War & Peace Quote by Betty Friedan

Friedan’s line refuses the easy dopamine hit of a clear villain. In one sentence, she reroutes feminist anger away from individual men and toward the machinery that scripts everyone’s role. “Not the enemy” is a tactical choice as much as a moral one: it keeps the movement from collapsing into a gender war and instead frames it as a critique of a system that profits from women’s confinement and men’s emotional truncation.

The sharpness is in “fellow victim,” a phrase that sounds almost charitable until you notice how radically it shifts responsibility. Friedan isn’t letting men off the hook; she’s narrowing the charge. The problem isn’t male nature, it’s male conditioning, and that conditioning is enforced by institutions that look “normal” precisely because they’re everywhere: workplaces built around male breadwinner ideals, media that sells femininity as domestic destiny, marriages structured as unpaid labor contracts. Calling men “victims” exposes how patriarchy recruits them too, training entitlement alongside fragility, authority alongside loneliness.

Context matters: The Feminine Mystique lands in an early-1960s America buzzing with postwar prosperity and suffocating domestic ideology. Friedan’s feminism needed mainstream traction, not just moral clarity. This formulation opens a door for coalition while keeping the target in focus: structural power. It’s also a warning to activists: if your politics requires a scapegoat more than it requires change, you’ll end up preserving the very order you claim to oppose.