You can have it all, just not all at the same time.
A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of suicide.
Woman’s sexual problems are, in this sense, by-products of the suppression of her basic need to grow and fulfill her potentialities as a human being, potentialities which the mystique of feminine fulfillment ignores.
The unpleasant image of the feminists today resembles less the feminists themselves than the image fostered by the interests who so bitterly opposed the vote for women…
No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
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.
It is perhaps beside the point to remark that bowling alleys and supermarkets have nursery facilities, while schools and colleges and scientific laboratories and government offices do not.
The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.
Chosen motherhood is the real liberation. The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different, and the choice to be generative in other ways can at last be made, and is being made by many women now, without guilt.
It is wrong to keep spelling out unnecessary choices that make women unconsciously resist either commitment or motherhood–and that hold back recognition of the needed social changes.
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.
The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.
When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on women’s passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.
The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.
We couldn’t possibly know where it would lead but we knew it had to be done.
We couldn’t possibly know where it would lead but we knew it had to be done.
When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.
It is easier to live life through someone else than to become complete yourself.
Neither woman nor man lives by work or love alone…. The human self defines itself and grows through love and work: All psychology before and after Freud boils down to that.
Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.
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!
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.
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.