Betty Friedan -- HERSTORY

"All revolutionary movements have been made by intellectuals, the educated. It’s nonsense to fool around with any silliness about whether or not the modern women’s movement was a white, middle-class movement. Absolutely. It was a white, middle-class movement from the beginning, though it always had blacks in it and it always had to do with the problem of poverty, which for women cuts across class lines. The people who could articulate the philosophy of this movement were people who had education, although for some, the education had come in the labor movement and not in college. That’s how movements happen." Betty Friedan

The oral biography of Betty Friedan, who fueled the women’s liberation movement that continues to work toward equal rights for women around the globe.

Betty Friedan -- The Women's Movement

"It isn’t accidental that the modern women’s movement exploded in America because the ideology of the mainstream of the movement is first of all that women are people; and being people, they can and must demand equality of opportunity and their own voice in the decisions of society, human freedom, human dignity, all the rest that is considered our American birthright. And that’s all it was. Everybody had such a hard time thinking this was a movement without an ideology, but the ideology of this movement was no more or no less than the ideology of all human evolution and of American democracy, but applied to women. That’s what was unique, and it was applied to us. We did it for ourselves and not abstractly—grocery baskets to the poor for some other race." Betty Friedan  

The oral biography of Betty Friedan, who fueled the women’s liberation movement that continues to work toward equal rights for women around the globe.

Betty Friedan -- HERSTORY

Betty-Friedan

"Well, they say the women's movement is the largest movement of social change of the last decades and in some ways it’s probably the largest revolution of all time, though it isn’t what anyone else has ever meant by revolution. You have to see it in its own terms. I think we’re only beginning to see the far-flung implications of the change. Also I think the women’s movement is only a step in a larger process of evolution, that it’s a stage. It’s been happening for a long time." Betty Friedan 

The oral biography of Betty Friedan, who fueled the women’s liberation movement that continues to work toward equal rights for women around the globe.