“To be gazed at is one danger; to be manhandled is another. Women as a rule are unfamiliar with violence, they have not been through the tussles of childhood and youth as have men; and now the girl is laid hold of, swept away in a bodily struggle in which the man is the stronger. She is no longer free to dream, to delay, to maneuver: she is in his power, at his disposal.”
Bk. 2, Pt.. 3, Ch. 3: Sexual initiation. p. 427 (1974 Vintage edition)
The Second Sex (1949)
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Simone de Beauvoir 152
French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, po… 1908–1986Related quotes
Wressley of the Foreign Office.
Plain Tales from the Hills (1888)
“She regarded men as creatures made for women to dispose of.”
About Madeleine, in Ch. XI
Democracy: An American Novel (1880)
Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Preponderance of Egoism, p. 133
page 81 https://books.google.ca/books?id=obXWAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA81
The Apprentice (1996)
Cassandra (1860)
Context: Women dream till they have no longer the strength to dream; those dreams against which they so struggle, so honestly, vigorously, and conscientiously, and so in vain, yet which are their life, without which they could not have lived; those dreams go at last. All their plans and visions seem vanished, and they know not where; gone, and they cannot recall them. They do not even remember them. And they are left without the food of reality or of hope.
Later in life, they neither desire nor dream, neither of activity, nor of love, nor of intellect. The last often survives the longest. They wish, if their experiences would benefit anybody, to give them to someone. But they never find an hour free in which to collect their thoughts, and so discouragement becomes ever deeper and deeper, and they less and less capable of undertaking anything.
“If she chuses to set free one or two of my slaves she is to have full power to do so.”
1790s, Last Will and Testament (1798)
