betty friedan the problem that has no name

Each suburban housewife struggled with it alone. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women.Norton & Company, 2002 edition ISBN 0393322572 The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women. Interviews with Betty Friedan, Janann Sherman, ed.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.As quoted in People magazine (March 7-14, 1994) p.When I talk to people, they think of movies of forty-five years ago! Hepburn and Tracy! We need to see men and women as equal partners, but it’s hard to think of movies that do that.As quoted by The Christian Science Monitor (April 1, 1974) This has sometimes appeared paraphrased: 'Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.'.Men weren’t really the enemy - they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.

So they're only half-human, as women are only half-human, until we can go this next step forward. They are not allowed to express their own sensitivity, their own need to be passive sometimes and not always active. Men are not allowed to admit that they are sometimes afraid.

Men have an enormous capacity in them that they have to repress and fear in order to live up to the obsolete, brutal, bear-killing, Ernest Hemingway, crewcut Prussian, napalm-all-the-children-in-Vietnam, bang-bang-you're-dead image of masculinity.

Men will not be free to be all they can be as long as they must live up to an image of masculinity that disallows all the tenderness and sensitivity in a man, all that might be considered feminine.

Speech at the First National Conference for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, 1969. Then, and only then, will they be able to embrace motherhood without conflict, when they will be able to define themselves not just the somebody's mother, not just as servants of children, not just is breeding receptacles, but as people for whom motherhood is a freely chosen part of life, freely celebrated while it lasts, but for whom creativity has many more dimensions, as it has for men. I am saying that motherhood will only be a joyous and responsible human act when women are free to make, with full conscious choice and full human responsibility, the decisions to become mothers.

Am I saying that women must be liberated from motherhood? No.

1.3 It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement (1976 ).

Betty friedan the problem that has no name