Each woman is made to feel it is her own cross to bear if she can’t be the perfect clone of the male superman and the perfect clone of the feminine mystique.
If I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class.
American women were frustrated in just the role of housewife – but they also managed to enlarge it. And they weren’t just housewives, they were community leaders.
Women, because they are not generally the principal breadwinners, can be perhaps most useful as the trail blazers, working along the bypaths, doing the unusual job that men cannot afford to gamble on.
A good woman is one who loves passionately, has guts, seriousness and passionate convictions, takes responsibility, and shapes society.
I have discovered that there is a crucial difference between society’s image of old people and ‘us’ as we know and feel ourselves to be.
To protest free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong.
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.
I can’t point to any major episodes of sexual discrimination in my early life. But I was so aware of the crime, the shame that there was no use of my mother’s ability and energy.
We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.’
The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.
The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.
Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.
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.
Getting older is an adventure, not a problem.
We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.
Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.
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.
You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.
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.