The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir — Read

The history of woman-because she is still trapped in her female functions-depends much more than man's on her physiological destiny; and the arc of this destiny is more erratic, more discontinuous, than the masculine one. Every period of woman's life is fixed and monotonous: but the passages from one stage to another are dangerously abrupt; they reveal themselves in far more decisive crises than those of the male: puberty, sexual initiation, menopause. While the male grows older continuously, the woman is brusquely stripped of her femininity; still young, she loses sexual attraction and fertility, from which, in society's and her own eyes, she derives the justification of her existence and her chances of happiness: bereft of all future, she has approximately half of her adult life still to live.

The "dangerous age" is characterized by certain organic troubles,1 but the symbolic value they embody gives them their importance. The crisis is felt much less acutely by women who have not essentially staked everything on their femininity; those who work hard-in their home or outside-are relieved when their menstrual servitude ends; peasants and workers' wives who are constantly threatened with new pregnancies are happy when, finally, that risk no longer exists. In this situation as in many others, women's disorders come less from the body itself than from their anxious consciousness of it. The moral drama usually begins before the onset of the physiological phenomena, and it does not end until long after they have been eliminated.