Simone De Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir’s essential masterwork is a powerful analysis of the Western notion of “woman,” and a revolutionary exploration of inequality and otherness. Unabridged in English for the first time, this long-awaited edition reinstates significant portions of the original French text that were cut in the first English translation. Vital and groundbreaking, Beauvoir’s pioneering and impressive text remains as pertinent today as when it was first published, and will continue to provoke and inspire generations of men and women to come.

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.

The Second Sex quotes

Join the club