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4.11 AVERAGE
4.11 AVERAGE
Beauvoir said that only when writing The Second Sex had she understood that the vast majority of women simply did not have the choices that she had had and that women are, in fact, defined and treated as the second sex by a male-oriented society (Beauvoir, 1976).
This is an existentialist feminist philosophical book. So, it's super interesting and intelligent. And it's a very good book, in fact. Especially for one written in 1940s Europe. This review contains a lot of quotes, but I just had to share them. I also like re-reading my reviews so these quotes are mostly for me to come back to and think about again later.
If the ‘vast majority of women’, as Beauvoir thinks, are oppressed everywhere, why do they often accept their situation? She thinks that women, like all ‘economically and politically dominated peoples anywhere’ first have to realise that they are in a disadvantaged and unfair position, and then they have to think it is possible to change it. Beauvoir presents women are shaped by their position in society to the point that often they do not even realise that they are oppressed.
"… those [women] who have the most to lose from taking a stand, that is, women like me who have carved out a successful sinecure or career, have to be willing to risk insecurity – be it merely ridicule – in order to gain self-respect. And they have to understand that those of their sisters who are most exploited will be the last to join them. A worker’s wife, for example, is least free to join the movement. She knows that her husband is more exploited than most feminist leaders and that he depends on her role as the housewife-mother to survive himself. Anyway, for all these reasons, women did not move."
What, Beauvoir asks, does it mean to be a woman? Beauvoir rejects the essentialist view, which contradicts the fundamental existentialist claim that existence precedes essence, that the free choices of our consciousness determine what we are. In this sense, her famous formula ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ (Le deuxième sexe II: 13/267) is for her, a philosophical platitude. But Beauvoir also rejects the anti-essentialist view: Being a woman is, at least in our world, not a casual fact, irrelevant to a person’s core identity - any more than is being Jewish or black or old. Nor is being a woman simply a matter of one’s own choice: precisely how you are a woman may be up to you, but the fact that you are a woman and that this fact makes a great deal of difference is imposed on you by your situation. On that view, being a woman could limit my freedom only to the extent that I chose it to be a limitation. Beauvoir, however, recognizes that some features of my situation may well be obstacles to my freedom no matter how I choose. It does not follow that such a feature must always be an obstacle: we can imagine a situation in which being a woman is of no more significance than having blue eyes. But the fact is that in the current historical situation, being a woman does restrict your freedom, no matter how you choose to live your life. This is a significant revision of the naïve existentialist conception of freedom.
"[W]hat is a woman? ‘Tota mulier in utero: she is a womb,’ some say. Yet speaking of certain women, the experts proclaim, ‘They are not women’, even though they have a uterus like the others. Everyone agrees there are females in the human species; today, as in the past, they make up about half of humanity; and yet we are told that ‘femininity is in jeopardy’; we are urged, ‘Be women, stay women, become women.’ So not every female human being is necessarily a woman; she must take part in this mysterious and endangered reality known as femininity. Is femininity secreted by the ovaries? Is it enshrined in a Platonic heaven? Is a frilly petticoat enough to bring it down to earth? Although some women zealously strive to embody it, the model has never been patented. It is typically described in vague and shimmering terms borrowed from a clairvoyant’s vocabulary. If there is no such thing today as femininity, it is because there never was. Does the word ‘woman’, then, have no content? It is what advocates of Enlightenment philosophy, rationalism or nominalism vigorously assert: women are, among human beings, merely those who are arbitrarily designated by the word ‘woman’."
"My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, whoever we are, should be considered as human beings.’ But nominalism is a doctrine that falls a bit short; and it is easy for anti-feminists to show that women are not men. Certainly woman like man is a human being; but such an assertion is abstract; the fact is that every concrete human being is always uniquely situated. Rejecting the notions of the eternal feminine, the black soul or the Jewish character is not to deny that there are today Jews, blacks or women: this denial is not a liberation for those concerned, but an inauthentic flight. Clearly, no woman can claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex."
"Woman has ovaries and a uterus; such are the particular conditions that lock her in her subjectivity; some even say she thinks with her hormones. Man vainly forgets that his anatomy also includes hormones and testicles. He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world that he believes he apprehends in all objectivity, whereas he considers woman’s body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that particularises it. ‘The female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’ Aristotle said. ‘We should regard women’s nature as suffering from natural defectiveness.’ And St Thomas in his turn decreed that woman was an ‘incomplete man’, an ‘incidental’ being. This is what the Genesis story symbolises, where Eve appears as if drawn from Adam’s ‘supernumerary’ bone, in Bossuet’s words. Humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being."
Even when a woman's rights are recognised abstractly, long-standing habit keeps them from being concretely manifested in customs.
And she continues,
"To prove women’s inferiority, antifeminists began to draw not only, as before, on religion, philosophy and theology, but also on science: biology, experimental psychology, and so forth. At most they were willing to grant ‘separate but equal status’ to the other sex. That winning formula is most significant: it is exactly that formula the Jim Crow laws put into practice with regard to black Americans; this so-called egalitarian segregation served only to introduce the most extreme forms of discrimination. This convergence is in no way pure chance: whether it is race, caste, class or sex reduced to an inferior condition, the justification process is the same."
A must-read. Iconic. You don't necessarily have to be a seasoned existentialist to be super interested or convinced by what she says.
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex became a crucial work for the feminist movement that developed from the 1960s onwards, although it was first published in 1949. Beauvoir was not only aware of the delay of its impact, but also regarded it as consistent with the inevitable obstacles that women encounter in understanding their own situation.
This is an existentialist feminist philosophical book. So, it's super interesting and intelligent. And it's a very good book, in fact. Especially for one written in 1940s Europe. This review contains a lot of quotes, but I just had to share them. I also like re-reading my reviews so these quotes are mostly for me to come back to and think about again later.
If the ‘vast majority of women’, as Beauvoir thinks, are oppressed everywhere, why do they often accept their situation? She thinks that women, like all ‘economically and politically dominated peoples anywhere’ first have to realise that they are in a disadvantaged and unfair position, and then they have to think it is possible to change it. Beauvoir presents women are shaped by their position in society to the point that often they do not even realise that they are oppressed.
"… those [women] who have the most to lose from taking a stand, that is, women like me who have carved out a successful sinecure or career, have to be willing to risk insecurity – be it merely ridicule – in order to gain self-respect. And they have to understand that those of their sisters who are most exploited will be the last to join them. A worker’s wife, for example, is least free to join the movement. She knows that her husband is more exploited than most feminist leaders and that he depends on her role as the housewife-mother to survive himself. Anyway, for all these reasons, women did not move."
What, Beauvoir asks, does it mean to be a woman? Beauvoir rejects the essentialist view, which contradicts the fundamental existentialist claim that existence precedes essence, that the free choices of our consciousness determine what we are. In this sense, her famous formula ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ (Le deuxième sexe II: 13/267) is for her, a philosophical platitude. But Beauvoir also rejects the anti-essentialist view: Being a woman is, at least in our world, not a casual fact, irrelevant to a person’s core identity - any more than is being Jewish or black or old. Nor is being a woman simply a matter of one’s own choice: precisely how you are a woman may be up to you, but the fact that you are a woman and that this fact makes a great deal of difference is imposed on you by your situation. On that view, being a woman could limit my freedom only to the extent that I chose it to be a limitation. Beauvoir, however, recognizes that some features of my situation may well be obstacles to my freedom no matter how I choose. It does not follow that such a feature must always be an obstacle: we can imagine a situation in which being a woman is of no more significance than having blue eyes. But the fact is that in the current historical situation, being a woman does restrict your freedom, no matter how you choose to live your life. This is a significant revision of the naïve existentialist conception of freedom.
"[W]hat is a woman? ‘Tota mulier in utero: she is a womb,’ some say. Yet speaking of certain women, the experts proclaim, ‘They are not women’, even though they have a uterus like the others. Everyone agrees there are females in the human species; today, as in the past, they make up about half of humanity; and yet we are told that ‘femininity is in jeopardy’; we are urged, ‘Be women, stay women, become women.’ So not every female human being is necessarily a woman; she must take part in this mysterious and endangered reality known as femininity. Is femininity secreted by the ovaries? Is it enshrined in a Platonic heaven? Is a frilly petticoat enough to bring it down to earth? Although some women zealously strive to embody it, the model has never been patented. It is typically described in vague and shimmering terms borrowed from a clairvoyant’s vocabulary. If there is no such thing today as femininity, it is because there never was. Does the word ‘woman’, then, have no content? It is what advocates of Enlightenment philosophy, rationalism or nominalism vigorously assert: women are, among human beings, merely those who are arbitrarily designated by the word ‘woman’."
"My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, whoever we are, should be considered as human beings.’ But nominalism is a doctrine that falls a bit short; and it is easy for anti-feminists to show that women are not men. Certainly woman like man is a human being; but such an assertion is abstract; the fact is that every concrete human being is always uniquely situated. Rejecting the notions of the eternal feminine, the black soul or the Jewish character is not to deny that there are today Jews, blacks or women: this denial is not a liberation for those concerned, but an inauthentic flight. Clearly, no woman can claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex."
"Woman has ovaries and a uterus; such are the particular conditions that lock her in her subjectivity; some even say she thinks with her hormones. Man vainly forgets that his anatomy also includes hormones and testicles. He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world that he believes he apprehends in all objectivity, whereas he considers woman’s body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that particularises it. ‘The female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’ Aristotle said. ‘We should regard women’s nature as suffering from natural defectiveness.’ And St Thomas in his turn decreed that woman was an ‘incomplete man’, an ‘incidental’ being. This is what the Genesis story symbolises, where Eve appears as if drawn from Adam’s ‘supernumerary’ bone, in Bossuet’s words. Humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being."
Even when a woman's rights are recognised abstractly, long-standing habit keeps them from being concretely manifested in customs.
And she continues,
"To prove women’s inferiority, antifeminists began to draw not only, as before, on religion, philosophy and theology, but also on science: biology, experimental psychology, and so forth. At most they were willing to grant ‘separate but equal status’ to the other sex. That winning formula is most significant: it is exactly that formula the Jim Crow laws put into practice with regard to black Americans; this so-called egalitarian segregation served only to introduce the most extreme forms of discrimination. This convergence is in no way pure chance: whether it is race, caste, class or sex reduced to an inferior condition, the justification process is the same."
A must-read. Iconic. You don't necessarily have to be a seasoned existentialist to be super interested or convinced by what she says.
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex became a crucial work for the feminist movement that developed from the 1960s onwards, although it was first published in 1949. Beauvoir was not only aware of the delay of its impact, but also regarded it as consistent with the inevitable obstacles that women encounter in understanding their own situation.
Пелевин писал, что в этом мире сосуществуют два совершенно разных типа людей, видящих мир с совершенно разных позиций, испытывающих различные коллективные галлюцинации, но вынужденные договориться сосуществовать, будучи обречёнными никогда не понять друг друга в сколь бы то ни было значимой доле.
Бовуар, опираясь на весь цвет современной ей французской турбо-интеллектуальной тусовки, несомненно, герой_ка своего времени. Однако, вызывающая своеобразный снисходительный смех - ну нельзя же так запросто откреститься от психоанализа, а потом на полном серьёзе мучительно обсасывать роль фаллоса, как стержня, поддерживающего личность.
Нельзя так вольно снимать сливки с источников - ежу ведь видно, что в "Записках" Цезаря те абзацы, на которые она ссылается, это явная вставка. Ну не может так склинить автора, чтобы описывая тактику и стратегию, внезапно посвятить три абзаца многожёнству и промискуитету в Галлии.
А также нельзя убегать от того, что за тобой не гонится.
Бовуар, опираясь на весь цвет современной ей французской турбо-интеллектуальной тусовки, несомненно, герой_ка своего времени. Однако, вызывающая своеобразный снисходительный смех - ну нельзя же так запросто откреститься от психоанализа, а потом на полном серьёзе мучительно обсасывать роль фаллоса, как стержня, поддерживающего личность.
Нельзя так вольно снимать сливки с источников - ежу ведь видно, что в "Записках" Цезаря те абзацы, на которые она ссылается, это явная вставка. Ну не может так склинить автора, чтобы описывая тактику и стратегию, внезапно посвятить три абзаца многожёнству и промискуитету в Галлии.
А также нельзя убегать от того, что за тобой не гонится.
Probably any issue anyone has ever had in life is discussed in this book and everyone should read it, not only because FEMINISM but mostly because it's about society and civilisation as a whole.
Having bought the book for a class, I will freely admit to reading only parts of the book, and in particular only those that had been assigned by the instructor. Nonetheless, the parts I read show a clear purpose on describing the Feminine Reality that we see today, and Beauvoir shows how through various disciplines, Woman, the Second Sex, was given the constructed reality of being subordinate to Man. Her goal is to give man and woman a look into the Feminine Reality.
This is a giant tome. 800+ pages. Tried to keep in mind the audience. This book was published in France in 1949. Ms. Beauvoir's research and sources are impressive. She presents facts and stories from history, sociology, psychology, philosophy, literature and first-person accounts. Overall, the information was depressing. How far we have come... I think!
slow-paced
informative
reflective
slow-paced
BRUH WHAT IN THE PICK ME GIRL IS THIS SHIT.
the first half of this book was excellent. i won't lie. i thoroughly enjoyed it.
but then ms girl fell down a rabbit hole of pedophilia and demonizing women for literally existing through this fake ass lense of 'but not me tho sucks for yall ahahah'
anyway. don't read this past page 415. that's five days of my life i am never getting back and i feel literally so uncomfortable at her views on sexuality. also ms girl literally said that getting into an interracial relationship as a white person is basically self harm. get the fuck out of here i fucking hate her.
the first half of this book was excellent. i won't lie. i thoroughly enjoyed it.
but then ms girl fell down a rabbit hole of pedophilia and demonizing women for literally existing through this fake ass lense of 'but not me tho sucks for yall ahahah'
anyway. don't read this past page 415. that's five days of my life i am never getting back and i feel literally so uncomfortable at her views on sexuality. also ms girl literally said that getting into an interracial relationship as a white person is basically self harm. get the fuck out of here i fucking hate her.
“One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.”
“Is femininity secreted by the ovaries? Is it enshrined in a Platonic heaven? Is a frilly petticoat enough to bring it down to earth?”
“Merely stating the problem suggests an immediate answer to me. It is significant that I pose it. It would never occur to a man to write a book on the singular situation of males in humanity.”
“He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world that he believes he apprehends in all objectivity, whereas he considers woman's body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that particularises it.”
“Every subject posits itself as a transcendence concretely, through projects; it accomplishes its freedom only by perpetual surpassing towards other freedoms; there is no other justification for present existence than its expansion towards an indefinitely open future.”
“Every individual concerned with justifying his existence experiences his existence as an indefinite need to trascend himself. But what singularly defines the situation of woman is that being, like all humans, an autonomous freedom, she discovers and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as Other.”
“when a girl climbs trees, it is, according to him, to be the equal of boys: he does not imagine that she likes to climb trees.”
“Clearly man wants woman's enslavement when fantasising himself as a benefactor, liberator or redeemer; if Sleeping Beauty is to be awakened she must be sleeping;”
“the woman is the Other in which the subject surpasses himself without being limited, who opposes him without negating him; she is the Other who lets herself be annexed to him without ceasing to be the Other. And for this she is so necessary to man's joy and his triumph that if she did not exist, men would have had to invent her…woman is necessary as long as she remains an Idea into which man projects his own transcendence she is detrimental as objective reality, existing for herself and limited to herself,”
“all the writers we have considered expect, in Malraux's words, woman to cherish in them this
"incomparable monster' known to themselves alone.”
“… the pervasive overall fear the girl feels concerning her insides, a fear that will often be perpetuated throughout her whole life as a woman. She has a deep concern about everything happening inside her; from the start, she is far more opaque to herself and more profoundly inhabited by the worrying mystery of life than the male.”
“To lose confidence in one's body is to lose confidence in one's self.”
“Because her body is suspect to her, she scrutinises it with anxiety and sees it as sick: it is sick.”
“She closes herself up in fierce solitude: she refuses to reveal to those around her the hidden self that she considers to be real self and that is in fact an imaginary character: she plays at being a dancer like Tolstoy's Natasha, or a saint like Marie Lenéru, or simply that singular wonder that is herself. There is still an enormous difference between this heroine and the objective face that her parents and friends recognise in her. She is also convinced that she is misunderstood: her relationship with herself becomes even more passionate: she becomes intoxicated with her isolation, feels different, superior, exceptional: she promises that the future will take revenge on the mediocrity of her present life. From this narrow and petty existence she escapes by dreams. She has always loved to dream: she gives herself up to this penchant more than ever; she uses poetic clichés to mask a universe that intimidates her, she sanctifies the male sex with moonlight, rose-coloured clouds, velvet nights; she turns her body into a marble, jasper or mother-of-pearl temple; she tells herself foolish fairy tales. She sinks so often into such nonsense because she has no grasp on the world; if she had to act she would be forced to see clearly, whereas she can wait in the fog.”
“she does not accept the destiny nature and society assign to her; and yet, she does not actively repudiate it: she is too divided internally to enter into combat with the world; she confines herself to escaping reality or to contesting it symbolically.”
“It is clear that all the faults for which the adolescent girl is reproached merely express her situation. It is a painful condition to know one is passive and dependent at the age of hope and ambition, at the age where the will to live and to take a place in the world intensifies; woman learns at this conquering age that no conquest is allowed her, that she must disavow herself, that her future depends on men's good offices. New social and sexual aspirations are awakened but they are condemned to remain unsatisfied; all her vital or spiritual impulses are immediately barred. It is understandable that she should have trouble establishing her balance. Her erratic mood, her tears and her nervous crises are less the result of a physiological fragility than the sign of her deep maladjustment. However, this situation that the girl flees by a thousand inauthentic paths is also one that she sometimes assumes authentically. Her shortcomings make her irritating; but her unique virtues sometimes make her astonishing. Both have the same origin. From her rejection of the world, from her unsettled waiting, and from her nothingness, she can create a springboard for herself and emerge then in her solitude and her freedom.”
“She finds an image of the solitude of her soul in the secrecy of forests and the tangible figure of transcendence in the vast horizons of the plains; she is herself this limitless land, this summit jutting towards the sky;”
“she will also find in this decor an expression of her personality; it is she who has chosen, made and hunted down furniture and knick-knacks, who has aesthetically arranged them in a way where symmetry is important; they reflect her individuality while bearing social witness to her standard of living. Her home is thus her earthly lot, the expression of her social worth and her intimate truth. Because she does nothing, she avidly seeks herself in what she has.”
“Few tasks are more similar to the torment of Sisyphus than those of the housewife…She does nothing; she only perpetuates the present.”
“It is a crisis that pushes the girl from childhood to adolescence; an even more acute crisis thrusts her into adult life.”
“Logic in masculine hands is often violence.”
“If it is said men oppress women, the husband reacts indignantly; he feels oppressed: he is; but in fact, it is the masculine code, the society developed by males and in their interest, that has defined the feminine condition in a form that is now for both sexes a source of distress.”
“Men universally forbid abortion; but they accept it individually as a convenient solution”
“A new existence is going to manifest itself and justify her own existence, she is proud of it; but she also feels like the plaything of obscure forces, she is tossed about, assaulted. What is unique about the pregnant woman is that at the very moment her body transcends itself, it is grasped as immanent: it withdraws into itself in nausea and discomfort; it no longer exists for itself alone and then becomes bigger than it has ever been.”
“The mother can have her reasons for wanting a child, but she cannot give to this other — who tomorrow is going to be — his raisons d’être; she engenders him in the generality of his body, not in the specificity of his existence.”
“The son will be a chief, a leader of men, a soldier, a creator; he will impose his will on the face of the earth and his mother will share in his immortality; the houses she did not build, the countries she did not explore, the books she did not read, he will give to her. Through him she will possess the world: but on condition that she possesses her son.”
“The mother does not greet a daughter as a member of the chosen caste: she seeks a double in her. She projects onto her all the ambiguity of her relationship with her self; and when the alterity of this alter ego affirms itself, she feels betrayed.”
“The mother's attitude to her grown daughter is very ambivalent: she seeks a god in her son; in her daughter, she finds a double.”
“The world does not appear to the woman as a 'set of tools' halfway between her will and her goals, as Heidegger defines it: on the contrary, it is a stubborn, indomitable resistance; it is dominated by fate and run through with mysterious caprices. No mathematics can make an equation out of this mystery of a spot of blood that changes into a human being in the mother's womb, no machine can rush it or slow it down; she experiences the resistance of a duration that the most ingenious machines fail to divide or multiply; she experiences it in her flesh that is subjected to the rhythm of the moon, and that the years first ripen and then corrode.”
“A woman is shut up in a kitchen or a boudoir and one is surprised her horizon is limited: her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.”
“To do great things, today's woman needs above all forgetfulness of self: but to forget oneself one must first be solidly sure that one has already found oneself.”
“Is femininity secreted by the ovaries? Is it enshrined in a Platonic heaven? Is a frilly petticoat enough to bring it down to earth?”
“Merely stating the problem suggests an immediate answer to me. It is significant that I pose it. It would never occur to a man to write a book on the singular situation of males in humanity.”
“He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world that he believes he apprehends in all objectivity, whereas he considers woman's body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that particularises it.”
“Every subject posits itself as a transcendence concretely, through projects; it accomplishes its freedom only by perpetual surpassing towards other freedoms; there is no other justification for present existence than its expansion towards an indefinitely open future.”
“Every individual concerned with justifying his existence experiences his existence as an indefinite need to trascend himself. But what singularly defines the situation of woman is that being, like all humans, an autonomous freedom, she discovers and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as Other.”
“when a girl climbs trees, it is, according to him, to be the equal of boys: he does not imagine that she likes to climb trees.”
“Clearly man wants woman's enslavement when fantasising himself as a benefactor, liberator or redeemer; if Sleeping Beauty is to be awakened she must be sleeping;”
“the woman is the Other in which the subject surpasses himself without being limited, who opposes him without negating him; she is the Other who lets herself be annexed to him without ceasing to be the Other. And for this she is so necessary to man's joy and his triumph that if she did not exist, men would have had to invent her…woman is necessary as long as she remains an Idea into which man projects his own transcendence she is detrimental as objective reality, existing for herself and limited to herself,”
“all the writers we have considered expect, in Malraux's words, woman to cherish in them this
"incomparable monster' known to themselves alone.”
“… the pervasive overall fear the girl feels concerning her insides, a fear that will often be perpetuated throughout her whole life as a woman. She has a deep concern about everything happening inside her; from the start, she is far more opaque to herself and more profoundly inhabited by the worrying mystery of life than the male.”
“To lose confidence in one's body is to lose confidence in one's self.”
“Because her body is suspect to her, she scrutinises it with anxiety and sees it as sick: it is sick.”
“She closes herself up in fierce solitude: she refuses to reveal to those around her the hidden self that she considers to be real self and that is in fact an imaginary character: she plays at being a dancer like Tolstoy's Natasha, or a saint like Marie Lenéru, or simply that singular wonder that is herself. There is still an enormous difference between this heroine and the objective face that her parents and friends recognise in her. She is also convinced that she is misunderstood: her relationship with herself becomes even more passionate: she becomes intoxicated with her isolation, feels different, superior, exceptional: she promises that the future will take revenge on the mediocrity of her present life. From this narrow and petty existence she escapes by dreams. She has always loved to dream: she gives herself up to this penchant more than ever; she uses poetic clichés to mask a universe that intimidates her, she sanctifies the male sex with moonlight, rose-coloured clouds, velvet nights; she turns her body into a marble, jasper or mother-of-pearl temple; she tells herself foolish fairy tales. She sinks so often into such nonsense because she has no grasp on the world; if she had to act she would be forced to see clearly, whereas she can wait in the fog.”
“she does not accept the destiny nature and society assign to her; and yet, she does not actively repudiate it: she is too divided internally to enter into combat with the world; she confines herself to escaping reality or to contesting it symbolically.”
“It is clear that all the faults for which the adolescent girl is reproached merely express her situation. It is a painful condition to know one is passive and dependent at the age of hope and ambition, at the age where the will to live and to take a place in the world intensifies; woman learns at this conquering age that no conquest is allowed her, that she must disavow herself, that her future depends on men's good offices. New social and sexual aspirations are awakened but they are condemned to remain unsatisfied; all her vital or spiritual impulses are immediately barred. It is understandable that she should have trouble establishing her balance. Her erratic mood, her tears and her nervous crises are less the result of a physiological fragility than the sign of her deep maladjustment. However, this situation that the girl flees by a thousand inauthentic paths is also one that she sometimes assumes authentically. Her shortcomings make her irritating; but her unique virtues sometimes make her astonishing. Both have the same origin. From her rejection of the world, from her unsettled waiting, and from her nothingness, she can create a springboard for herself and emerge then in her solitude and her freedom.”
“She finds an image of the solitude of her soul in the secrecy of forests and the tangible figure of transcendence in the vast horizons of the plains; she is herself this limitless land, this summit jutting towards the sky;”
“she will also find in this decor an expression of her personality; it is she who has chosen, made and hunted down furniture and knick-knacks, who has aesthetically arranged them in a way where symmetry is important; they reflect her individuality while bearing social witness to her standard of living. Her home is thus her earthly lot, the expression of her social worth and her intimate truth. Because she does nothing, she avidly seeks herself in what she has.”
“Few tasks are more similar to the torment of Sisyphus than those of the housewife…She does nothing; she only perpetuates the present.”
“It is a crisis that pushes the girl from childhood to adolescence; an even more acute crisis thrusts her into adult life.”
“Logic in masculine hands is often violence.”
“If it is said men oppress women, the husband reacts indignantly; he feels oppressed: he is; but in fact, it is the masculine code, the society developed by males and in their interest, that has defined the feminine condition in a form that is now for both sexes a source of distress.”
“Men universally forbid abortion; but they accept it individually as a convenient solution”
“A new existence is going to manifest itself and justify her own existence, she is proud of it; but she also feels like the plaything of obscure forces, she is tossed about, assaulted. What is unique about the pregnant woman is that at the very moment her body transcends itself, it is grasped as immanent: it withdraws into itself in nausea and discomfort; it no longer exists for itself alone and then becomes bigger than it has ever been.”
“The mother can have her reasons for wanting a child, but she cannot give to this other — who tomorrow is going to be — his raisons d’être; she engenders him in the generality of his body, not in the specificity of his existence.”
“The son will be a chief, a leader of men, a soldier, a creator; he will impose his will on the face of the earth and his mother will share in his immortality; the houses she did not build, the countries she did not explore, the books she did not read, he will give to her. Through him she will possess the world: but on condition that she possesses her son.”
“The mother does not greet a daughter as a member of the chosen caste: she seeks a double in her. She projects onto her all the ambiguity of her relationship with her self; and when the alterity of this alter ego affirms itself, she feels betrayed.”
“The mother's attitude to her grown daughter is very ambivalent: she seeks a god in her son; in her daughter, she finds a double.”
“The world does not appear to the woman as a 'set of tools' halfway between her will and her goals, as Heidegger defines it: on the contrary, it is a stubborn, indomitable resistance; it is dominated by fate and run through with mysterious caprices. No mathematics can make an equation out of this mystery of a spot of blood that changes into a human being in the mother's womb, no machine can rush it or slow it down; she experiences the resistance of a duration that the most ingenious machines fail to divide or multiply; she experiences it in her flesh that is subjected to the rhythm of the moon, and that the years first ripen and then corrode.”
“A woman is shut up in a kitchen or a boudoir and one is surprised her horizon is limited: her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.”
“To do great things, today's woman needs above all forgetfulness of self: but to forget oneself one must first be solidly sure that one has already found oneself.”
informative
reflective
slow-paced