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.
It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question ‘who am I’ except the voice inside herself.
I wouldn’t be satisfied with a life lived solely on the barricades. I reserve my right to be frivolous.
If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don’t blame the women’s movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based.
Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows.
Aging will create the music of the coming century.
He’s a male chauvinistic piglet.
Why the increasing emphasis by professional age experts and the media on – and public acceptance of – the nursing home as the locus of age when, in fact, more than ninety percent of those over sixty-five continue to live in the community?
By now, abortion should be obsolete. And I – and probably a lot of other feminists – wish it were obsolete, because abortion, in itself, is not a value – it is simply the right to chose, which is an essential value.
Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.
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.
There is absolutely no evidence that it is harmful to children if their mother’s health, well-being and autonomy and control of her own destiny is maximized by work outside the home.
The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.
We broke through the feminine mystique and women who were wives, mothers and housewives began to find themselves as people. That didn’t mean they stopped, or had to stop, being mothers, wives or even liking their homes.
Diversity has got to be a part of modern feminism, and I think that my feminism is stronger because its an inclusive thing. I won’t be backed into a corner that polarizes me against other women. And I wished they wouldn’t be either.
If you were very bright and you became head of a department, as I did, of the psychology department, you were encouraged to go on to graduate work. But as a women you didn’t even think about discrimination.
I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.
I understood somehow my mother’s frustration. And that it was no good not only for her, but for her children or her husband, that she didn’t have a real use of her ability.
When I was in high school, even in college, I didn’t have any real image of a career woman or a professional woman.
I didn’t want to be in a situation where I was broader than the boys, which I was, in the academic world.
Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.