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Quote by Betty Friedan

“My adolescence was quite miserable, when I look back on it, at least my early part of my adolescence. Because there was anti-Semitism in Peoria, and I didn't feel that when I was in elementary school.”

Quote by Betty Friedan

Author

Betty Friedan was an American writer renowned for her groundbreaking work, 'The Feminine Mystique,' which had a profound impact on the women's liberation movement of the 20th century. Her writing exposed the dilemmas faced by women in society, the family, and the workplace, sparking a reevaluation of their status and rights. more

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“Being Jewish, you didn't get into a sorority. So I really was much more outgoing and gregarious. I really didn't want to spend an Emily Dickinson adolescence reading poetry on gravestones, which I did.”

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“I would have much rather been in the jalopy with the kids, going to Hunt's for hamburgers. But, when I entered high school, all my friends got into sororities and fraternities and I didn't.”

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“If you were very bright and you became head of a department, as I did, of the psychology department, you were encouraged to go on to graduate work. But as a women you didn't even think about discrimination.”

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“I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.”

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“I understood somehow my mother's frustration. And that it was no good not only for her, but for her children or her husband, that she didn't have a real use of her ability.”

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“When I was in high school, even in college, I didn't have any real image of a career woman or a professional woman.”

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“I won a really big fellowship to go straight on to get my Ph.D. And I went through agonies of indecision, and then I decided not to accept it. I just decided I didn't want to be an academic.”

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“I didn't want to be in a situation where I was broader than the boys, which I was, in the academic world.”

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“I just decided that I didn't want to be in the academic world, because it was [really] too easy for me at the top. But also it wasn't active enough for me.”

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“While I had been, I guess, quite brilliant, academically, in my college years, I also had been editor of the paper, and I loved that. And, that was a much more active thing. And I missed it when I was doing graduate work.”

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Author:Betty Friedan