War & Peace Quote by Betty Friedan

Friedan refuses the easy villain. In a movement often caricatured as man-hating, she pivots to a sharper, less comfortable diagnosis: patriarchy doesn’t just dominate from the outside, it recruits from the inside. Calling men “fellow victims” is both strategic and provocative. Strategic, because it broadens the coalition and denies critics the pleasure of a gender war. Provocative, because it shifts responsibility onto women themselves, daring her audience to admit how thoroughly the culture has trained them to police their own ambitions.

The subtext is psychological warfare in reverse: the most durable oppression is the kind you volunteer to maintain. Friedan’s phrase “women’s denigration of themselves” doesn’t mean individual low self-esteem so much as a socially manufactured script women are pressured to perform - self-erasure dressed up as virtue, dependency marketed as romance, smallness mistaken for safety. The “enemy” is internalized contempt: the quiet, daily bargain where a woman preemptively shrinks her wants to avoid punishment, ridicule, or isolation.

Context matters. Writing in the wake of The Feminine Mystique and amid second-wave feminism’s push into workplaces, politics, and bedrooms, Friedan is arguing for liberation as re-education. Men are damaged too by rigid roles; they inherit the mask of authority and the emotional illiteracy that comes with it. Still, the line carries a deliberate sting: dismantling the system requires more than blaming its visible beneficiaries. It requires refusing the script even when refusal costs social approval.