There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial...Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and… - Simone de Beauvoir

One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.

Thus, the triumph of patriarchy was neither an accident nor the result of a violent revolution. From the origins of humanity, their biological privilege enabled men to affirm themselves alone as sovereign subjects; they never abdicated this privilege; they alienated part of their existence in Nature and in Woman; but they won it back afterward; condemned to play the role of the Other, woman was thus condemned to possess no more than precarious power: slave or idol, she was never the one who chose her lot.

Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.