Women’s resigned prudence made them obstacles to their own class emancipation.

Evidence

But she also engenders a sterile prudence; women always try to keep, to fix, to arrange rather than to destroy and reconstruct anew; they prefer compromises and exchanges to revolutions. In the nineteenth century, they constituted one of the biggest obstacles to the effort of women workers’ emancipation: for every Flora Tristan or Louise Michel, how many utterly timid housewives begged their husbands not to take any risk! — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1744

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: Beauvoir’s claim that housewives blocked working-class women’s emancipation complicates linear ‘women have always supported liberation’ narratives.
• XREF: connects to: Women’s class loyalties fragment them more than shared sex unites them. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 277; Some Egyptian elite women rejected women’s liberation because it exposed their own powerlessness; Women’s otherness lacks the historical before that enables other groups to rebel — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 58 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Elite Egyptian women resisted their own liberation because it threatened their sense of superiority #exemplifies (0.82) — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 854
• Some Egyptian elite women rejected women’s liberation because it exposed their own powerlessness #exemplifies (0.80)
• Women’s oppression differs from class oppression because women share solidarity with their oppressors #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 147
• Women’s otherness lacks the historical before that enables other groups to rebel #expands (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 58
• The underprivileged internalize their class position as personal deficiency rather than systemic failure. #expands (0.72) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2215