The restrictions that education and custom impose on women limit her grasp of the universe; when the struggle to claim a place in this world gets too rough, there can be no question of tearing oneself away from it; one must first emerge within it in sovereign solitude if one wants to try to grasp it anew: what women primarily lack is learning from the practice of abandonment and transcendence, in anguish and pride.
– Simone de Beauvoir (translation Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier), ‘Chapter 14: The independent woman’, Extracts from The Second Sex (Vintage Feminism, 2015), p.67
Featured image by Sasha Andersen. The picture shows a closeup of a sculpture by Danish artist Eva Steen Christensen.
SASHA KIRSTINE 