Feminine Mystique Quotes

It was the era that I later analyzed, the "feminine mystique" era, [when] "career woman" was a dirty word. And so I didn't want a career anymore. [But] I had to do something. So I started freelancing for women's magazines. ~ Betty Friedan

We broke through the feminine mystique and women who were wives, mothers and housewives began to find themselves as people. That didn't mean they stopped, or had to stop, being mothers, wives or even liking their homes. ~ Betty Friedan

Why should anyone raise an eyebrow because a latter-day Einstein's wife expects her husband to put aside that lifeless theory of relativity and help her with the work that is supposed to be the essence of life itself: diaper the baby and don't forge to rinse the soiled diaper in the toilet paper before putting it in the diaper pail, and then wax the kitchen floor. ~ Betty Friedan

An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that "justify" the institution of slavery. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth. Economist John Kenneth
Galbraith offers an economic explanation for "the persistence of the view of homemaking as a 'higher calling'": the concept of women as naturally trapped within the Feminine Mystique, he feels, "has been forced on us by popular sociology, by magazines, and by fiction to disguise the fact that woman in her role of consumer has been essential to the development of our industrial society…. Behavior that is essential for economic reasons is transformed into a social virtue. ~ Naomi Wolf

It is perhaps beside the point to remark that bowling alleys and supermarkets have nursery facilities, while schools and colleges and scientific laboratories and government offices do not. ~ Betty Friedan

Barbara is on what is called the woman's trip to the exclusion of almost everything else. When she and Tom and Max and Sharon need money, Barbara will take a part-time job, modeling or teaching kindergarten, but she dislikes earning more than ten or twenty dollars a week. Most of the time she keeps house and bakes. "Doing something that shows your love that way," she says, "is just about the most beautiful thing I know." Whenever I hear about the woman's trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin'-says-lovin'-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara. ~ Joan Didion

I realized that what I was saying was threatening, somehow, to the editors of women's magazines. That it threatened the very world they were trying to paint, what I then called the "feminine mystique." ~ Betty Friedan

The only kind of work which permits an able woman to realize her abilities fully, to achieve identity in society in a life plan that can encompass marriage and motherhood, is the kind that was forbidden by the feminine mystique, the lifelong commitment to an art or science, to politics or profession. If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based. ~ Betty Friedan

It is both an irony and an indictment of the feminine mystique that it often forced the unhappy ones, the ugly ducklings, to find themselves, while girls who fitted the image became adjusted 'happy' housewives and have never found out who they are. ~ Betty Friedan

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

We've all heard that women tolerate sex to get relationships, while men tolerate relationships to get sex. That is simply not true - but there is something truly chilling about the fact that most Americans believe it's true and use this formula as a guide for behavior. ~ Israel Morrow

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 real joke that history played on American women is not the one that makes people snigger, with cheap Freudian sophistication, at the dead feminists. It is the joke that Freudian thought played on living women, twisting the memory of the feminists into the man-eating phantom of the feminine mystique, shriveling the very wish to be more than just a wife and mother. ~ Betty Friedan

Each woman is made to feel it is her own cross to bear if she can't be the perfect clone of the male superman and the perfect clone of the feminine mystique. ~ Betty Friedan

When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman. ~ Betty Friedan

One could understand feminism generally as an attack on woman as she was under "patriarchy" (that concept is a social construction of feminism). The feminine mystique was her ideal; in regard to sex, it consisted of women's modesty and in the double standard of sexual conduct that comes with it, which treated women's misbehavior as more serious than men's. Instead of trying to establish a single standard by bringing men up to the higher standard of women, as with earlier feminism, today's feminism decided to demand that women be entitled to sink to the level of men. It bought into the sexual revolution of the late sixties and required that women be rewarded with the privileges of male conquest rather than, say, continue serving as camp followers of rock bands. The result has been the turn for the worse. ... What was there in feminine modesty that the feminists left behind?

In return for women's holding to a higher standard of sexual behavior, feminine modesty gave them protection while they considered whether they wanted to consent. It gave them time: Not so fast! Not the first date! I'm not ready for that! It gave them the pleasure of being courted along with the advantage of looking before you leap. To win over a woman, men had to strive to express their finer feelings, if they had any. Women could judge their character and choose accordingly. In sum, women had the right of choice, if I may borrow that slogan. All this and more was social construction, to be sure ~ Harvey Mansfield

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 need to grow and fulfil their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual need. ~ Betty Friedan

As women, we can embody all aspects of the Triple Goddess simultaneously (Mother, Maiden, Crone) at every stage of our lives. The elements of feminine mystique, giftedness, and strength are available to us through the spirit as much as the body. ~ Elizabeth S. Eiler

Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgasmic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery. ~ Betty Friedan

I was in a book group in 1973," she recounted. "We read The Feminine Mystique one week, and the next week everyone went out and got a job. The book group never met again. ~ Debora L. Spar

Nikki : I think he makes women question their position in life through their association with the dichotomy of his physical power and his whole feminine mystique. That's the part of Travis I'm always trying to capture. The tension. You must have felt it in the studio.
She was serious. He could tell by the tone of her voice. And again, unbelievably, she was waiting for an answer.
Kid : Uh ... no.
Nikki : You didn't feel the tension ?
Kid : Yeah, there was tension. I just didn't realize it was the dichotomy of Travis' physical powers and his,uh,feminine mystique creating it. I thought it was the paint and the hellish death motif, not to mention the,uh,sheer demonic luridness of the eternity-sucking vortex. ~ Tara Janzen

In retrospect, we could see that the 1950s had been a reactionary period in America of Eisenhower blandness, of virulent anticommunism, of the 'Feminine Mystique.' ~ Edmund White

To review briefly, in the late 1960s, men got paid more than women (usually double) for doing the exact same job. Women could get credit cards in their husband's names but not their own, and many divorced, single and separated women could not get cards at all. Women could not get mortgages on their own and if a couple applied for a mortgage, only the husband's income was considered. Women faced widespread and consistent discrimination in education, scholarship awards, and on the job. In most states the collective property of a marriage was legally the husband's since the wife had allegedly not contributed to acquiring it. Women were largely kept out of a whole host of jobs--doctor, college professor, bus driver, business manager--that women today take for granted. They were knocked out in the delivery room... once women got pregnant they were either fired from their jobs or expected to quit. If they were women of color, it was worse on all fronts--work education, health care. (And talk about slim pickings. African American men were being sent to prison and cut out of jobs by the millions.) Most women today, having seen reruns of The Brady Bunch and Father Knows Best, and having heard of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, the bestseller that attacked women's confinement to the home, are all too familiar with the idealized yet suffocating media images of happy, devoted housewives. In fact, most of us have learned to laugh at them, vacuuming in their stockings and heels, clu ~ Susan J. Douglas

Women owe Friedan an incalculable debt for The Feminine Mystique. Domesticity was not a satisfactory story of an intelligent woman's life. ~ Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

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. ~ Betty Friedan

Whenever I hear about the woman's trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin'-says-lovin'-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, ~ Anonymous

It is death that gives life its meaning. ~ Teresa Moorey

To find and keep love today, you have to learn the mystery of seduction. ~ Lebo Grand

The mystique of the femme fatale cannot be perfectly translated into male terms. ~ Camille Paglia

A man with a weak Masculine is especially prone to despise and fear these qualities and may attempt to suppress the more destructive elements of the Feminine force in his partner. ~ David Deida

The finer literature, indeed, is characterized by a certain suffusion of the feminine flavor, the finer, the more ideal, thought plumed with sentiment; even science loves to spring from its feet, philosophy affect the clouds to inspire and edify. ~ Amos Bronson Alcott

I thought to be feminine was to give in to straight culture, or the beauty standard, but in my heart I had a flair for fashion and style. They were passions I kept secret because I didn't understand I could love clothes and hair and makeup and still like girls. ~ Beth Ditto

My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. ~ V.S. Naipaul

I guess because twins have this mystique, and triplets - I think the normal sibling connection potentially can be very powerful, and there's this idea that it's even more powerful. It really is, not just someone like me, but another version of me. ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

do you dare to step in-
to the vulnerable black, stripped
to the soul with human blindness –

when the full and weeping
moon steps from the shade
of a tumult of mountains –

when, in the fragrant dim,
day's tree stump transforms
into some nether-worldly other –

when time's skin is thin and you are
bared – when there is nothing
between you and the Wildest One

whose name is your own? ~ Beth Morey

And I'm hoping that over the next 20, 50 years, whatever, the mystique of television and film and all that will diminish somewhat, and people will leave us alone to get on with our jobs. ~ Erika Slezak

Wanderess, Wanderess,
weave us a story of seduction and ruse.
Heroic be the Wanderess,
the world be her muse. ~ Roman Payne

To be sensual is life. ~ Lebo Grand

Because of the womb being a central phenomenon in the feminine body, the whole psychology of woman differs: she is non-aggressive, non-inquiring, non-questioning, non-doubting, because all of those things are part of aggression. She will not take the initiative; she simply waits - and she can wait infinitely. ~ Rajneesh

On TV, talking heads wrung their hands over a lack of traditional feminine values and wondered if girls' sports were to blame. Then they cut to a commercial featuring a sexy college coed vacuuming her dorm room in her underwear. ~ Libba Bray

Nonviolent actions are by their nature androgynous. In them the two impulses that have long been treated as distinct, 'masculine' and 'feminine,' the impulse of self-assertion and the impulse of sympathy, are clearly joined; the very genius of nonviolence, in fact, is that it demonstrates them to be indivisible, and so restores human community ... ~ Barbara Deming

She'd like to say something about the metaphors of space. She won't, but she'd like to. In many religions, the sun is viewed as an analogue to God, and in some Near Eastern cults, the fire cults that interested Nietzsche, the sun is a diety, the origin of all energy, heat, light, and life. A masculine force, this sun, countered by the feminine lucent moon, mutable, pale pink at the horizon, grayish white overhead, and silver in daytime. The moon is a friend to women. Its attraction, its capacity to pull objects toward itself, is traditionally a metaphor for womanly force. Lovers know and understand the moon as a sign for love: a cliché, certainly, but one that does not wear out. "The Moon," they whisper, infinitely. ~ Charles Baxter

I think I've drawn from some of the most feminine women, like Jackie Kennedy. I am totally devastated that she's gone. She had it all. ~ Sandra Bernhard

Shame is paralyzing and debilitating. It invites us not to be heard, at least not in an authentic way. Acting courageously when shame enters the picture requires extraordinary courage because people will do anything to escape from shame or from the possibility that shame will be evoked. It is just too difficult to go there. Even for people who will walk in to the fires of transformation to face fear.

Men and women tend to manage shame differently. Generally, men have less tolerance for shame, perhaps because they are shamed almost from birth for half their humanity. The so called feminine part of themselves including anything vulnerable or seen as weak. Men often sit with shame for only a nanosecond before flipping it into something more masculine or therefore tolerable like anger or rage or a need to dominate devalue or control. ~ Harriet Lerner

A truly sensual woman almost never gets heartbroken. Why? Because she doesn't attract heartbreakers in the first place, and not that the men she attracts are perfect, but I think the universe seems to value her a little bit too much. ~ Lebo Grand

A mystique of history and heritage surrounds the New York Yankees. It's like the old days revived. We're loved and hated, but always in larger doses than any other team. We're the only team in any sport whose name and uniform and insignia are synonymous with their entire sport all over the world ... the Yankees mean baseball to more people than all the other teams combined. ~ Paul Blair

(Flora) "No, Jess- it'll take hours. Just go and see Mr. Powell and fess up. It's the only way. Crawl and grovel and offer to do all sorts of remedial thingies. That's what I do with my dad. And do it with captivating feminine charm. That always works on Dad. I stroke his hair. It never fails."
"I can't stroke Mr. Powell's hair, for God's sake!" A horrible hallucination flashed through Jess's mind. ~ Sue Limb

The result of this one-sided patriarchal stance, demonstrable in all areas of life, is an un integrated man who is attacked by his repressed side and often enough overwhelmed by it. This transpires not only in the fate of the individual man as seduction by a "lower" anima, but equally through seduction by a compensatory ideology, for example materialism, to which "spirit" men are especially susceptible.
The man wants to remain exclusively masculine and out of fear rejects the transformative contact with a woman of equal status. Negativizing the Feminine in the patriarchate prevents the man from experiencing woman as a thou of equal but different status, and hence from coming to terms with her. The consequence of the patriarchal male's haughtiness toward women leads to the inability to make any genuine contact with the Feminine, i.e., not only in a real woman but also with the Feminine in himself, the unconscious. Whenever an integral relationship to the Feminine remains undeveloped, however, this means that, due to his fear, the male is unable to break through to his own wholeness that also embraces the Feminine. Thus the patriarchal culture's separation from the Feminine and from the unconscious becomes one of the essential causes for the crisis of fear in which the patriarchal world now finds itself. ~ Erich Neumann

Precisely because I'm a man who is attracted to women, there may be some things that I have to say as a spectator of feminine grace that women themselves may not be able to see. ~ William T. Vollmann

As soon as the man had gone, Caitrina moved to stand before him, her soft feminine scent clouding his senses. Would it always be like this - this clawing need for her? The inability to think when she was near? The feeling that if he didn't take her in his arms and kiss her, he would surely die? ~ Monica McCarty

The mystery of the feminine heart was meant to be a good thing, by the way. A source of joy. ~ Stasi Eldredge

How on earth was this woman a spinster? She was an earl's daughter, surely possessed of a large dowry. If none of the title-hungry, debt-ridden layabouts in Mayfair had seen fit to propose marriage, simple logic dictated there must be something remarkably off-putting about her. An unbearably grating voice, perhaps. A snaggletooth, or poor personal hygiene.
But she displayed none of those features. She was young and pretty, with no detectable odor. Her teeth were a string of pearls, and she had a voice like sunshine. There was nothing off-putting about her whatsoever. She was... on-putting, in every way. ~ Tessa Dare

Wisdom is referred to as "she" - or even as "Lady Wisdom" - because the Greek word for wisdom is feminine); ~ Bart D. Ehrman

Who is She? She is your power, your Feminine source. Big Mama. The Goddess. The Great Mystery. The web-weaver. The life force. The first time, the twentieth time you may not recognize her. Or pretend not to hear. As she fills your body with ripples of terror and delight.

But when she calls you will know you've been called. Then it is up to you to decide if you will answer. ~ Lucy H. Pearce

All feminine claws, he said to himself, are sheathed in velvet; but they can hurt a good deal if they touch you on the sore places of the defects of your qualities
even merely with the velvet. ~ Ford Madox Ford

The fungi became, or is for some mysterious reason still to be discovered, a pipeline into a mind, an entelechy, which we can only image as feminine and can only associate somehow to the environment, to the ecosystem. This is the Gaian mind. This is what the goddess really is. The goddess is a network of connective intelligence that is operating on this planet. ~ Terence McKenna

Actors used to carry films because people would have to actually go to the movies to see them. It was the only place. But now there's none of that mystique, and so there's less of a reason to buy a ticket. ~ Eva Mendes

We are now, I believe, on the threshold of a third stage which I call the stage of the sacred marriage. This is the only position we could possibly take and still survive. This is a stage beyond both matriarchy and patriarchy. It involves the restoration to human respect of all of the rejected powers of the feminine. But it is absolutely essential that this restoration should be accomplished in the deep spirit of the sacred feminine. Not only should we invoke the sacred feminine, restore the sacred feminine, but this union between the matriarchal and the patriarchal, the sacred marriage, must be accomplished in the spirit of the sacred feminine for it to be real, effective, rich, and fecund. It must occur in her spirit of unconditional love, in her spirit of tolerance, forgiveness, all-embracing and all-harmonizing balance, and not, in any sense, involve a swing in the other direction. ~ Andrew Harvey

Women have been trained to be deeply relational creatures with "permeable boundaries," which make us vulnerable to the needs of others. This permeability, this compelling need to connect, is one of our greatest gifts, but without balance it can mean living out the role of the servant who nurtures at the cost of herself. Referring to this feminine script in her essay "Professions for Women," Virginia Woolf describes the syndrome and offers a drastic remedy: "She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draft she sat in it - in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others...I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defense. Had I not killed her, she would have killed me." At the very least we need to disempower this part of ourselves, to relieve ourselves of the internal drive to forfeit our souls as food for others. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

I rolled my eyes. Leave it to Uncle Jonathan to worry about prostitution being too much for my feminine persuasion, yet think nothing of me seeing a body spliced open before I'd even had my luncheon. ~ Kerri Maniscalco

No woman can fully understand nor appreciate her femininity without the help of a man, even if he only exists in her imagination. ~ Lebo Grand

I started off as an Australian model. I had so many knockbacks, having short hair and being rejected, and I always thought: I'm never gonna get to where I want to get unless I start looking more feminine. ~ Ruby Rose

You'd be better off just drinking paint thinner," a voice says. It's playful and feminine with a tone that makes me think of home. Not that we talked like her in Florida, no, but her voice reminds me of warmth. It reminds me of sunshine. It reminds me of starry nights and cloudless days.
That's way too sappy, I know.
Don't tell anyone I said that shit. ~ J.M. Darhower

Are Republican women politicians more 'feminine' than Democratic women politicians? ~ Susan Estrich

And in most queer communities, regardless of one's sex or identity, people who are more masculine in gender expression are almost always viewed as more valid and attractive than their feminine counterparts. ~ Julia Serano

There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman. ~ Margaret Fuller

ladies, don't be a woman of simple taste particularly in the way you look, or at least keep that to the minimum. You are a goddess, after all. Stop trying to look all humbled or modest. You've got to look and smell like a goddess who, in my opinion, is a woman that is constantly in touch with her own sensuality, which also means she's always on top of her game. ~ Lebo Grand

You can be brave and still be feminine. You can lead and still love flowers. Most importantly, you can be queen and still be a bride. ~ Kiera Cass

From across her husband's open grave I had thought she exuded a certain foxy mystique, but now, to my disappointment, she looked just like every other mother I knew. ~ Alex George

To feminine eyes a man's prestige, or his fame, envelops him in a luminous haze which obscures his faults. The triumphs of an aviator, an actor, a football player, an orator are often responsible for the beginning of a love affair. ~ Andre Maurois

this consciousness I'm describing is gendered (and I think it is), it is clearly feminine. The single most damaging and distorting thing that religion has done to faith involves overlooking, undervaluing, and even outright suppressing this interior, ulterior kind of consciousness. So much Western theology has been constructed on a fundamental disfigurement of the mind and reality. In neglecting the voices of women, who are more attuned to the immanent nature of divinity, who feel that eruption in their very bodies, theology has silenced a powerful - perhaps the most powerful - side of God. ~ Christian Wiman

Any words of greeting Leo had intended to say vanished instantly. His gaze traveled slowly over her. She was like one of the exquisite feminine images painted on bandboxes or displayed in print shops. The pristine perfection of her made him long to unwrap her, like a bonbon done up in a neat paper twist.
Leo's silence went on so long that Catherine was forced to speak again. "I'm ready for the outing. Where are we going?"
"I can't remember," Leo said, still staring. ~ Lisa Kleypas

I've got six brothers, so I grew up with all boys, then I moved in with three girls, and the differences were incredible. Living in a very feminine house threw me a bit. The bathroom was unbelievable; it was like a chemist's. ~ Kimberley Nixon

When I started working in a feminist feminine magazine all my life was about rebelling against male authority, which is authority in general is male, so it was rebelling against everything. Everything that was around me made me angry. ~ Isabel Allende