A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, ‘Who am I, and what do I want out of life?’ She mustn’t feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children.
Being Jewish, you didn’t get into a sorority. So I really was much more outgoing and gregarious. I really didn’t want to spend an Emily Dickinson adolescence reading poetry on gravestones, which I did.
Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?
I would have much rather been in the jalopy with the kids, going to Hunt’s for hamburgers. But, when I entered high school, all my friends got into sororities and fraternities and I didn’t.
It is easier to live life through someone else than to become complete yourself.
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.
You can have it all, just not all at the same time.
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.
Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.
Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgasmic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery.
When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.
You can show more of the reality of yourself instead of hiding behind a mask for fear of revealing too much.
I loved my kids. And I loved my house, and I loved a lot of things about my life in the 1950s. But there were a lot like me in that era, very overeducated housewives.
I’m my age and I feel glorious.
Advice? I don’t offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.
I realized that what I was saying was threatening, somehow, to the editors of women’s magazines. That it threatened the very world they were trying to paint, what I then called the “feminine mystique.”
Dominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that.
We need to see men and women as equal partners, but its 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!
Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women’s magazines.
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.