The Second Sex

Religions forged by men reflect this will for domination: they found ammunition in the legends of Eve and Pandora.

was willed in heaven and profitable on earth.

Lawmakers, priests, philosophers, writers, and scholars have gone to great lengths to prove that women’s subordinate condition

passive, alienated, and lost, is prey to a foreign will, cut off from his transcendence, robbed of all worth.

Refusing to be the Other, refusing complicity with man, would mean renouncing all the advantages an alliance with the superior caste confers on them. Lord-man

They live dispersed among men, tied by homes, work, economic interests, and social conditions to certain men—fathers or husbands—more closely than to other women.

“The passage from the state of Nature to the state of Culture is defined by man’s ability to think biological relations as systems of oppositions; duality, alternation, opposition, and symmetry, whether occurring in defined or less clear form, are not so much phenomena to explain as fundamental and immediate givens of social reality.”

Man thinks himself without woman. Woman does not think herself without man.”

of meaning without reference to the male.