Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex (1949)

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To "catch" a husband is an art; to "hold" him is a job.

Simone de Beauvoir
One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.

Simone de Beauvoir
To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.

Simone de Beauvoir
Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.
Quoted by Beauvoir as the watchword of the new feminism

Simone de Beauvoir
The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.

Simone de Beauvoir
Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one being active and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one.

Simone de Beauvoir
It must be said in addition that the men with the most scrupulous respect for embryonic life are also those who are most zealous when it comes to condemning adults to death in war.

Simone de Beauvoir
Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself.

Simone de Beauvoir
Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.

Simone de Beauvoir
Christian ideology has contributed no little to the oppression of woman.

Simone de Beauvoir
The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project.

Simone de Beauvoir
It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.

Simone de Beauvoir
Christianity gave eroticism its savor of sin and legend when it endowed the human female with a soul.

Simone de Beauvoir
It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.

Simone de Beauvoir
The innumerable conflicts that set men and women against one another come from the fact that neither is prepared to assume all the consequences of this situation which the one has offered and the other accepted.

Simone de Beauvoir
Between women love is contemplative; caresses are intended less to gain possession of the other than gradually to re-create the self through her; separateness is abolished, there is no struggle, no victory, no defeat; in exact reciprocity each is at once subject and object, sovereign and slave; duality become mutuality.

Simone de Beauvoir
Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.

Simone de Beauvoir
When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.

Simone de Beauvoir
Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.

Simone de Beauvoir
A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.

Simone de Beauvoir
There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.

Simone de Beauvoir
The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation.

Simone de Beauvoir
This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons hitherto brought forward in explanation of this fact has seemed adequate.

Simone de Beauvoir
But women do not say 'We', except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say 'women', and women use the same word in referring to themselves.

Simone de Beauvoir
If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through "the eternal feminine," and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman?

Simone de Beauvoir
Women's mutual understanding comes from the fact that they identify themselves with each other; but for the same reason each is against the others.

Simone de Beauvoir
The present enshrines the past—and in the past all history has been made by men.

Simone de Beauvoir
When an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior. But the significance of the verb to be must be rightly understood here; it is in bad faith to give it a static value when it really has the dynamic Hegelian sense of "to have become." Yes, women on the whole are today inferior to men; that is, their situation affords them fewer possibilities. The question is: should that state of affairs continue?
Many men hope that it will continue; not all have given up the battle.

Simone de Beauvoir
Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise.

Simone de Beauvoir
All the idols made by man, however terrifying they may be, are in point of fact subordinate to him, and that is why he will always have it in his power to destroy them.

Simone de Beauvoir