One Is Not Born a Woman But Rather Becomes a Woman

With this quote Simone wanted to emphasize that a woman becomes a woman not because she was born as such but because she was treated as such from the time she was born. Simone believed that women should seize their lives and make their essence as there is no inherent nature that decrees that men are to be in a certain way as opposed to women.

We would have to infer that Simone’s meaning of being a woman is not physically based at all, hence woman must be understood either as an abstract concept where one feels like a woman, or as a social category.

In this case then one does not have a gender to begin with but it is created later on. So if one is treated like a woman because her physical sex was female then in turn this forms her gender-identity.

We do not have any kind of gendered nature. No pre-conscript in life. We are molded by the environment we live in as simply being is not a free-floating autonomous thing rather it’s what you do with the cards you’ve been dealt.

Get quality help now

Marrie pro writer

Verified writer

Proficient in: Gender

5 (204)

“ She followed all my directions. It was really easy to contact her and respond very fast as well. ”

+84 relevant experts are online

Hire writer

Women have always been treated as inferior and secondary to men as society teaches them to know their place which through a patriarchal ideology leads them to believe that their place is to fulfill a males needs and therefore exist in relation to men, to follow external cues to seek validation of their worth.

Females have historically had far fewer legal rights and as a result less public influence but women must recognize most of the social standards as tightening influences and avoid building up constructs that have been learned through socialization to keep men dominant and only at that point will they have the opportunity to elude their setting and determine their own destiny.

What holds women down are ideologies that are developed in what is still a patriarchal society. In order for women to liberate themselves from these constraints they have got to be made mindful that they are there no different from the male species, and this is often where de Beauvoir’s thoughts are tragically still of pertinence nowadays. Indeed in the event that society’s mores have moved on from those portrayed by de Beauvoir, the basic remains the same. Women ought to not permit themselves to be constrained by other people’s thoughts of what they are or how they ought to carry on or what they ought to to portray in themselves to be.

I interpret it as a statement about gender and not sex, therefore womanhood, being per formative rather than innate. It is something that women learn to perform through both social and self-policing. They learn to become what is understood as, in their social/cultural context, a proper woman.