“Claiming that feminism killed home cooking is not just shaming, it’s wildly inaccurate from a historical standpoint...As should be obvious to anyone who’s peeked at a cookbook from the late 1940s or early 1950s that promotes ingredients like sliced hot dogs and canned tomato soup, we’ve been eating processed crap since long before feminism. Yet the idea of the feminist abandoning her children to TV dinners while she rushes off to a consciousness-raising group is unshakable.”
“The Feminine Mystique has been credited — or blamed — for destroying, single-handedly and almost overnight, the 1950s consensus that women’s place was in the home. Friedan’s book ‘pulled the trigger on history,’ in the words of Future Shock author Alvin Toffler.”
“What if the terror a girl faces at twenty-one, when she must decide who she will be, is simply the terror of growing up--growing up, as women were not permitted to grow before? What if the terror a girl faces at twenty-one is the terror of freedom to decide her own life, with no one to order which path she will take, the freedom and the necessity to take paths women before were not able to take? ”
“Perhaps women who have made it as 'exceptional' women don't really identify with other women. For them, there are three classes of people: men, other women, and themselves; their very status as exceptional women depends on keeping other women quiet, and not rocking the boat.”
—Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. 5th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001. Print. 383.
