Simone de Beauvoir

Alice Schwarzer

Interviews clarify de Beauvoir's opinions on feminism, the condition of women, her relationship with Sartre, politics, maternity, and love

Conversations with Simone de Beauvoir

After The Second Sex

Riley

Abeer A.

They live dispersed among the males, attached through resi- dence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain - fithers or husbands- more firmly than they are to other women. If they belong to the bourgeoisie, hey feel solidarity with men of that class, not with proletarian women; if they are white, their allegiance is to white men, not to Negro women. 

Macy HB

Like Woolf, and a striking number of other great women writers, Beauvoir was childless…she regarded motherhood as a threat to her integrity. 

And the burden of free love, Beauvoir would discover, was grossly unequal for a woman and for a man.

embrace femininity, emotion etc, do not aspire to be manlike 

The defiant position that American women occupy proves they are haunted by the sentiment of their own femininity. 

A man never begins by positing himself as an individual of a certain sex.

Humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being.

As bourgeois women, they are in solidarity with bourgeois men and not with women proletarians; as white women, they are in solidarity with white men and not with black women…The tie that binds her to her oppressors is unlike any other.

One of the benefits that oppression secures for the oppressor is that the humblest among them feels superior: the most mediocre of males believes himself a demigod next to women.

For all those suffering from an inferiority complex, there is a miraculous liniment; no one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or more disdainful, then a man anxious about his own virility.

After The Second Sex quotes

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