Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Simone de Beauvoir was a writer on feminism and existentialism. She also wrote novels. Her book "The Second Sex" is a feminist classic. It is based on the idea that, while men and women may have different tendencies, each person is unique, and it is culture which has enforced a uniform set of expectations of what is "feminine," as contrasted to what is "human" which is equated with what is male. Beauvoir argued that women can free themselves, through individual decisions and collective action.

 

Selected Simone de Beauvoir Quotations

• One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

• To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue none the less to exist to him also; mutually recognizing each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other.

 

• Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.

• This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.

• Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.

• The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concreted situation.

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

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

• 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?

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

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Source:

From Jone Johnson Lewis,Your Guide to Women's History.