Simone de Beauvoir’s two-book tome is exactly that—a tome. Over 700 pages of the history of women and how society has perceived us from the very beginning, it is at times depressing, funny, and even sometimes outdated. Written in the 1940s, it is quite sad to see how little has changed. Instead of the usual post I write about a book’s summary, I am going to go with 15 of the best quotes from the book to give people who haven’t read it—and probably won’t, because of its length—the overall idea of this classic feminist text. I know 15 probably seems like a big number in this sense, but believe me, it was difficult to choose only 15 from all the parts I had highlighted!
1. “I am interested in the fortunes of the individual as defined not in terms of happiness but in terms of liberty.”
2. “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 absolute truth.”
3. “From the moment when woman is free, she has no other destiny than what she freely creates for herself.”
4. “Few myths have been more advantageous to the ruling caste than the myth of woman: it justifies all privileges and even authorizes their abuse. Men need not bother themselves with alleviating the pains and the burdens that physiologically are women’s lot, since these are ‘intended by Nature’; men use them as pretext for increasing the misery of the feminine lot still further, for instance by refusing to grant to woman any right to sexual pleasure, by making her work like a beast of burden.”
5. “Then she will be a full human being, when ‘the infinite bondage of woman is broken, when she will live in and for herself, man—hitherto detestable—having let her go free.’”
6. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
7. “And, actually, it is not by increasing her worth as a human being that she will gain value in men’s eyes; it is rather by modeling herself upon their dreams.”
8. “It has been said that marriage diminishes man, which is often true; but almost always it annihilates woman…The tragedy of marriage is not that it fails to assure woman the promised happiness—there is no such thing as assurance in regard to happiness—but that it mutilates her…”
9. “And she is appalled at the narrow limitations life has imposed upon her.”
10. “What am I? Nothing. What would I be? Everything.” and “I am my own heroine.” –Marie Bashkirtsev
Although these two quotes are used by Beauvoir and not actually by her, I thought they were too powerful to leave out.
11. “That changes nothing fundamental in the matter: the individual is still not free to do as she pleases in shaping the concept of femininity. The woman who does not conform devaluates herself sexually and hence socially.”
12. “How could woman ever have had genius when they were denied all possibility of accomplishing a work of genius—or just a work?”
13. “The free woman is just being born.”
14. “It must be repeated once more that in human society nothing is natural and that woman, like much else, is a product elaborated by civilization. The intervention of others in her destiny is fundamental: if this action took a different direction, it would produce a quite different result. Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself.”
15. “Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear.”
Beauvoir focused on economic freedom, but also liberty in general, as woman’s salvation. Although more and more women in the Western world are free to do as they choose (still under the influence of the patriarchy, of course) many–too many–women are still trapped without the freedom to choose anything. Not where they live, what they will do, or even how many children they want to have. And this is what should be present in our minds as we read her writing.
Women aren’t free until EVERY woman is free.
