Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

Disguise our bondage as we will, 'Tis woman, woman, rules us still.

The veil is the mask of Egyptian women in a power struggle against the dictatorship of men…. The veil gives women more power in a man’s world.

Women aren't more easily swayed by fascism than men, but I believe that their situation makes them in effect more slavish than men.

The patriarchy is alive and well in Egypt and the wider Arab world.

If you're going to have a male-dominant system, to maintain the system, you have to teach men to dominate.

Woman does not belong to herself.... Man has made her a perpetual minor.

Women’s power will be better tolerated when it’s wielded in service of patriarchal interests.

Through the ages, from the beginning of time, I'm certain man has covered woman's face with masks. They are, however, his masks, not hers.

Like all dominant groups, men seek to promote an image of their subordinate's nature that contributes to the preservation of the status quo. For thousands of years, males have seen women not as women could be, but only as males want them to be.

We live in a thinly veiled misogynistic society.

Male supremacy has kept woman down. It has not knocked her out.

Show me a frigid women and, nine times out of ten, I'll show you a little man.

In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.

I had no desire to crash a man's world.

The problem is with men. I know I shouldn't say this, but they've shrouded and hidden women to hide their incompetence.

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.

Men often still expect women to be under their thumb.

Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.

Men's need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it.

Men aren't the way they are because they want to drive women crazy; they've been trained to be that way for thousands of years. And that training makes it very difficult for men to be intimate.

Women are not so well united as to form an Insurrection. They are for the most part wise enough to love their Chains, and to discern how becomingly they fit.

Women's fashion is a subtle form of bondage. It's men's way of binding them. We put them in these tight, high-heeled shoes, we make them wear these tight clothes and we say they look sexy. But they're actually tied up.

The real victims of men are other men.

A woman who does not become the slave of just one man becomes the slave of all men.

From the cradle to the grave she is subject to the power and control of man. Father, guardian, or husband, one conveys her like some piece of merchandise over to the other.