Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

The notion that somehow women are wildly different infuriates me.

Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.

A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.

The thing I can say about Japan is they were progressive for a country that is very male dominant.

A woman's experience is different from a man's in virtually every respect, including how she is treated by the media.

I don't know why femininity should be associated with weakness. Women should be free to express who they are without thinking, 'I need to act like a man, or I need to tone it down to be successful.' That's a very good way to keep women down.

There is a sense that women are more anchored than men in our society.

I am particularly distressed when people in the public eye who influence our culture perpetuate sexism.

Many of us were raised with the 'be a lady' thing, and all those kind of things that can be used against you and strip you out of opportunity and power.

We're really taught to be followers from a very young age - men lead and women follow.

One thing is for sure: that women are far more compassionate, empathetic, sensitive, and emotional in comparison to men.

The way the world sees women vs. men is a subject that really interests me.

They [men and women] have both been, and men especially, have been told that how they naturally are is bad.

We do what we see and what we're told. If we haven't been raised in a family or in a community where women are treated as full human beings and men don't have to be superior anymore, we continue to think that it's not only natural but inevitable.

We know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the creation of the next generation.

I wanted to know why people follow rules blindly, or why girls had to act a certain way and boys didn't. Why could boys ask girls out and girls not ask guys out? Why did girls have to shave their legs and guys didn't? Why did society, like, set everything up the way they did? My whole adolescence was full of unanswered whys. Because they never got answered, I just kept lighting fires everywhere - metaphorically speaking.

Modern-era feminists believe that there is no inherent difference in men and women, that it's all the way they're raised.

I was certainly never conscious of 'playing the woman.' I would not have approved of that. It is not a winning tactic. I operated in the world as I found it, and it was a man's world.

I wouldn't call myself a feminist, because I think there are differences between men and women.

It would be futile to attempt to fit women into a masculine pattern of attitudes, skills and abilities and disastrous to force them to suppress their specifically female characteristics and abilities by keeping up the pretense that there are no differences between the sexes.

Because women have been marginalised, they're more likely to behave like immigrants and continue to push themselves forward in order to avoid falling through the cracks, but I don't think a happy ending comes from matriarchy.

Men and women aren't too dissimilar.

Boys will be boys. And even that wouldn't matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls.

Over the years, the most ponderous problem for women has been that men think that men and women are very different. Another of our massive problems is that women also think that men and women are very different.

Women didn't go to school when they were young because parents preferred to send their brothers. The women couldn't access loans in their own right because the banks sought the approval of a male dependent.