Female attempts to dominate men are defensive responses to imposed oppression

Evidence

The woman confined to immanence tries to keep man in this prison as well; thus the prison will merge with the world, and she will no longer suffer from being shut up in it: the mother, the wife, the lover, are the jailers; society codified by men decrees that woman is inferior: she can only abolish this inferiority by destroying male superiority. She does her utmost to mutilate, to dominate man, she contradicts him, she denies his truth and values. But in doing that, she is only defending herself; neither immutable essence nor flawed choice has doomed her to immanence and inferiority. They were imposed on her. All oppression creates a state of war. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1966

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that oppression creates war-like conflict echoes Sartre’s master-slave dialectic and Hegel’s struggle for recognition, central to Beauvoir’s Continental grounding. — connects to: Women’s defenselessness functions as the legal title of their oppression; Women who wielded feudal power were admired only by imitating male cruelty — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 207; Beaten down by masculine logic, wives respond with silence, tears, or violence — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1299 (+3 more)
• DEFINE: Immanence is here defined functionally as the state imprisonment in which woman is confined and from which she tries to escape — the entry of the conclusion chapter’s key terms.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to ‘On Sacrifice’ framing: oppression as a state of war echoes how ritualized domination systems stabilize through structured conflict.