The Blog of Awesome Women/ Betty’s Personal Sheroes

From a 1984 radio interview: “I admire Barbara Jordan [and] Martha Griffiths, the lieutenant governor of Michigan…I have in some ways, great admiration for Indira Gandhi…After the winning of the vote in 1920, until my Feminine Mystique in 1963, women’s history was almost blotted out of the national consciousness. We didn’t study it in school. So, the women that are now, in my opinion, heroines of history before me: Mary Wollstonecraft in England, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Fuller, Susan B. Anthony, [and] Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the United States, and their like in other countries…Eleanor Roosevelt, of course…I criticized, but also admired a great deal; Margaret Mead, Abigail Adams, the wife of John Adams, one of the first Presidents of the United States…I always adored Collette, and the idea of Collette and the writings of Collette. I love the imagery of Madame de Stael, who would be doing all the things at once the way women have to do them. She would be having a pedicure, having her nails polished, nursing her baby at her breast, dictating a menu to her cook, waving goodbye to her lover going off to the Napoleonic Wars and writing at the same time, writing her stories, her memoirs…I love that image. But the images of women we are beginning o have now, we are only [now] discovering that are as a result of the women’s movement. We, who have made the women’s movement, had to create ourselves and help each other create ourselves as a new kind of woman.”

This quote from Betty Friedan was taken from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.