In truth we need to change the society itself, men as well as women, to change everything.
Simone de BeauvoirWhen I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].
Simone de BeauvoirAs long as the family and the myth of the family ... have not been destroyed, women will still be oppressed.
Simone de BeauvoirObviously, everything has always been defined by the dominant ideology. But the dominant ideology has been able to accept women's literature as well as men's literature. I would say that women have been hindered from creating for a variety of reasons, as Virginia Woolf so admirably explained in A Room of One's Own. When they have created, on the whole they have been recognized. In literature it hasn't been nearly as oppressive as in, say, painting, where even the existence of so many women painters has always been denied.
Simone de Beauvoir