Betty Friedan (1921 – 2006)
"second-wave" feminist best known for The Feminine Mystique, a critique of women's role as stay-at-home mothers.
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.
No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
The only kind of work which permits an able woman to realize her abilities fully, to achieve identity in society in a life plan that can encompass marriage and motherhood, is the kind that was forbidden by the feminine mystique, the lifelong commitment to an art or science, to politics or profession.
Aging is not "lost youth" but a new stage of opportunity and strength. Friedan, B. (1994, March 20). How to live longer, better, wiser. Parade Magazine, p. 4-6.
Friedan: I think it's partly a reaction against feminism, partly envy of feminism, and partly partly a real need of men to evolve through the burden of the masculine mystique, the burden of machismo.
If I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class. This is [...] female chauvinism. Friedan, Betty. 1998.
"Do you object to the celebration of sexuality in our pictorials?
If women’s role in life is limited solely to housewife/mother, it clearly ends when she can no longer bear more children and the children she has borne leave home.