10 quotes
The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women.
The Feminine Mystique (1963)
The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.
The Feminine Mystique (1963)
It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
The Feminine Mystique (1963)
A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex but neither should she 'adjust' to prejudice and discrimination.
The Feminine Mystique (1963)
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.
The Feminine Mystique (1963)
Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgastic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery.
The Feminine Mystique (1963)
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.
The Feminine Mystique (1963)
Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework — an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self- sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.
The Feminine Mystique (1963)
When women take their education and their abilities seriously and put them to use, ultimately they have to compete with men. 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.
The Feminine Mystique (1963)
American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if … the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realize one’s full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror.
The Feminine Mystique (1963)