Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

If there's a woman who is exhibiting her femininity or performing her femininity, it's always seen as meant to pull in the male gaze.

Growing up with three boys in a heavily male-dominated world, I especially needed to express myself as a woman.

A woman is a woman!

I'm very proud of being a woman, and as a woman, I don't even like the word 'feminism' because when I hear that word, I associate it with women trying to pretend to be men, and I'm not interested in trying to pretend to be a man. I don't want to embrace manhood; I want to embrace my womanhood.

I don't know what I am if I'm not a woman.

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

Funny business, a woman's career: the things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman. It's one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we've got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we've had or wanted.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.

Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

You think that being a girl is degrading, but secretly, you'd love to know what it's like, wouldn't you?

I have a few girlfriends, but nearly all my friends are guys. I don't think I ever wore girl clothes. I wore baggy jeans, baggy T-shirts, sweaters, just to avoid the looks that everyone gives you when you're a young female in the world.

One is not born a woman, but becomes one.

As someone who has always felt at times pretty genderless because of my size, it interests me to challenge ideas of prejudice and femininity, and what it is to be a woman.

I know how it feels to be a woman because I am a woman. And I won't be classified as just a man.

You always have this fear in a movie of just being somebody's woman.

I had felt uncomfortable as a woman my whole life.

I started to think of Grace of Monaco as a metaphor for women in general.

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'.

I was raised to be a girl Michelangelo.

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.

And I think a woman should find it a joy to be female because God made both male and female.

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.

What does it mean, being a woman?