Simone de Beauvoir

Referring to a book—a very irritating one at that—Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, Dorothy Parker wrote: “I cannot be fair about books that treat women as women. 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 antifeminists 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. To reject 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.

I used to get annoyed in abstract discussions to hear men tell me: “You think such and such a thing because you’re a woman.” But I know my only defense is to answer, “I think it because it is true,” thereby eliminating my subjectivity; it was out of the question to answer, “And you think the contrary because you are a man,” because it is understood that being a man is not a particularity; a man is in his right by virtue of being man; it is the woman who is in the wrong.

thinks with her hormones. Man vainly forgets that his anatomy also includes hormones and testicles.

She is determined and differentiated in relation to man, while he is not in relation to her; she is the inessential in front of the essential. He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other

woman discovers herself as the inessential and never turns into the essential, it is because she does not bring about this transformation herself. Proletarians say “we.” So do blacks. Positing themselves as subjects, they thus transform the bourgeois or whites into “others.” Women—except in certain abstract gatherings such as conferences—do not use “we”; men say “women,” and women adopt this word to refer to themselves; but they do not posit themselves authentically as Subjects.

Now, woman has always been, if not man’s slave, at least his vassal; the two sexes have never divided the world up equally; and still today, even though her condition is changing, woman is heavily handicapped. In no country is her legal status identical to man’s, and often it puts her at a considerable disadvantage. Even when her rights are recognized abstractly, long-standing habit keeps them from being concretely manifested in customs. Economically, men and women almost form two castes; all things being equal, the former have better jobs, higher wages, and greater chances to succeed than their new female competitors;

world still belongs to men: men have no doubt about this, and women barely doubt it.

George Bernard Shaw sums it up: The white American relegates the black to the rank of shoe-shine boy, and then concludes that blacks are only good for shining shoes

when an individual or a group of individuals is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he or they are inferior

Life in itself is neither good nor
evil, it is the place of good and evil,
according to what you make it.”

—Montaigne