It's true that this is one of the problems which often arises among my radical, revolutionary feminist friends: Do you have to join the system or not? On the one hand, if you don't, you risk being ineffectual. But if you do, from that moment on, you place your feminism at the service of a system which you want to take apart.
Simone de BeauvoirFranรงoise could not help taking a surreptitious glance at Xaviรจre: she gave a start of amazement. Xaviรจre was no longer watching, her head was lowered. Franรงoise barely suppressed a scream. The girl was pressing the lighted end against her skin, a bitter smile curling her lips. It was an intimate, solitary smile, like that of a half-wit; the voluptuous, tortured smile of a woman possessed of some secret pleasure.
Simone de BeauvoirThe torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams.
Simone de BeauvoirI would certainly like to see some young women take up psychoanalysis seriously and reconstruct it from an absolutely new viewpoint.
Simone de BeauvoirThe younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.
Simone de Beauvoir