The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.

Feminism or the family? Carried to excess maybe. I have insisted that women cannot be defined solely in those terms. But for a great many women - not all, because we are only beginning to realize and affirm the diversity of women themselves - choosing motherhood makes motherhood itself a liberating choice.

Chosen motherhood is the real liberation. The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different, and the choice to be generative in other ways can at last be made, and is being made by many women now, without guilt.

Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.

Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women's magazines.

It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself.

I realized that what I was saying was threatening, somehow, to the editors of women's magazines. That it threatened the very world they were trying to paint, what I then called the "feminine mystique."