Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

I've been reading The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, which is obviously very dated now but still relevant. It's so interesting to see how far we've come and how far we haven't come with all these myths that people put onto women.

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

When I grew up, it was a time when women were just supposed to be cute and not have many opinions. My mother and her friends were quite different. They were all the most beautiful women you've ever seen ... and they were very strong women.

The entrance of the woman with equal rights into practical modern life, her new freedom, her finding herself side by side with men in the streets, offices, professions, factories, sports, and now even in political and military life, is one of those dissolutive phenomena in which, in most cases, it is difficult to perceive anything positive. In essence, all this is simply the renunciation of the woman's right to be a woman.

As women began to challenge their own internalized views of a woman's proper place, their desire and demand for equal status and free choice began to grow exponentially.

Surely women's liberation is a most unpromising panacea. But the movement is working politically, because our sexuality is so confused, our masculinity so uncertain, and our families so beleaguered that no one knows what they are for or how they are sustained.

I would give a woman not more rights, but more privileges. Instead of sending her to seek such freedom as notoriously prevails in banks and factories, I would design specially a house in which she can be free.

The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness.

The media and even, to some degree, leaders of women's organizations don't understand that the women's movement is an absolute part of society now. It is in the consciousness, it is taken for granted. It is part of the way women look at themselves, and women are looked at.

advocating women's rights and greater opportunity for women in the workplace and in every avenue of public life is inconsistent with an insistence on mother taking care of children and housework.

I think, certainly in the more civilized societies, women's roles are growing in power all of the time.

The embattled gates to equal rights indeed opened up for modern women, but I sometimes think to myself; that is not what I meant by freedom, it is only social progress.

We are the women men warned us about.

I was brought up with a very strong sense of what can happen if your society starts to chip away at the small victories women have won for themselves.

I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.

Our daughters were coming of age during a rising consciousness about gender equality. Throughout their school years - from kindergarten through graduate school, 1972 to 1992 - women were starting to take their places in areas traditionally reserved mostly for men.

Men need to understand, and women too, what feminism is really about.

It's only very recently that women have succeeded in entering those professions which, as Muses, they typified for the Greeks.

Stewardesses were a joke to many of us coming of age in the liberated Sixties. They were no joke in the women's movement that liberated us, however.

When I was coming of age, I remembered reading and studying the initial ideas within the feminist movement. There was this idea with my parents' generation that in order to find equality, a woman would need to behave like a man.

Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation... none was more alarming, from a feminist point of view, than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.

It's a little bit late in the day for men to object that women are getting outside their proper sphere.

There aren't a lot of roles written for women who are strong willed.

So women are at the beginning of building a language, and not all women are conscious of it.

I think there has been a great deal of valuable revisionism in women's history.