The Feminine Mystique (1963) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Characters/People edit see section history

• Margaret Mead: Add a description of this character.
• Freud
• Maslow
• Mccall
• Nora
• Lucy Stone
• Sarah
• Martha
• Redbook
• Bawa
• Mary
• Dr. Spock
• Susan Anthony

Quotes edit see section history

• “What if the terror a girl faces at 21, is simply the terror of growing up, as women were not permitted to grow before? the terror of freedom to decide here own life”

• “For all the new women, and the new men.”

• “Victorian culture did not permit women to accept or gratify their basic sexual needs, our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual role.”

• “It has been popular in recent years to laugh at feminism as one of history's dirty jokes: to pity, sniggering, those old-fashioned feminists who fought for women's rights to higher education, careers, the vote, They wer neurotic victims of penis envy who wanted to be men, it is said now.”

• “They had to prove women were human. They had to shatter, violently if necessary, the decorative Dresden figurine that represented the ideal woman of the last century. . . prove that woman was not a passive, empty mirror, not a frilly, useless decoration, not a mindless animal, not a thing th be disposed of by others, incapable of a voice in her own existence”

• “To make one half the human race consume its energies in the functions of housekeeper, wife and mother is a monstrous waste of the most precious material God ever made”

• “Is it so hard to understand that emancipation, the right to full humanity, was important enough to generations of women that some fought with their fists, and went to jail, even died for it?”

• “It is a strangely unquestioned perversion of history that the passion and fire of the feminist movement came from man-hating, embittered, sex-starved spinsters, from castrating non-women who burned with such envy for the male organ that they wanted to take it away from all men, demanding rights only because they lacked the power to love as women. ... (many feminists) loved and were loved, and married; many seem to have been as passionate in their relations with lover and husband, in an age when passion in women was as forbidden as intelligence, as they were in their battle for woman's chance to grow to full human stature.”

• “It is a cliche of our won time that women spent half a century fighting for "rights," and the next half wondering whether they wanted them after all.”

• “'Rights' have a dull sound to people who have grown up after they have been won”

• “running like a bright and sometimes dangerous thread through the history of the feminist movement was also the idea that equality for woman was necessary to free both man and woman for true sexual fulfillment, For the degradation of woman also degraded marriage, love all relations between man and woman.”

• “I trust my Mother sees and knows how glad I am to have been born, and at a time when there was so much that needed help at which I could lend a hand, Dear Old Mother! She had a hard life, and was sorry she had another girl to share and bear the hard life of a woman...But I am wholly glad that I came.”

  Lucy Stone

• “woman's enemy was not man. 'We do not fight with man himself, but only with bad principles.'”

  Ernestine Rose

• “what is physical freedom to mental bondage”

  Elizabeth Stanton

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• The old image of the spirited career girl was largely created by writers and editors who were women, she told me. The new image of woman as housewife-mother has been largely created by writers and editors who are men.

  Highlighted by 61 Kindle customers

• It is my thesis that the core of the problem for women today is not sexual but a problem of identity—a stunting or evasion of growth that is perpetuated by the feminine mystique. It is my thesis that as the Victorian culture did not permit women to accept or gratify their basic sexual needs, our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual role.

  Highlighted by 60 Kindle customers

• The feminine mystique says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity.

  Highlighted by 58 Kindle customers

• The mistake, says the mystique, the root of women’s troubles in the past is that women envied men, women tried to be like men, instead of accepting their own nature, which can find fulfillment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love.

  Highlighted by 58 Kindle customers

• “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.”

  Highlighted by 53 Kindle customers

• But the moral, in 1939, was that if she kept her commitment to herself, she did not lose the man, if he was the right man.

  Highlighted by 44 Kindle customers

• The problem is always being the children’s mommy, or the minister’s wife and never being myself.

  Highlighted by 39 Kindle customers

• part of the strange newness of the problem is that it cannot be understood in terms of the age-old material problems of man: poverty, sickness, hunger, cold.

  Highlighted by 33 Kindle customers

• “To make one half the human race consume its energies in the functions of housekeeper, wife and mother is a monstrous waste of the most precious material God ever made.”

  Highlighted by 33 Kindle customers

• I never knew a woman, when I was growing up, who used her mind, played her own part in the world, and also loved, and had children.

  Highlighted by 30 Kindle customers

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• America
• Vassar
• New York
• United States
• Vienna
• Massachusetts
• Westchester
• New England
• Africa
• India
• New Jersey

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Betty Friedan (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 301.4120973

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Nonfiction › Social Sciences › Sociology › Women
• Books › Nonfiction › Women's Studies › Feminist Theory
• Books › Nonfiction › Social Sciences › Gender Studies
• Books › Health, Mind & Body › Psychology & Counseling

Books That Cite This Book edit see section history