Notes for myself:

Biological Data:
“Woman, the most distinguished of females, is also the most fragile, the one who experiences her destiny the most dramatically and who distinguishes herself the most significantly from her male.”
“These anomalies are absolutely not a victory of the individual over the tyranny of the species: there is no way to escape that tyranny because it enslaves individual life at the same time that it nourishes it.”
“Woman is her body as man is his, but her body is something other than her.”
“It is often said that older women form ’a third sex’; it is true that they are not males, but are no longer female either;”
“Many of these characteristics are due to woman’s subordination to the species.”
“But we refuse the idea that they form a fixed destiny for her. They do not suffice to constitute the basis for a sexual hierarchy; they do not explain why woman is the Other; they do not condemn her forever to this subjugated role.”
“As Merleau-Ponty rightly said, man is not a natural species: he is a biological idea. Woman is not a fixed reality but a becoming;”
“…if the body is not a thing, it is a situation…”
“’Weakness’ is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal, and the laws he imposes.”
“…woman’s enslavement to the specieis is tighter or looser depending on how many births the society demands and the hygenic conditions in which pregnancy and birth occur.”

History, chapter 2: Love this chapter — even as man worships woman, he does not relinquish his societal power, for her mystical, goddess-like position in society is still Other, not mirror to that of man, and she is worshipped through the eyes of man, defined in worth by man as Other. When man dares to realize his position, he can subjugate without contradiction.