Protectiveness Has Often Muffled The Sound Of

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.

We Need To See Men And Women As Equal Partners, But Its 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!

What Had Really Caused The Women's Movement Was The Additional Years Of Human Life. At The Turn Of The Century Women's Life Expectancy 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.

I Never Set Out To Write A Book To Change Women's Lives, To Change History. It's Like, 'who, Me?' Yes, Me. I Did It. And I'm Not That Different From Other Women. Maybe My Power And Glory Was That I Could Speak My Truth As A Woman And It Was The Truth Of Every Woman.

The Only Way For A Woman, As For A Man, To Find Herself, To Know Herself As A Person, Is By Creative Work Of Her Own.