Simone De Beauvoir Feminist Quotes

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.

Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.

Everything that men have written about women should be viewed with suspicion, because they are both judge and party,’ wrote Poulain de la Barre,11 a little-known seventeenth-century feminist.

it is not women's inferiority that has determined their historical insignificance: it is their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority

For a woman to be taken as seriously as a man she must be three times as effective. Happily, this is not difficult.--Simone de Beauvoir

the oppressor always attempts to diminish those he oppresses; man intentionally refuses women their chances.

Destiny is not what limits her.

One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion

Once we give the sense of contradiction its due, we see that genuinely feminist philosophical work ... not only has the potential to revolutionalize philosophy but actually demands a reappraisal, from the ground up, of what it is to be a human—a thinking and sexed—being.

Existia um livro que eu acreditava ter me feito vislumbrar quem seria no futuro: Mulherzinhas, de Louisa May Alcott

Le sens de la toilette féminine est manifest: il s'agit de se 'parer' et se parer c'est s'offrir; les feministes hétérosexuelles se sont montrées naguère sur ce point aussi intransiseantes que les lesbiennes: elles refusaient de faire d'elles-même une marchandise qu'on exhibem elles adoptaient des tailleurs et des feutres secs; les robes ornées, décolletées leurs semblaient le symbole de l'ordre social qu'elles combattaient.

[Women] have no history, religion of their own, and they are not like the proletarian solidarity work and interests (…) They live dispersed among men, attached by housing, labor, economic, social condition in some men – fathers or husbands – more closely than other women

How long will the Gilgamesh Project – the quest for immortality – take to complete? A hundred years? Five hundred years? A thousand years? When we recall how little we knew about the human body in 1900, and how much knowledge we have gained in a single century, there is cause for optimism. Genetic engineers have recently managed to double the average life expectancy of Caenorhabditis elegans worms.12 Could they do the same for Homo sapiens? Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, who would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse ageing processes.13 A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die of some accident, but a-mortal, meaning that in the absence of fatal trauma their lives could be extended indefinitely). Whether or not Project Gilgamesh succeeds, from a historical perspective it is fascinating to see that most late-modern religions and ideologies have already taken death and the afterlife out of the equation. Until the eighteenth century, religions considered death and its aftermath central to the meaning of life. Beginning in the eighteenth century, religions and ideologies such as liberalism, socialism and feminism lost all interest in the afterlife. What, exactly, happens to a Communist after he or she dies? What happens to a capitalist? What happens to a feminist? It is pointless to look for the answer in the writings of Marx, Adam Smith or Simone de Beauvoir. The only modern ideology that still awards death a central role is nationalism. In its more poetic and desperate moments, nationalism promises that whoever dies for the nation will for ever live in its collective memory. Yet this promise is so fuzzy that even most nationalists do not really know what to make of it. The

Time for an exercise, which I shall call 'Say It Out Loud With Miranda'. Please take a moment to sit back, breathe and intone: 'I am taking myself seriously as a woman.' Note your response. If you're reading this on the bus, or surreptitiously in the cinema, or in any other public scenario, then please note other people's responses. (If you are male, and teenaged, and reading this in a room with other teenage boys, then for your own safety I advise you not to participate.) The rest of you – what comes to mind when you say those words? Is it a fine lady scientist, a ballsy young anarchist with tights on her head or a feminist intellectual from the 1970s nose-down in Simone de Beauvoir? Or is it what I think my friend meant when she said 'woman' which is really 'aesthetic object'. Clothes-horse. Show pony. General beautiful piece of well-groomed stuff that's lovely to look at? I reckon, to my great dismay, that she did indeed mean the latter. And in saying that I don't take myself seriously in this regard her assessment of me is absolutely bang-on. If taking oneself seriously as a woman means committing to a like of grooming, pumicing, pruning and polishing one's exterior for the benefit of onlookers, then I may as well heave my unwieldy rucksack to the top of a bleak Scottish hill and make my home there under a stone, where I'll fashion shoes out of mud and clothes out of leaves.

Until the eighteenth century, religions considered death and its aftermath central to the meaning of life. Beginning in the eighteenth century, religions and ideologies such as liberalism, socialism and feminism lost all interest in the afterlife. What, exactly, happens to a Communist after he or she dies? What happens to a capitalist? What happens to a feminist? It is pointless to look for the answer in the writings of Marx, Adam Smith or Simone de Beauvoir. The only modern ideology that still awards death a central role is nationalism. In its more poetic and desperate moments, nationalism promises that whoever dies for the nation will forever live in its collective memory. Yet this promise is so fuzzy that even most nationalists do not really know what to make of it.

INTRODUCTION TO GENDER AND SOCIETY The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir A classic analysis of the Western conception of the woman. Feminism Is for Everybody by bell hooks A primer about the power and potential of feminist action. We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Feminism redefined for the twenty-first century. QUEER THEORY AND INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISM Gender Trouble by Judith Butler A classic, and groundbreaking, text about gender and the boundaries of identity. Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein A 1990s-era memoir of transition and nonbinary identity. This Bridge Called My Back ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa A collection of essays about the intersections between gender, class, sexuality, and race. Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde A landmark collection of essays and speeches by a lauded black lesbian feminist. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston A memoir of growing up as a Chinese American woman. MODERN HISTORY How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor A history of the Combahee River Collective, a group of radical black feminists operating in the 1960s and 1970s. And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts Investigative reportage about the beginning of the AIDS crisis. A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski An LGBT history of the United States, from 1492 to the present. CONTEMPORARY QUESTIONS Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus by Vanessa Grigoriadis An exploration of the effects of the sexual revolution in American colleges. The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin A book about the shifting power dynamics between men and women. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay Essays about the author’s experiences as a woman and our cultural understanding of womanhood. All the Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister An investigation into the lives of twenty-first-century unmarried women. GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN FICTION Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown A groundbreaking lesbian coming-of-age novel, originally published in 1973. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin A classic of morality and desire, set in 1950s Paris, about an American man and his relationship with an Italian bartender. Angels in America by Tony Kushner A Pulitzer Prize–winning play about the Reagan-era AIDS epidemic. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson A coming-of-age and coming-out novel about a woman growing up in an evangelical household.

[Simone de Beauvoir] provoked and disturbed feminists with her famous comment about her relationship with Sartre: 'There has been one undoubted success in my life: my relationship with Sartre.' I can almost understand. She adapts her whole being to the situation. She will not be hurt because she will change herself like a sculptor working in clay. She labors for it, sacrifices for it. It is an achievement, a consummately creative act: she invents herself in it.

About halfway through high school, I abandoned my childhood religious upbringing. Not surprisingly, given my experience with my father, I was drawn irresistibly to the feminist movement, devouring all the classic books from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex to Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, and many more. Later, while living in Europe, I stumbled across L’Abri, the ministry of Francis Schaeffer in Switzerland. (We had lived in Europe when I was young, and I had gone back.) At L’Abri, for the first time I discovered that there exists something called Christian apologetics, and I was stunned. I had no idea that Christianity could be supported by logic and reasons and good arguments. Eventually I found the arguments persuasive and I reconverted to Christianity. Yet that was only the beginning of a decades-long process of spiritual and psychological healing from my father’s abuse.

Meantime, other “feminist bibles”had appeared, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex being the best. Which brings me to something no one believes. When I wrote The Golden Notebook it never occurred to me I was writing “a feminist bible.”The sixties feminists were not the first in the arena. “The Woman Question”dated from the fifteenth century. In communist circles in the forties and fifties feminist issues were much discussed. But the second sentence of The Golden Notebook is: “‘The point is,’said Anna, ‘as far as I can see, everything is cracking up.’“This is what I thought The Golden Notebook was about, as its “structure”said. Everything was cracking up, and by now it is easily seen that we live in a fast-fragmenting culture. So I became “a feminist icon.”But what had I said in The Golden Notebook? That any kind of singlemindedness, narrowness, obsession, was bound to lead to mental disorder, if not madness. (This may be observed most easily in religion and politics.)