key ideas

• • Sex versus gender – ‘one is not born, but rather becomes a woman’.
  • Otherness – men are perceived as the ‘norm’ and women deviate from this norm.
  • She believed women had for too long lived a life according to rules imposed by men, which she saw as “bad faith”.
• • She developed a notion of gender, in which women conformed to an expected role in society, which men controlled e.g. that they should nurture children, which is learned as girls.
  • This led to the idea of the “Other” in which men defined women as fundamentally different from the norm and inferior to them.
  • Progress could only be made if they became conscious of their own identity, through self-liberation and escaping from a domestic and family role imposed on them by men.