Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them.

If society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled.

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

During the ages, no rebellion has been of like importance with that of Woman against the tyranny of Church and State; none has had its far reaching effects.

[T]he great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment.

Every movement takes a century to make its mark. The women’s movement is only 40 some years old.

You may hiss as much as you please, but women will get their rights anyway. You can’t stop us, neither

If you have a slave around the house how can you expect to make a revolution outside it? The problem for women is that if we try to be free, then we naturally become lonely, because so many women are willing to become slaves, and men usually prefer that.

Womanpower means the self determination of women, and that means all the baggage of paternalistic society will have to be thrown overboard.

I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.

Let women issue a declaration of independence sexually, and absolutely refuse to cohabit with men until they are acknowledged as equals in everything, and the victory would be won in a single week.

Our women have minds too. Let them show their faces to the world, and see it with their eyes…Don’t be afraid. Change is essential, so much so that, if need be, we are prepared to sacrifice lives for its sake.

I remember when the feminist movement started. I was in Edmonton. There was no feminist movement in Edmonton.

Feminism, like Boston, is a state of mind. It is the state of mind of women who realize that their whole position in the social order is antiquated, as a woman cooking over an open fire with heavy iron pots would know that her entire housekeeping was out of date.

For a woman emancipation means corruption.

Knowing the horror that most women have of anything approaching irreverence, the Bible has been called out to play the part of a scarecrow on the rich fields of men’s monopolies…Men have had the management of all things human for six thousand years…Has the result been so eminently successful that we need dread a little change?

We always had a lot of admiration for feminists who were out there trying to change things for the better for women, who were trying to find equality in the workplace and at home.

Feminism liberated women from the natural dignity of their sex and turned them into inferior men.

It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.

When you say you're not a feminist, if feminism hadn't existed, and you didn't live in a feminist world, you wouldn't be saying that, because you'd be too busy scrubbing out the toilets in back while cooking up your husband's tea and dying in childbirth at the age of 34.

It is often asserted that as woman has always been man's slave--subject--inferior--dependent, under all forms of government and religion, slavery must be her normal condition. This might have some weight had not the vast majority of men also been enslaved for centuries to kings and popes, and orders of nobility, who, in the progress of civilization, have reached complete equality.

I demanded more rights for women because I know what women had to put up with.

The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion.

Nature says women are human beings, men have made religions to deny it. Nature says women are human beings, men cry out no!

The message of women's liberation is that women can love each other and ourselves against our degrading education.