The Second Sex

The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe, 1949) is Simone de Beauvoir‘s monumental study of what it means to be a woman, a book of some eight hundred pages, first published in two volumes, which became the founding text of modern feminism. Written in about fifteen months, after Beauvoir had realised, as she began to write a memoir, that the first thing to say about herself was that she was a woman, it is at once a work of philosophy, history, anthropology, literary criticism, psychology and sociology. Its thesis is stated in the famous sentence that opens the second volume: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” No biological, psychological or economic destiny determines the figure that woman presents in society; it is civilisation as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine. The book argues that woman has been historically defined as the Other in relation to man, who is taken as the Subject, the Absolute; that this subordination is not natural but a product of history and ideology; and that it can and must be overcome, by women’s economic independence and by the recognition by both sexes of each other as free and equal beings.

The Introduction sets out the problem. “What is a woman?” Beauvoir asks, and observes that a man would never write a book on the peculiar situation of men; he does not need to. When he describes himself, he identifies himself with the human: “man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.” Woman is defined by man, not the reverse: “She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute — she is the Other.” Why has the subordination of one half of humanity to the other never been resolved or reversed, as in other cases of domination (the proletariat, Black people)? Because women lack the concrete means to organise themselves as a unit; they live dispersed among men — through homes, economic condition, social standing and marriage — more closely attached to their oppressors than to each other. Beauvoir takes as her method the existentialist philosophy of Sartre — freedom, transcendence, bad faith, the look — but applies it in a way he had not: she asks how the situation of woman has led her to a mode of existence marked by immanence (confinement to repetitive, closed activity), against the transcendence (the projection into a free future) which is the goal of human existence.

Volume I, “Facts and Myths”, reviews the explanations of woman’s condition. Chapter by chapter, Beauvoir examines biology (the female body, with its reproductive burden, is a situation but not a destiny), psychoanalysis (Freud’s account of woman as a mutilated man, whose “penis envy” explains her, interprets the prestige of the male as a natural fact when it is a social one), and historical materialism (Engels’s view that the overthrow of “mother right” was “the world historical defeat of the female sex” is suggestive, but he fails to explain why man oppressed woman, rather than the reverse). Then a sweeping history from prehistory to the twentieth century shows how women, in primitive society, in antiquity, in the Middle Ages and in the modern period, have been confined to the domestic sphere, deprived of property rights, and used as instruments of the family’s property; and how the achievements of women, such as the vote, have been limited by the persistence of dependence. In the final part, on myths, she takes literature — Montherlant, D. H. Lawrence, Claudel, Breton, Stendhal — to show how men have projected onto woman their fantasies of the Mother, the Virgin, the Whore, the Muse, the “eternal feminine”, and the mysterious Other, in a mystification which puts her on a pedestal while keeping her in a cage. “The myth of woman plays an important role in literature; but what is its importance in daily life? To what extent does it affect the customs and conduct of individuals?”

Volume II, “Lived Experience”, is the more original part, a phenomenology of the life of woman, “from childhood to old age”. The chapter on childhood describes how the little girl is trained into femininity: she is given dolls, taught to be passive and pretty, told not to climb trees or fight; the boy is encouraged to be active and independent, and to attach himself to his penis as his “double”; the girl’s body becomes for her an object for others’ eyes. At puberty she discovers her body as a source of shame, through menstruation, the development of breasts, the male gaze; she is invited to make herself an object, to wait. The chapter on sexual initiation and the lesbian discusses the girl’s discovery of sexuality, which in marriage is often conducted by force or in ignorance, and presents a sympathetic account of homosexual love, one of the first in French philosophy. Part Two, “Woman’s Situation”, looks at the married woman, in the long chapter that is the heart of the book: marriage is a “traditional destiny”, which asks the woman to give up her independence for security, and results in the “wasting” of her life in housework, a chore that has to be redone every day (“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework”), in a “slavery” that is mitigated by neither love nor sex; and the mother, whose supposed instinct is shaped by social expectations, and whose children become the field of her ambition and domination. She discusses social life, prostitutes and hetaerae, and the experience of ageing: “the ‘critical age’”, when a woman who has lived only as a body and a servant to others finds herself unwanted and useless. In Part Three, “Justifications”, Beauvoir describes three ways in which women try to find meaning in their situation: the narcissist, who makes herself her own idol; the woman in love, who tries to merge her life into the beloved’s — for whom “love is her whole life, while for man it is only an episode”; and the mystic, who takes God as her lover. Each of these fails, since each is an attempt to find salvation through another; each is a form of bad faith.

The concluding Part, “Toward Liberation”, considers the independent woman, the one who works, thinks and acts for herself. Beauvoir argues that economic independence is the necessary condition for liberation, but it is not enough: women must also resist the internalised ideas of femininity that make them accept the status of the Other. She is struck by the conflict that the independent woman experiences between her femininity and her professional ambitions. She foresees a future of equality and of reciprocity, in which the two sexes recognise each other as free, not by “abolishing” sexual difference but by abolishing the hierarchy: “The ‘eternal feminine’ is not eternal; it is a historical product.” The closing words, quoting Marx, say that a relationship of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being, and ends with a statement of faith in the possibility of “brotherhood”: “To gain the supreme victory, it is necessary, for one thing, that by and through their natural differentiation men and women unequivocally affirm their brotherhood.”

The reception was explosive. Parts were serialised in Les Temps modernes (1949); the Vatican put the book on the Index; the novelist François Mauriac wrote to a contributor to the magazine that he now knew everything about the vagina of its editor; and Albert Camus charged her with making the French male ridiculous. Yet it sold widely, and was translated into dozens of languages. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and the second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 70s took it as a bible: Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Juliet Mitchell and many others. Subsequent critics have questioned parts: its apparent hostility to maternity and the female body, its assumption that transcendence is a male value, its limited attention to race and class, and its Western bourgeois perspective. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) takes up the sentence “one becomes a woman” to argue that gender is performative. Beauvoir herself in 1972 declared herself a feminist and joined the women’s liberation movement; the book remains a classic of philosophy and of the history of women’s emancipation.

In conversation

• “One is not born, but becomes, a woman” — gender as a made situation.
• The Other — man as Subject, woman as object.
• Housework and Sisyphus — immanence in the home.