Quotes from book
The Feminine Mystique

Name: The Feminine Mystique
Author: Betty Friedan

The Feminine Mystique is a book by Betty Friedan that is widely credited with sparking the beginning of second-wave feminism in the United States. It was published on February 19, 1963 by W. W. Norton.

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

Betty Friedan book The Feminine Mystique

Source: The Feminine Mystique

“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.”

Betty Friedan book The Feminine Mystique

Source: The Feminine Mystique (1963), Ch. 14 "A New Life Plan for Women".

“It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.”

Betty Friedan book The Feminine Mystique

Source: The Feminine Mystique (1963), Ch. 14 "A New Life Plan for Women".

“… 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.”

Betty Friedan book The Feminine Mystique

Source: The Feminine Mystique

“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.”

Betty Friedan book The Feminine Mystique

Interviews with Betty Friedan, Janann Sherman, ed. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2002, ISBN 1578064805, p. x.
Source: The Feminine Mystique

“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.”

Betty Friedan book The Feminine Mystique

Source: The Feminine Mystique

“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.”

Betty Friedan book The Feminine Mystique

Source: The Feminine Mystique

“Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgastic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery.”

Betty Friedan book The Feminine Mystique

Source: The Feminine Mystique (1963), Ch. 11 "The Sex-Seekers".

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

Betty Friedan book The Feminine Mystique

Source: The Feminine Mystique (1963), Ch. 14 "A New Life Plan for women".

“Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework — an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self- sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.”

Betty Friedan book The Feminine Mystique

Source: The Feminine Mystique (1963), Ch. 1 "The Problem That Has No Name".

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

Betty Friedan book The Feminine Mystique

Ch 13 "The Forfeited Self".
The Feminine Mystique (1963)

“The problem that has no name (which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities) is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.”

Betty Friedan book The Feminine Mystique

Source: The Feminine Mystique (1963), Ch. 14 "A New Life Plan for Women".

“The suburban housewife — she was the dream image of the young American women 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 … had found true feminine fulfilment.”

Betty Friedan book The Feminine Mystique

Source: The Feminine Mystique (1963), Ch. 1 "The Problem That Has No Name"

“When women take their education and their abilities seriously and put them to use, ultimately they have to compete with men. 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.”

Betty Friedan book The Feminine Mystique

Source: The Feminine Mystique (1963), Ch. 14 "A New Life Plan for Women".

“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.”

Betty Friedan book The Feminine Mystique

Ch 13 "The Forfeited Self".
The Feminine Mystique (1963)

“The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women.”

Betty Friedan book The Feminine Mystique

Opening lines, Ch. 1 "The Problem That Has No Name".
The Feminine Mystique (1963)
Context: 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 housewife 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?”