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.

— Betty Friedan

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.

— Betty Friedan

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

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.

— Betty Friedan

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

— Betty Friedan

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.

— Betty Friedan

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.

— Betty Friedan

No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.

— Betty Friedan

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

— Betty Friedan

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

— Betty Friedan