Female lateness and contrariness are deliberate protests against a life of waiting

Evidence

There is much feminine behavior that has to be interpreted as protest. We have seen that the woman often cheats on her husband by defiance and not for pleasure; she will be absentminded and a spendthrift on purpose because he is methodical and careful. Misogynists who accuse woman of “always being late” think she lacks “the sense of exactitude.” In truth, we have seen how docilely she adapts to the demands of time. Being late is deliberate. Some flirtatious women think that this is the way to excite the desire of the man, who will thus attach more importance to their presence; but above all, in keeping a man waiting for a few minutes, the woman protests against this long wait that is her own life. In one sense, her whole existence is a waiting since she is enclosed in the limbo of immanence and contingency and her justification is always in someone else’s hands: she is waiting for a tribute, men’s approval, she is waiting for love, she is waiting for gratitude and her husband’s or lover’s praise; she expects to gain from them her reasons to exist, her worth, and her very being. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1753

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the immanence/transcendence apparatus introduced in earlier chapters; women’s ‘waiting’ is the experiential texture of immanence. — connects to: Puberty converts the girl’s imagined future passivity into a settled bodily fate of waiting — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 832; Life’s structure of waiting follows from the temporal nature of the for-itself — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1254
• SEED: Essay angle: the gendered politics of punctuality as resistence — lateness as micro-protest, and how ‘always late’ stereotypes invert a structural condition.

Broader Connections

• Puberty converts the girl’s imagined future passivity into a settled bodily fate of waiting #expands (0.82) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 832
• Life’s structure of waiting follows from the temporal nature of the for-itself #qualifies (0.72) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1254