"She is what she is: Women are not born to be submissive, but become submissive" Author: [France] Manon Garcia Translator: Huang Qing/Shen Zhenying Publisher: CITIC Publishing Group

Love what I love, and love my way.

Imagine cosmetics, high heels, corsets, princess dresses, lace bras, jewelry, brand-name bags... this rich material world and social culture have expectations and shapes on women; when you have children and become a mother, you feel the fulfillment and satisfaction of the "pain and joy" that "motherhood" brings you... all of this is so natural and so reasonable.

Even those women who are most independent-minded and feminist-minded will inadvertently discover that they enjoy the conquering gazes of men, they desire to be a docile pet in their partner's arms, and they are more willing to do housework and get a little pleasure from neatly folded clothes and carefully prepared breakfast for their family, compared to jobs that seem to allow them to shine. Are these desires and pleasures contradictory to women's independence? Is this subconscious obedience natural?

However, when we return to our daily lives, we can see ambiguity and contradictions about women's issues everywhere: people call for women to be independent and free, to pursue their own careers, and not to accept men's superiority and bossing them around; at the same time, society is full of advice and guidelines on how to be a sexy girl, a good wife and a good mother. What exactly is a woman? Is there a "female nature"? What is the root of such contradictions?

As a philosophical taboo and a blind spot of feminism, the complexity of female obedience at the empirical level has never been unraveled and carefully analyzed. Following the footsteps of Simone de Beauvoir, the author of this book, Manon Garcia, is committed to studying this phenomenon and how the gender hierarchy in society profoundly affects women's living experience, because understanding why women obey is the only way to all liberation. If the world wants women to "be themselves", then women must first find what "they" are.

Manon Garcia, born in 1985, graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, holds a PhD in philosophy, is an expert in feminist philosophy, has taught at Harvard University and the University of Chicago, and is currently working at Yale University. This book is her debut work.