We need to see men and women as equal partners, but it's hard to think of movies that do that. When I talk to people, they think o...f movies of forty-five years ago! Hepburn and Tracy!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfact...ion, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban housewife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: "Is this all?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them aroun...d, 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The suburban housewife--she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world.... The American housewife--freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth, and the illnesses of her grandmother ... had found true feminine fulfilment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 hus...band, compete with her neighbors for empty status, and so smother her son that he cannot compete at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man's advance in the professi...ons, or by refusing to compete with man at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What had really caused the women's movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women's life expect...ancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn't live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was "the problem that had no name." Realizing that it was not some freakish personal fault but our common problem as women had enabled us to take the first steps to change our lives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »