“What Friedan gave to the world was, "the problem that has no name." She not only named it but dissected it. The advances of science, the development of labor-saving appliances, the development of the suburbs: all had come together to offer women in the 1950s a life their mothers had scarcely dreamed of, free from rampant disease, onerous drudgery, noxious city streets. But the green lawns and big corner lots were isolating, the housework seemed to expand to fill the time available, and polio and smallpox were replaced by depression and alcoholism. All that was covered up in a kitchen conspiracy of denial...[i]nstead the problem was with the mystique of waxed floors and perfectly applied lipstick.”

“You can have it all, just not all at the same time.”

“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.”

“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 of movies of forty-five years ago! Hepburn and Tracy!”

“Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.”

“Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.”

“Neither woman nor man lives by work or love alone.... The human self defines itself and grows through love and work: All psychology before and after Freud boils down to that.”

“It is easier to live life through someone else than to become complete yourself.”

“When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.”

“We couldn't possibly know where it would lead but we knew it had to be done.”

“We couldn't possibly know where it would lead but we knew it had to be done.”