Condorcet blamed education and social existence, not nature, for women’s supposed deficiencies.

Evidence

Many of the faults for which they are reproached—mediocrity, meanness, shyness, pettiness, laziness, frivolity, and servility—simply express the fact that the horizon is blocked for them. Woman, it is said, is sensual, she wallows in immanence; but first she was enclosed in it. The slave imprisoned in the harem does not feel any morbid passion for rose jelly and perfumed baths: she has to kill time somehow; inasmuch as the woman is stifling in a dismal gynaeceum—brothel or bourgeois home—she will also take refuge in comfort and well-being; moreover, if she avidly pursues sexual pleasure, it is often because she is frustrated; sexually unsatisfied, destined to male brutality, “condemned to masculine ugliness,” she consoles herself with creamy sauces, heady wines, velvets, the caresses of water, sun, a woman friend, or a young lover. If she appears to man as such a “physical” being, it is because her condition incites her to attach a great deal of importance to her animality. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1745 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Only since women have begun to feel at home on this earth has a Rosa Luxemburg or a Mme Curie emerged. They brilliantly demonstrate that it is not women’s inferiority that has determined their historical insignificance: it is their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 289 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Women’s alleged faults arise from their enclosed condition, not innate nature — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1745; Historical insignificance caused women’s inferiority, not the reverse. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 289; People’s supposed deficiencies are historical facts, not natural traits

Broader Connections

• Women’s alleged faults arise from their enclosed condition, not innate nature #corroborates (0.90) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1745
• People’s supposed deficiencies are historical facts, not natural traits #corroborates (0.85)
• Historical insignificance caused women’s inferiority, not the reverse. #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 289