Beth > Beth's Quotes

“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.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“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.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity, she finally began to enjoy being a woman.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“The key to the trap is, of course, education. The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save, American women from the greater dangers of the feminine mystique.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“The insult, the real reflection on our culture's definition of the role of women, is that as a nation we only noticed something was wrong with women when we saw its effects on their sons.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“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 Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“Why should women accept this picture of a half-life, instead of a share in the whole of human destiny?”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of suicide.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“I think the girl who is able to earn her own living and pay her own way should be as happy as anybody on earth. The sense of independence and security is very sweet.”
― Susan B. Anthony

“Woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself.”
― Susan B. Anthony

“I was born a heretic. I always distrusted people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows.”
― Susan B. Anthony

“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.”
― Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“Woman's degradation is in man's idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man.”
― Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns.”
― Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“When women understand that governments and religions are human inventions; that Bibles, prayer-books, catechisms, and encyclical letters are all emanations from the brains of man, they will no longer be oppressed by the injunctions that come to them with the divine authority of *Thus sayeth the Lord.*”
― Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another.”
― Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“The happiest people I have known have been those who gave themselves no concern about their own souls, but did their uttermost to mitigate the miseries of others.”
― Elizabeth Cady Stanton, History of Woman Suffrage, Volumes I-III