Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.

On ne na:"t pas femme: on le devient. One is not born a woman: one becomes a woman.

We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually it's a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start.

If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through "the eternal feminine," and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman?

What worries me is that the debate about gender differences still seems to polarize nature vs. nurture, with some in the social sciences and humanities wanting to assert that biology plays no role at all, apparently unaware of the scientific evidence to the contrary

In the theory of gender I began from zero. There is no masculine power or privilege I did not covet. But slowly, step by step, decade by decade, I was forced to acknowledge that even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity.

The differences between the sexes are the single most important fact of human society.

So, if anatomy is destiny then testosterone is doom.

My father always defined my gender to my brothers. He'd say, 'This is your sister; you must take care of her.'

I find the question of whether gender differences are biologically determined or socially constructed to be deeply disturbing.

I see myself as quite feminine. But many people seem to think differently about that; sometimes people mistake me for a man. In Paris I often hear 'bonjour monsieur'.

Ah, well, do I wish that we lived in a world where gender didn't figure so prominently? Of course. Do I even think about myself as a woman when I go to make art? Of course not.

As you get older it's more confusing. Suddenly, there's more pressure to fit in to your assigned gender.

I didn't read much SF as a kid - I was a total Tolkien geek - but I started reading Samuel Delany and Angela Carter and Ursula LeGuin in high school, and I was definitely taken with the notion that here was a literature that could explore various notions of gender identity and how it affects the culture at large.

In a family of all girls, I was always the 'boy' in my mind - the protector, the masculine one. No one would ever have to worry about me.

What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine.

We have been very conditioned by the cultures that we come from and are usually very identified with the particular gender that we happen to be a member of.

Parenting girls makes you quite gender-conscious - it's almost impossible to fight the power of pink. It's not such a terrible thing to want to be a princess when you're five, but it would be nice if there were some other options.

Physical, emotional, psychological and social differences [between the sexes] exist and dare not be disregarded.

I grew up in a very patriarchal family. And I believe that I like being a woman. I act behaving like a woman.

Because gender can be uncomfortable, there are easy ways to close this conversation. Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes - that sort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not.

I feel like I think like a woman because I grew up with my mother and my sister, so I've just been programmed to think like a girl.

Growing up, I was not told that there were women's areas of preoccupation or male ones.

There are those who believe that the existence of gender differences at very early ages is evidence that these differences are biological or generic in origin.

I think our society has sort of built this gender binary, and the way we've said it exists does not really exist in nature.