Top Notch Selections of the Book Feminine Mystique

Betty Friedan worked for gender equality in United States of America.  In 1963, Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique was revolutionary when it was first published, exploring the traditional role of women. She advocated for the female gender to seek fulfillment outside the home. She profoundly acted as a Keynote Speaker in many road side seminars to raise the voice against the molestation of women. 

She also founded the “National Organization for Women” and became known as one of the leaders in the wave of feminism.

Here I am compiling the great quotes of this amazing Social Activist about feminism from his book “Feminine Mystique”:

1) “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.” 

2) “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.” 

3) “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.” 

4) “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.”

5) “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, shrivelling the very wish to be more than just a wife and mother.”  

6) “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.” 

7) “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.” 

“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?”