I wish I had written this

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.  

..But when women as well as men emerge from biological living to realize their human selves, those leftover halves of life may become their years of greatest fulfillment.

Then the split in the image will be healed, and daughters will not face that humping-off point and twenty-one or forty-one.  When their mothers' fulfillment makes girls sure they want to be women, they will not have to "beat themselves down" to be feminine; they can stretch and stretch until their own efforts tell them who they are.  They will not need the regard of boy or man to feel alive.  And when women do not need to live through their husbands and children, men will not fear the love and strength of women, nor need another's weakness to prove their own masculinity.  They can finally see each other as they are.  And this may be the next step in human evolution.

Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?  Who knows what women's intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love?  Who knows of the possibilities of love when men and women share not only children, home, and garden, not only the fulfillment of their biological roles, but the responsibilities and passions of the work that creates the human future and full human knowledge of who they are?  It has barely begun, the search of women for themselves.  

Betty Friedan