Beauvoir and Woolf

Simone de Beauvoir’s The second Sex and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s own, both discuss the problems that women face. Women are mistreated and put down by the men who view themselves as being far above women. Beauvoir says in The Second Sex, “ Men need not bother themselves with alleviating the pains and the burdens that physiologically are women’s lot, since these are ‘intended by nature’; men use them as a pretext for increasing the misery of the feminine lot still further, for instance by refusing to grant to woman any right to sexual pleasure, by making her work like a beast of burden.” She means that men don’t have to worry about the things that women go through and only use these pains to treat women as “the other sex”.

                        Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, talks about how women depend on men because the men provide the women with everything and that women need the permission of men for anything that they want to do. The women have to take care of the children and raise them while the men go out to work to make money and provide for the family. Woolf mentions how “women must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. She means that with all the things that a woman must do around the house there is no time to write and also that they need money in order to do so which can only be provided by men.