Girls learn that happiness requires being loved through passive waiting.

Evidence

Prostrate, her face buried in her hands, she experiences the miracle of renunciation: on her knees she climbs to heaven; her abandon in God’s arms assures her an assumption lined with clouds and angels. She models her earthly future on this marvelous experience. The child can also discover it in other ways: everything encourages her to abandon herself in dreams to the arms of men to be transported to a sky of glory. She learns that to be happy, she has to be loved; to be loved, she has to await love. Woman is Sleeping Beauty, Donkey Skin, Cinderella, Snow White, the one who receives and endures. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 706

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to tales, fairy-tale scholarship, and feminist critique of romance narratives; resonates with the passivity motif in A Very Minor Prophet and other texts. — connects to: Puberty converts the girl’s imagined future passivity into a settled bodily fate of waiting — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 832; The passive feminine woman is a social construction imposed on girls — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 691; Girls learn to be positioned in space rather than to constitute it — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 671

Broader Connections

• Puberty converts the girl’s imagined future passivity into a settled bodily fate of waiting #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 832
• The passive feminine woman is a social construction imposed on girls #exemplifies (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 691
• Girls learn to be positioned in space rather than to constitute it #expands (0.70) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 671