Girls seem precocious because the adult female stage itself remains more infantile

Evidence

A man specialized in his profession is separated from the infant stage by years of training; paternal activities are profoundly mysterious for the little boy; the man he will be later is barely sketched in him. On the contrary, the mother’s activities are accessible to the little girl. “She’s already a little woman,” say her parents, and often she is considered more precocious than the boy: in fact, if she is closer to the adult stage, it is because this stage traditionally remains more infantile for the majority of women. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 696

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely paradigm-shifting reversals of the ‘girls mature faster’ truism: the apparent precocity is an artifact of the adult female stage being arrested at an infantile level — the whole critique of woman’s immanence in one sentence.
• XREF: Points forward to the book’s own immanence/transcendence apparatus and contrasts with the Freudian/Hegelian stage theories Beauvoir is overturning. — connects to: Women confined to the male-created world remain in an infantile condition.; Woman’s infantilization results from never having emerged as a subject before others — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1742

Broader Connections

• Women confined to the male-created world remain in an infantile condition. #qualifies (0.85)
• Woman’s infantilization results from never having emerged as a subject before others #expands (0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1742