Kept women interiorize dependence on their wealthy benefactors and adopt conservative values.

Evidence

Very often the kept woman interiorizes her dependence; subjected to public opinion, she accepts its values; she admires the “fashionable world” and adopts its customs; she wants to be regarded according to bourgeois standards. She is a parasite of the rich bourgeoisie, and she adheres to its ideas; she is “right thinking”; in former times she would readily send her daughters to a convent school, and as she got older, she even went to Mass and openly converted. She is on the conservatives’ side. She is too proud to have made her place in this world to want to change. The struggle she wages to “arrive” does not dispose her to feelings of brotherhood and human solidarity; she paid for her success with too much slavish compliance to sincerely wish for universal freedom. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1688

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Beauvoir’s broader thesis of woman as the Other who interiorizes male-defined existence; also echoes Gramsci’s hegemony — the dominated adopting the dominator’s worldview. — connects to: Women’s economic dependence makes them define themselves through men’s desires. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 298; Rising black middle-class incomes fostered women’s pursuit of idealized femininity — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 514; Female purity shifted from inner moral conflict to a dogmatic value per se — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 220

Broader Connections

• Women’s economic dependence makes them define themselves through men’s desires. #corroborates (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 298
• Rising black middle-class incomes fostered women’s pursuit of idealized femininity #expands (0.75) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 514
• Female purity shifted from inner moral conflict to a dogmatic value per se #expands (0.70) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 220