Simone de Beauvoir

Everything that has been written by men

about women should be viewed with suspicion,

because they are both judge and party.

—

Woman is losing herself, woman is lost.”

The queens, as Beauvoir remarks, “were neither male nor female: they were sovereigns.”

When the res‍­ults were pos‍­ted, Sartre was first and Beau‍­voir second (she was the ninth woman who had ever passed), and that, forever, was the order of pre‍­ced‍­ence—Adam be‍­fore Eve—in their cre‍­ation myth as a couple.

religions—even when they worship a goddess—as the inventions of men to perpetuate their dominion.

dismisses religions—even when they worship a goddess—as the inventions of men to perpetuate their dominion

The black, the Jew, and the woman, she concluded, were objectified as the Other in ways that were both overtly despotic and insidious, but with the same result: their particularity as human beings was reduced to a lazy, abstract cliché

One is not born, but rather becomes, woman

But first, what is a woman? “Tota mulier in utero: she is a womb,” some say. Yet speaking of certain women, the experts proclaim, “They are not women,” even though they have a uterus like the others.

Woman is the negative, to such a point that any determination is imputed to her as a limitation, without reciprocity.