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Quote by Betty Friedan

“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.”

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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“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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“It was the era that I later analyzed, the "feminine mystique" era, [when] "career woman" was a dirty word. And so I didn't want a career anymore. [But] I had to do something. So I started freelancing for women's magazines.”

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“American women were frustrated in just the role of housewife - but they also managed to enlarge it. And they weren't just housewives, they were community leaders.”

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“Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women's magazines.”

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“I realized that what I was saying was threatening, somehow, to the editors of women's magazines. That it threatened the very world they were trying to paint, what I then called the "feminine mystique."”

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“I loved my kids. And I loved my house, and I loved a lot of things about my life in the 1950s. But there were a lot like me in that era, very overeducated housewives.”

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