilizations of Africa? Looking at me as if I were some prehistoric dinosaur, she said: "Girls don't get excited about things like that anymore. We don't want careers. Our parents expect us to go to college, everybody goes. You're a social outcast at home if you don't. But a girl who got serious about anything she studied, like wanting to go on and do research, would be peculiar, unfeminine. I guess everybody wants to graduate with a diamond ring on her finger, that's the important thing.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“I also discovered that many frantically busy full-time housewives were amazed to find that they could polish off in one hour the housework that used to take them six, or was still undone at dinner time, as soon as they started studying, or working, or had some other serious interest outside the home.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“In the Vassar study, there was a group of students who, in Senior year, neither suffered conflict to the point of breakdown, nor stopped their own growth to flee into marriage. These were students who were preparing for a profession. They gained in college interests deep enough to commit themselves to a career. The study revealed that virtually all such students with professional ambitions plan to marry, but marriage is for them an activity in which they will voluntarily choose to participate, rather than something that is necessary for any sense of personal identity. Such students have a clear sense of direction, a greater degree of independence and self-confidence than most. They maybe be engaged or deeply in-love, but they do not feel they must sacrifice their own individualities or their career ambitions if they wish to marry. With these girls, the psychologists did not get the impression --as they did with so many-- that interest in men and in marriage is a kind of defense against intellectual development. Their interest in a particular man was real.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“The proportion of women attending college in comparison with men dropped from 47 per cent in 1920 to 35 per cent in 1958. A century earlier, women had fought for higher education; now girls went to college to get a husband. By the mid-fifties, 60 per cent dropped out of college to marry, or because they were afraid too much education would be a marriage bar.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique