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.
Betty FriedanRead
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?
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the isolation and unfulfilled aspirations of suburban wives in the mid-20th century.
Betty Friedan's quote highlights the internal struggle of suburban wives who, despite their seemingly mundane daily tasks and responsibilities, grapple with a profound sense of dissatisfaction and longing for more in life. It encapsulates the existential questioning many women faced about the meaning and value of their roles, prompting them to wonder if their lives held any greater purpose beyond domesticity.
Themes
SuburbanWivesStruggleIdentityDomesticExistential
In practice
Example use cases
Discussing gender roles at a women's empowerment event.
More from Betty Friedan
All quotes →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.
Betty FriedanRead
Advice? I don't offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.
Betty FriedanRead
We need to see men and women as equal partners, but it's hard to think of movies that do that. When I talk to people, they think of movies of forty-five years ago! Hepburn and Tracy!
Betty FriedanRead
No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
Betty FriedanRead
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 FriedanRead
Similar quotes
I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.
Siri HustvedtRead
Close friends and relatives, while not meaning to do so, often handicap on through 'opinions' and sometimes though ridicule, which is meant to be humorous. Thousands of men and women carry inferiority complexes with them all through life, because some well-meaning, but ignorant person destroyed their confidence through opinions or ridicule
Napoleon HillRead
I got into Facebook late, and I think if you get into Facebook late, you tend to use it the right way, as opposed to the people who got into it sooner and friended everybody and now have a thousand friends. I keep it at about 80 or so, and they're all people I know. Just because I do a movie doesn't mean I friend everybody in it.
Quentin TarantinoRead
The single most important factor in our long-term happiness is the relationships we have with our family and close friends.
Clayton M. ChristensenRead
All of my peers died of AIDS, and I have no one to celebrate my past or my journey, or to help me pass down stories to the next generation. We lost an entire generation of storytellers with HIV.
David MixnerRead
Only when one is connected to one's own core is one connected to others, I am beginning to discover. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be refound through solitude.
Anne Morrow LindberghRead