The Second Sex continued:

Man seeks in woman the Other as Nature and as his fellow being. But we know that ambivalent feelings Nature inspires in man. He exploits her, bt she crushes him, he is born of her and dies in her; she is the source of his being and the realm that he subjugates to his last will; Nature is a vein of gross material in which the soul is imprisoned, and she is the supreme reality; she is contingence and Idea, the finite and the whole; she is what opposes the Spirit, and the Spirit itself wells up, as this life itself, and as the over-yonder toward which life tends. Woman sums up nature as Mother, Wife, and Idea; these forms now mingle and now conflict, and each of them wears a double visage.