I Didn't Want To Be

Whatever I Wrote Was Heretical. It Offended The Editors Of The Women's Magazines.

The Feminine Mystique Has Succeeded In Burying Millions Of American Women Alive.

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.

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.

Over And Over Again, Stories In Women's Magazines Insist That Women Can Know Fulfillment Only At The Moment Of Giving Birth To A Child. They Deny The Years When She Can No Longer Look Forward To Giving Birth, Even If She Repeats The Act Over And Over Again. In The Feminine Mystique, There Is No Other Way For A Woman To Dream Of Creation Or Of The Future. There Is No Other Way She Can Even Dream About Herself, Except As Her Children's Mother, Her Husband's Wife.