If women’s role in life is limited solely to housewife/mother, it clearly ends when she can no longer bear more children and the children she has borne leave home.

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.

We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.'

You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.

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.

...women who 'adjust' as housewives, who grow up wanting to be 'just a housewife,' are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps...they ate suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.

The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.