Simone de Beauvoir Women Quotations

The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them.

The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.

She was trying to get rid of a religious hangover.

it is not the inferiority of women that has caused their historical insignificance; it is rather their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority.

To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity.

The American woman's inequality with men is proved by her defiant attitude.

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.

The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams.

One can hardly tell women that washing up saucepans is their divine mission, [so] they are told that bringing up children is their divine mission. But the way things are in the world, bringing up children has a great deal in common with washing up saucepans.

The women of today are in a fair way to dethrone the myth of femininity; they are beginning to affirm their independence in concrete ways; but they do not easily succeed in living completely the life of a human being.