Betty Friedan Quotes

No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.

Aging is not 'lost youth' but a new stage of opportunity and strength.

It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself.

Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-- 'Is this all?

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.

You can have it all, just not all at the same time.

Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.

Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? Who knows what women's intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love?

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.

The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.

When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity, she finally began to enjoy being a woman.

In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens. It would be a great service to tell girls who plan to work in society to expect this subtle, uncomfortable discrimination--tell them not to be quiet, and hope it will go away, but fight it. A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she "adjust" to prejudice and discrimination

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.

...women who 'adjust' as housewives, who grow up wanting to be 'just a housewife,' are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps...they ate suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.

The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.

Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to be themselves.

Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.

The insult, the real reflection on our culture's definition of the role of women, is that as a nation we only noticed something was wrong with women when we saw its effects on their sons.

Why should women accept this picture of a half-life, instead of a share in the whole of human destiny?

Over and over again, stories in women's magazines insist that women can know fulfillment only at the moment of giving birth to a child. They deny the years when she can no longer look forward to giving birth, even if she repeats the act over and over again. In the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no other way she can even dream about herself, except as her children's mother, her husband's wife.

The key to the trap is, of course, education. The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save, American women from the greater dangers of the feminine mystique.

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.

It is not possible to preserve one's identity by adjusting for any length of time to a frame of reference that is in itself destructive to it. It is very hard indeed for a human being to sustain such an 'inner' split - conforming outwardly to one reality, while trying to maintain inwardly the value it denies.

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.

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.

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.

What Friedan gave to the world was, "the problem that has no name." She not only named it but dissected it. The advances of science, the development of labor-saving appliances, the development of the suburbs: all had come together to offer women in the 1950s a life their mothers had scarcely dreamed of, free from rampant disease, onerous drudgery, noxious city streets. But the green lawns and big corner lots were isolating, the housework seemed to expand to fill the time available, and polio and smallpox were replaced by depression and alcoholism. All that was covered up in a kitchen conspiracy of denial... [i]nstead the problem was with the mystique of waxed floors and perfectly applied lipstick.

We have gone on too long blaming or pitying the mothers who devour their children, who sow the seeds of progressive dehumanization, because they have never grown to full humanity themselves. If the mother is at fault, why isn't it time to break the pattern by urging all these Sleeping Beauties to grow up and live their own lives? There never will be enough Prince Charmings or enough therapists to break that pattern now. It is society's job, and finally that of each woman alone. For it is not the strength of the mothers that is at fault but their weakness, their passive childlike dependency and immaturity that is mistaken for "femininity." Our society forces boys, insofar as it can, to grow up, to endure the pains of growth, to educate themselves to work, to move on. Why aren't girls forced to grow up - to achieve somehow the core of self that will end the unnecessary dilemma, the mistaken choice between femaleness and humanness that is implied in the feminine mystique?

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...

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.

There is something less than fully human in those who have never known a commitment to an idea, who have never risked an exploration of the unknown, who have never attempted the kind of creativity of which men and women are potentially capable.

Rights” have a dull sound to people who have grown up after they have been won.

The man who is extremely and dangerously hungry has no other interest but food. Capacities not useful for the satisfying of hunger are pushed into the background. 'But what happens to man's desires when there is plenty of food and his belly in chronically filled? At once, other (and higher) needs emerge and these, rather than the psychological hungers, dominate the organism.

You're never finished.

it is an undeniable fact that, in organizing, petitioning, and speaking out to free the slaves, American women learned how to free themselves.

The real joke that history played on American women is not the one that makes people snigger, with cheap Freudian sophistication, at the dead feminists. It is the joke that Freudian thought played on living women, twisting the memory of the feminists into the man-eating phantom of the feminine mystique, shriveling the very wish to be more than just a wife and mother.

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.

Our daughters grow up with the same possibilities as our sons

The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.

Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?

Aging is not 'lost youth' but a new stage of opportunity and strength.” ​— ​Betty Friedan

Aging is not 'lost youth' but a new stage of opportunity and strength.” ― Betty Friedan

I remember feeling very angry at Betty Friedan." AB: What? Why? "Well... she hated housework and wanted women to be independent, but then she's hire other women to do her housework.

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.

Much of what Freud believed to be biological, instinctual, and changeless has been shown by modern research to be a result of specific cultural causes.1 Much of what Freud described as characteristic of universal human nature was merely characteristic of certain middle-class European men and women at the end of the nineteenth century.

The future homemaker trains for her role within the home, but the boy prepares for his by being given more independence outside the home, by his taking a “paper route” or a summer job. A provider will profit by independence, dominance, aggressiveness, competitiveness.8

There was a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform, the image that I came to call the feminine mystique.

A woman who is herself only a sexual object, lives finally in a world of objects, unable to touch in others the individual identity she lacks herself.

If a woman had a problem in the 1950's and 1960's, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself. Other women were satisfied with their lives, she thought. What kind of a woman was she if she did not feel this mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor? She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never know how many other women shared it.

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled wit it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffered Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night -she was afreaid to ask even of herself the silent question- "Is this all?

American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if … the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realize one’s full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror.

Why is it never said that the really crucial function, the really important role that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house.

Gradually, without seeing it clearly for quite a while, I came to realize that something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives today.

A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she 'adjust' to prejudice and discrimination.

Don’t you see? Helen Gurley Brown is still telling us that we need a man to be fulfilled. Betty Friedan is telling us that we already have everything we need within ourselves.

It is my thesis that the core of the problem for women today is not sexual but a problem of identity -- a stunting or evasion of growth that is perpetuated by the feminine mystique. It is my thesis that as the Victorian culture did not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfil their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual need.

Telling women’s stories was—and would always be—Jackson’s major fictional project. As she had in The Road Through the Wall and the stories of The Lottery, with Hangsaman Jackson continued to chronicle the lives of women whose behavior does not conform to society’s expectations. Neither an obedient daughter nor a docile wife-in-training, Natalie represents every girl who does not quite fit in, who refuses to play the role that has been predetermined for her—and the tragic psychic consequences she suffers as a result. During the postwar years, Betty Friedan would later write, the image of the American woman “suffered a schizophrenic split” between the feminine housewife and the career woman: “The new feminine morality story is . . . the heroine’s victory over Mephistopheles . . . the devil inside the heroine herself.” That is precisely what happens in Hangsaman. Unfortunately, it was a story that the American public, in the process of adjusting to the changing roles of women and the family in the wake of World War II, was not yet ready to countenance.

It is both an irony and an indictment of the feminine mystique that it often forced the unhappy ones, the ugly ducklings, to find themselves, while girls who fitted the image became adjusted 'happy' housewives and have never found out who they are.

It sometimes feels like every generation of mothers from Betty Friedan and Adrienne Rich on has been learning anew that the story we've been sold about the magical power of a mother's love is largely a way to draft us into an enormous amount of unpaid and undervalued labor.

The concept “penis envy,” which Freud coined to describe a phenomenon he observed in women—that is, in the middle-class women who were his patients in Vienna in the Victorian era—was seized in this country in the 1940’s as the literal explanation of all that was wrong with American women.

Whenever, wherever in the world there has been an upsurge of human freedom, women have won a share of it for themselves. Sex did not fight the French Revolution, free the slaves in America, overthrow the Russian Czar, drive the British out of India; but when the idea of human freedom moves the minds of men, it also moves the minds of women. The cadences of the Seneca Falls Declaration came straight from the Declaration of Independence: When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that they have hitherto occupied. . . . We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.

Girls started going steady at twelve and thirteen, in junior high. Manufacturers put out brassieres with false bosoms of foam rubber for little girls of ten. And an advertisement for a child’s dress, sizes 3–6x, in the New York Times in the fall of 1960, said: “She Too Can Join the Man-Trap Set.

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.

If one interprets 'penis envy' as other Freudian concepts have been reinterpreted, in the light of our new knowledge that what Freud believed to be biological was often a cultural reaction, one sees simply that Victorian culture gave women many reasons to envy men: the same conditions, in fact, that the feminists fought against.

It's easy to see the concrete details that trap the suburban housewife, the continual demands on her time. But the chains that bind her in her trap are the chains in her own mind and spirit. They are chains made up of mistaken ideas and misinterpreted facts, of incomplete truths and unreal choices. They are not easily seen and not easily shaken off.

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.

The one lesson a girl could hardly avoid learning, if she went to college between 1945 and 1960, was not to get interested, seriously interested, in anything besides getting married and having children, if she wanted to be normal, happy, adjusted, feminine, have a successful husband, successful children, and a normal, feminine, adjusted, successful sex life.

I begin to feel I have no personality. I’m a server of food and a putter-on of pants and a bedmaker, somebody who can be called on when you want something. But who am I?

Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women; it has often cloaked a very real prejudice, even when it is offered in the name of science.

Probably one should never feel such gaiety or such despair. Better to operate on an even keep like Friedan and Gloria and the others.

Equality and human dignity are not possible for women if they are not able to earn.

As I listened to them, a German phrase echoed in my mind—“Kinder, Kuche, Kirche,” the slogan by which the Nazis decreed that women must once again be confined to their biological role. But this was not Nazi Germany. This was America. The whole world lies open to American women. Why, then, does the image deny the world? Why does it limit women to “one passion, one role, one occupation?” Not long ago, women dreamed and fought for equality, their own place in the world. What happened to their dreams; when did women decide to give up the world and go back home?

After the depression, after the war, Freudian psychology became much more than a science of human behavior, a therapy for the suffering. It became an all-embracing American ideology, a new religion.

To review briefly, in the late 1960s, men got paid more than women (usually double) for doing the exact same job. Women could get credit cards in their husband's names but not their own, and many divorced, single and separated women could not get cards at all. Women could not get mortgages on their own and if a couple applied for a mortgage, only the husband's income was considered. Women faced widespread and consistent discrimination in education, scholarship awards, and on the job. In most states the collective property of a marriage was legally the husband's since the wife had allegedly not contributed to acquiring it. Women were largely kept out of a whole host of jobs--doctor, college professor, bus driver, business manager--that women today take for granted. They were knocked out in the delivery room... once women got pregnant they were either fired from their jobs or expected to quit. If they were women of color, it was worse on all fronts--work education, health care. (And talk about slim pickings. African American men were being sent to prison and cut out of jobs by the millions.) Most women today, having seen reruns of The Brady Bunch and Father Knows Best, and having heard of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, the bestseller that attacked women's confinement to the home, are all too familiar with the idealized yet suffocating media images of happy, devoted housewives. In fact, most of us have learned to laugh at them, vacuuming in their stockings and heels, clueless about balancing a checkbook, asking dogs directions to the neighbor's. But we should not permit our ability to distance ourselves from these images to erase the fact that all women--and we mean all women--were, in the 1950s and '60s supposed to internalize this ideal, to live it and believe it.

She was, after all, an American woman, an irreversible product of a culture that stops just short of giving her a separate identity. He was, after all, an American man whose respect for individuality and freedom of choice are his nation's pride.

The glorification of "woman's role," then, seems to be in proportion to society's reluctance to treat women as complete human beings; for the less real function that role has, the more it is decorated with meaningless details to conceal its emptiness

In the sympathetic words of the New York Times: “All admit to being deeply frustrated at times by the lack of privacy, the physical burden, the routine of family life, the confinement of it. However, none would give up her home and family if she had the choice to make again.

One might ask: if an education geared to the growth of the human mind weakens femininity, will an education geared to femininity weaken the growth of the mind? What is femininity, if it can be destroyed by an education which makes the mind grow, or induced by not letting the mind grow?

The feminine mystique, elevated by Freudian theory into a scientific religion, sounded a single, overprotective, life-restricting, future-denying note for women. Girls who grew up playing baseball, baby-sitting, mastering geometry -- almost independent enough, almost resourceful enough, to meet the problems of the fission-fusion era -- were told by the most advanced thinkers of our time to go back and live their lives as if they were Noras, restricted to the doll's house by Victorian prejudice. And their own respect and awe for the authority of science -- anthropology, sociology, psychology share that authority now -- kept them from questioning the feminine mystique.

In self-actualizing people, the orgasm is simultaneously more important and less important than in average people. It is often a profound and even mystical experience, and yet the absence of sexuality is more easily-tolerated by these people. Loving at a higher-need level makes the lower needs and their frustrations and satisfactions less important, less central, more easily neglected. But it also makes them more whole-heartedly enjoyed when gratified. Food is simultaneously enjoyed and yet regarded as relatively unimportant in the total scheme of life. Sex can be whole-heartedly enjoyed, enjoyed far beyond the possibility of the average person, even at the same time that it does not play a central role in the philosophy of life.

where other conditions are equal, the children of mothers who work because they want to are less likely to be disturbed, have problems in school, or to “lack a sense of personal worth” than housewives’ children. The early studies of children of working mothers were done in an era when few married women worked, at day nurseries which served working mothers who were without husbands due to death, divorce or desertion.

It is recognised now that Freud never gave proper attention, even in man, to growth of the ego or self: 'the impulse to master, control or come to self-fulfilling terms with the environment'. Analysts who have freed themselves from Freud's bias and joined other behavioural scientists in studying the human need, and that interference with it, in any dimension, is the source of psychic trouble. The sexual is only one dimension of the human potential. Freud saw women only in terms of their sexual relationship with men. But in all those women in whom he saw sexual problems, there must have been very severe problems of blocked growth, growth short of full human identity -- an immature, incomplete self. Society as it was then, by explicit denial of education and independence, prevented women from realising their full potential, or from attaining those interests and ideals that might stimulated their growth. Freud reported these deficiencies, but could only explain them as the toll of 'penis envy'. He saw that women who secretly hungered to be man's equal would not enjoy being his object; and in this, he seemed to be describing a fact. But when he dismissed woman's yearning for equality as 'penis envy', was he not merely stating his own view that woman could never really be man's equal, any more than she could wear his penis?

At the present historical moment, the best adjusted girl is probably one who's intelligent enough to do well in school, but not so brilliant as to get all As. Capable, but not in an area relatively new to women. Able to stand on her own two feet and to earn a living, but not so good a living so as to compete with men. Capable of doing some job well --In case she doesn't marry or otherwise has to work-- but not so identified with the profession as to need it for her happiness.

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—“Is this all?

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.

Now, by all accounts, you have the perfect life: you have the high-earning husband, the rosy-cheeked children, and the Buick in the driveway. But something isn’t right. Household tasks don’t seem to hold your attention; you snarl at your children instead of blanketing them with smiles. You fret about how little you resemble those glossy women in the magazines, the ones who clean counters and bake cakes and radiate delight. (Looking at those ads, a housewife and freelance writer named Betty Friedan “thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t have an orgasm waxing the kitchen floor.”) Everything and everyone confirm that it’s just as you suspected: the problem is you. You’re oversexed, you’re undersexed, you’re overeducated, you’re unintelligent. You need to have your head shrunk; you need to take more sleeping pills. You ought to become a better cook—all those fancy new kitchen appliances!—and in the meantime be content and grateful with what you have. The cultural pressure of the 1950s was so intense that some women, in order to survive, killed off the parts of themselves that couldn’t conform.

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. There is no other way. But a job, any job, is not the answer—in fact, it can be part of the trap. Women who do not look for jobs equal to their actual capacity, who do not let themselves develop the lifetime interests and goals which require serious education and training, who take a job at twenty or forty to “help out at home” or just to kill extra time, are walking, almost as surely as the ones who stay inside the housewife trap, to a nonexistent future.

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.

The suburban housewife—she was the dream image of the young American woman and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife—freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth and the illnesses of her grandmother. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfillment. As a housewife and mother, she was respected as a full and equal partner to man in his world. She was free to choose automobiles, clothes, appliances, supermarkets; she had everything that women ever dreamed of.

Early on it is clear that Addie has a rebellious streak, joining the library group and running away to Rockport Lodge. Is Addie right to disobey her parents? Where does she get her courage? 2. Addie’s mother refuses to see Celia’s death as anything but an accident, and Addie comments that “whenever I heard my mother’s version of what happened, I felt sick to my stomach.” Did Celia commit suicide? How might the guilt that Addie feels differ from the guilt her mother feels? 3. When Addie tries on pants for the first time, she feels emotionally as well as physically liberated, and confesses that she would like to go to college (page 108). How does the social significance of clothing and hairstyle differ for Addie, Gussie, and Filomena in the book? 4. Diamant fills her narrative with a number of historical events and figures, from the psychological effects of World War I and the pandemic outbreak of influenza in 1918 to child labor laws to the cultural impact of Betty Friedan. How do real-life people and events affect how we read Addie’s fictional story? 5. Gussie is one of the most forward-thinking characters in the novel; however, despite her law degree she has trouble finding a job as an attorney because “no one would hire a lady lawyer.” What other limitations do Addie and her friends face in the workforce? What limitations do women and minorities face today? 6. After distancing herself from Ernie when he suffers a nervous episode brought on by combat stress, Addie sees a community of war veterans come forward to assist him (page 155). What does the remorse that Addie later feels suggest about the challenges American soldiers face as they reintegrate into society? Do you think soldiers today face similar challenges? 7. Addie notices that the Rockport locals seem related to one another, and the cook Mrs. Morse confides in her sister that, although she is usually suspicious of immigrant boarders, “some of them are nicer than Americans.” How does tolerance of the immigrant population vary between city and town in the novel? For whom might Mrs. Morse reserve the term Americans? 8. Addie is initially drawn to Tessa Thorndike because she is a Boston Brahmin who isn’t afraid to poke fun at her own class on the women’s page of the newspaper. What strengths and weaknesses does Tessa’s character represent for educated women of the time? How does Addie’s description of Tessa bring her reliability into question? 9. Addie’s parents frequently admonish her for being ungrateful, but Addie feels she has earned her freedom to move into a boardinghouse when her parents move to Roxbury, in part because she contributed to the family income (page 185). How does the Baum family’s move to Roxbury show the ways Betty and Addie think differently from their parents about household roles? Why does their father take such offense at Herman Levine’s offer to house the family? 10. The last meaningful conversation between Addie and her mother turns out to be an apology her mother meant for Celia, and for a moment during her mother’s funeral Addie thinks, “She won’t be able to make me feel like there’s something wrong with me anymore.” Does Addie find any closure from her mother’s death? 11. Filomena draws a distinction between love and marriage when she spends time catching up with Addie before her wedding, but Addie disagrees with the assertion that “you only get one great love in a lifetime.” In what ways do the different romantic experiences of each woman inform the ideas each has about love? 12. Filomena and Addie share a deep friendship. Addie tells Ada that “sometimes friends grow apart. . . . But sometimes, it doesn’t matter how far apart you live or how little you talk—it’s still there.” What qualities do you think friends must share in order to have that kind of connection? Discuss your relationship with a best friend. Enhance

The physicist's relativity, which in recent years has changed our whole approach to scientific knowledge, is harder, and therefore easier to understand, than the social scientist's relativity. It is not a slogan, but a fundamental statement about truth to say that no social scientist can completely free himself from the prison of his own culture; he can only interpret what he observes in the scientific framework of his own time. This is true even of the great innovators. They cannot help but translate their revolutionary observations into language and rubrics that have been determined by the progress of science up until their time. Even those discoveries that create new rubrics are relative to the vantage point of their creator.

It is also time to stop giving lip service to the idea that there are no battles left to be fought for women in America, that women's rights have already been won. It is ridiculous to tell girls to keep quiet when they enter a new field, or an old one, so the men will not notice they are there. In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second class citizens. It would be a great service to tell girls who plan to work in society to expect this subtle, uncomfortable discrimination-tell then not to be quiet, and hope it will all go away, but fight it. A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she "adjust" to prejudice and discrimination.

The insights, interpretations both of theory and fact, and the implicit values of this book are inevitably my own. But whether or not the answers I present here are final - and there are many questions which social scientists must probe further - the dilemma of the American woman is real. At the present time, many experts, finally forced to recognise this problem, are redoubling their efforts to adjust women to it in terms of the feminine mystique. My answers may disturb the experts and women alike, for they imply social change. But there would be no sense in my writing this book at all if I did not believe that women can affect society, as well as be affected by it; that, in the end, a woman, as a man, has the power to choose, and to make her own heaven or hell.

It is easy to see the concrete details that trap the suburban housewife, the continual demands on her time. But the chains that bind her in her trap are chains in her own mind and spirit. They are chains made up of mistaken ideas and misinterpreted facts, of incomplete truths and unreal choices. They are not easily seen and not easily shaken off. How can any woman see the whole truth within the bounds of her own life? How can she believe that voice insider herself, when it denies the conventional, accepted truths by which she has been living? And yet the women I have talked to, who are finally listening to that inner voice, seem in some incredible way to be groping through to a truth that has defied the experts. I became aware of a growing body of evidence, much of which has not been reported publicly because it does not fit current modes of thought about women-evidence which throws into questions the standards of feminine normality, feminine adjustment, feminine fulfillment, and feminine maturity by why most women are still trying to live.

Sometimes a woman would tell me that the feeling gets so strong she runs out of the house and walks through the streets. Or she stays inside her house and cries. Or her children tell her a joke, and she doesn’t laugh because she doesn’t hear it. I talked to women who had spent years on the analyst’s couch, working out their “adjustment to the feminine role,” their blocks to “fulfillment as a wife and mother.” But the desperate tone in these women’s voices, and the look in their eyes, was the same as the tone and the look of other women, who were sure they had no problem, even though they did have a strange feeling of desperation. A mother of four who left college at nineteen to get married told me: I’ve tried everything women are supposed to do—hobbies, gardening, pick-ling, canning, being very social with my neighbors, joining committees, run-ning PTA teas. I can do it all, and I like it, but it doesn’t leave you anything to think about—any feeling of who you are. I never had any career ambitions. All I wanted was to get married and have four children. I love the kids and Bob and my home. There’s no problem you can even put a name to. But I’m desperate. I begin to feel I have no personality. I’m a server of food and a putter-on of pants and a bedmaker, somebody who can be called on when you want something. But who am I? A twenty-three-year-old mother in blue jeans said: I ask myself why I’m so dissatisfied. I’ve got my health, fine children, a lovely new home, enough money. My husband has a real future as an electron-ics engineer. He doesn’t have any of these feelings. He says maybe I need a vacation, let’s go to New York for a weekend. But that isn’t it. I always had this idea we should do everything together. I can’t sit down and read a book alone. If the children are napping and I have one hour to myself I just walk through the house waiting for them to wake up. I don’t make a move until I know where the rest of the crowd is going. It’s as if ever since you were a little girl, there’s always been somebody or something that will take care of your life: your parents, or college, or falling in love, or having a child, or moving to a new house. Then you wake up one morning and there’s nothing to look forward to.

First, she must unequivocally say “no” to the housewife image. This does not mean, of course, that she must divorce her husband, abandon her children, give up her home. She does not have to choose between marriage and career; that was the mistaken choice of the feminine mystique. In actual fact, it is not as difficult as the feminine mystique implies, to combine marriage and motherhood and even the kind of lifelong personal purpose that once was called “career.” It merely takes a new life plan—in terms of one’s whole life as a woman. The first step in that plan is to see housework for what it is—not a career, but something that must be done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Once a woman stops trying to make cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, “something more,” she can say “no, I don’t want a stove with rounded corners, I don’t want four different kinds of soap.” She can say “no” to those mass daydreams of the women’s magazines and television, “no” to the depth researchers and manipulators who are trying to run her life. Then, she can use the vacuum cleaner and the dishwasher and all the automatic appliances, and even the instant mashed potatoes for what they are truly worth—to save time that can be used in more creative ways.

In the same year, the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique added fuel to the fire of a growing feminist discontent. The author spoke to middle-class White women, bored in suburbia (an escape hatch from increasingly Black cities) and seeking sanction to work at a “meaningful” job outside the home. Not only were the problems of the White suburban housewife (who may have had Black domestic help) irrelevant to Black women, they were also alien to them. Friedan’s observation that “I never knew a woman, when I was growing up, who used her mind, played her own part in the world, and also loved, and had children” seemed to come from another planet.

Since, beginning with the same premise and examining the same body of anthropological evidence, she now arrives at a slightly different sexual role for women, one might seriously question the basis upon which she decides the roles a woman should play -- and finds it so easy to change the rules of the game from one decade to the next.

It would be half-wrong to say it started with Sigmund Freud. It did not really start, in America, until the 1940s. And then again, it was less a start than the prevention of an end. The old prejudices -- women are animals, less than human, unable to think like men, born merely to breed and serve men -- were not so easily dispelled by the crusading feminists, by science and education, and by the democratic spirit after all. They merely reappeared in the forties, in Freudian disguise. The feminine mystique derived its power from Freudian thought; for it was an idea born of Freud, which led women, and those who studied them, to misinterpret their mothers' frustrations, and their fathers' and brothers' and husbands' resentments and inadequacies, and their own emotions and possible choices in life.

Two lines from the book (The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan) remained wedged in her memory "It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself," and "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