Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-- 'Is this all?”

Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.

It's a different stage of life, and if you are going to pretend it's youth, you are going to miss it. You are going to miss the surprises, the possibilities, and the evolution that we are just beginning to know about because there are n role models and there are no guideposts and there are no signs.

Aging is not "lost youth" but a new stage of opportunity and strength.

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. There is no other way.

A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex but neither should she adjust to prejudice and discrimination.

Men weren't really the enemy - they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.

You can show more of the reality of yourself instead of hding behind a mask for fear of revealing too much.

Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.

It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.

No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.

Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework--an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self- sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.

The man who is extremely and dangerously hungry has no other interest but food. Capacities not useful for the satisfying of hunger are pushed into the background. 'But what happens to man's desires when there is plenty of food and his belly in chronically filled? At once, other and higher needs emerge and these, rather than the psychological hungers, dominate the organism.

It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself.

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