Woman’s exclusion from men’s labor and thought, not her weakness, explains her oppression

Evidence

What was harmful for her was that, not becoming a labor partner for the worker, she was excluded from the human Mitsein: that woman is weak and has a lower productive capacity does not explain this exclusion; rather, it is because she did not participate in his way of working and thinking and because she remained enslaved to the mysteries of life that the male did not recognize in her an equal; by not accepting her, once she kept in his eyes the dimension of other, man could only become her oppressor. The male will for expansion and domination transformed feminine incapacity into a curse. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 167

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Mitsein (shared being-with-others) as the criterion woman was excluded from, a core concept.
• XREF: Mitsein echoes Heidegger’s Mitsein and Hegel’s master-slave dialectic that Beauvoir reworks elsewhere in the book. — connects to: Women’s defenselessness functions as the legal title of their oppression; Adler explains woman’s inferiority complex through her total situation, not anatomy — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 124; Women’s oppression derives from family and patrimony, not biological sex — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 190 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Women’s exclusion from authority stems from learned passivity, not innate inferiority #corroborates (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 673
• Women’s oppression derives from family and patrimony, not biological sex #qualifies (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 190