The Second Sex

• 1. Introduction

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  The Second Sex opens with a question that sounds almost too simple to ask. "What is woman?" Simone de Beauvoir, the French existentialist philosopher, posed it in 1949, then spent two volumes refusing to give an easy answer. She had researched and written the book in about 14 months, between 1946 and 1949. Some chapters first appeared in the journal Les Temps modernes. Within a week of its first French publication, around 22,000 copies were sold. The Vatican placed it on its list of prohibited books. Beauvoir published the work in two volumes, titled Facts and Myths and Lived Experience. What follows is regarded as a starting inspiration point of second-wave feminism. But how did a philosophy book about reproduction, marriage, and menstruation provoke such fury? What exactly did Beauvoir claim that men found so scandalous? And why, decades later, were people still arguing about how to translate a single sentence?

• 2. Woman As The Other

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  "Thus, humanity is male, and man defines woman not herself, but as relative to him." That sentence carries the core argument of the book. Beauvoir contended that man is treated as the default human being, while woman is cast as the "Other." She is not a subject in her own right, but a being defined by contrast.

  Beauvoir built toward the human case by describing the relationship of ovum to sperm across creatures, from fish to insects to mammals. She examined women's subordination to the species through reproduction and compared the physiology of men and women. Her conclusion was firm. Values cannot rest on physiology alone. The facts of biology must be read in light of ontological, economic, social, and physiological context.

  Beauvoir rejected the explanations of several major thinkers. Among them were Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Friedrich Engels. She took particular aim at Engels, who in his 1884 work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State argued that "the great historical defeat of the female sex" followed from the invention of bronze and the rise of private property. Beauvoir judged his claims unsupported. To replace these accounts, she offered two factors that explain how women's condition evolved: participation in production, and freedom from reproductive slavery.

• 3. The Weight Of History

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  A statue of a female Great Goddess, found in Susa, marks one starting point in Beauvoir's account of how men came to dominate women. She traced that domination as a gradual process, tied to the desire to perpetuate the family and keep patrimony intact. Motherhood, she wrote, left woman "riveted to her body," like an animal, which made it possible for men to rule over her and over Nature.

  Ancient Greece and Rome offered Beauvoir a contrast. In Greece, women were treated almost like slaves, though she noted exceptions such as Sparta, where there were no restraints on women's freedom. The Greek view held that "Men succeed in the world by transcendence, but immanence is the lot of women." In Rome, men remained the masters, so women enjoyed more rights, yet still faced discrimination and held only empty freedom.

  Christianity, in Beauvoir's reading, mostly served to subordinate women, with the exception of the German tradition. She described prostitution and the shifts brought by courtly love around the twelfth century. From the early fifteenth century she pointed to "great Italian ladies and courtesans," and singled out the Spaniard Teresa of Ávila as raising "herself as high as a man." Figures like Marguerite de Navarre excelled through writing and acting, even as women's legal status stayed unchanged through the nineteenth century.

  The Napoleonic Code drew Beauvoir's criticism, as did Auguste Comte and Honoré de Balzac, and she described Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as an anti-feminist. The Industrial Revolution gave women an escape from their homes, but they were paid little. She traced the growth of trade unions, the spread of birth control, and the history of abortion and women's suffrage. Of women like Rosa Luxemburg and Marie Curie, she wrote that they "brilliantly demonstrate that it is not women's inferiority that has determined their historical insignificance: It is their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority."

• 4. Myths Men Made

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  "It is an indisputable fact that meat goes bad when touched by menstruating women." Beauvoir quoted that line from the British Medical Journal of 1878, where a member of the British Medical Association wrote it, to illustrate what she called man's "horror of feminine fertility." She presented the "everlasting disappointment" of women largely from a male heterosexual's point of view, covering menstruation, virginity, copulation, marriage, motherhood, and prostitution.

  Poetry runs through this part of the book. Beauvoir drew on lines from André Breton, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Michel Leiris, Paul Verlaine, Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Valéry, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and William Shakespeare. She turned as well to the work of Henry de Montherlant, D. H. Lawrence, Paul Claudel, and Stendhal, writing that these "examples show that the great collective myths are reflected in each singular writer."

  Each of these writers, Beauvoir argued, wanted a different ideal woman. Montherlant sought pure animality. Lawrence demanded that she sum up the female gender in her femininity. Claudel called her soul-sister, Breton trusted the woman-child, and Stendhal looked for an equal. "Feminine devotion is demanded as a duty by Montherlant and Lawrence," she wrote, while Claudel, Breton, and Stendhal admired it as a generous choice. For all of them, the woman's only earthly destiny was always man.

  "Mystery" sits at the center of these male myths, in Beauvoir's account. Yet she argued that mystery is not fixed to women by sex, but assigned by situation, and that it belongs to any slave. She believed it faded during the eighteenth century, when men briefly treated women as peers. She closed by quoting Arthur Rimbaud, who hoped that one day women could become fully human beings once man gives her her freedom.

• 5. Becoming A Woman

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  At age 3 or 4, a boy is told he is a "little man," while a girl is taught to become a woman. Beauvoir opened her second volume with this contrast, arguing that a girl's "feminine" destiny is imposed by society. She insisted there is no innate "maternal instinct." The girl learns to worship a male god and to invent imaginary adult lovers.

  The discovery of sex arrives, in Beauvoir's words, as a "phenomenon as painful as weaning," met with disgust. When a girl learns that men, not women, rule the world, this "imperiously modifies her consciousness of herself." Beauvoir traced puberty, the start of menstruation, and the ways girls in their late teens accept their "femininity," which might include running away from home, fascination with the disgusting, following nature, or stealing. She held that the first sexual experiences with men shape a woman's whole life. Of relations between women, she wrote that "homosexuality is no more a deliberate perversion than a fatal curse."

• 6. The Trap Of Marriage

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  "To ask two spouses bound by practical, social and moral ties to satisfy each other sexually for their whole lives is pure absurdity." With that, Beauvoir turned her argument toward marriage. She described the labor of married women, including housecleaning, which she said amounts to "holding away death but also refusing life." The wife-servant's lot is ungratifying, she wrote, because the division of labor dooms her "wholly to the general and inessential."

  A woman finds her dignity, in Beauvoir's account, only by accepting her vassalage, the bed "service" and the housework "service." Weaned from her family, she meets only "disappointment" the day after her wedding. Beauvoir quoted Sophia Tolstoy, who wrote in her diary, "you are stuck there forever and there you must sit." Marriage, she concluded, "almost always destroys woman," a perverted institution that oppresses both men and women.

  The frustration of marriage, Beauvoir argued, drives women to adultery by denying them "the freedom and individuality of their feelings." She wrote about prostitutes and their relationships with pimps and with other women, and about hetaeras, who unlike prostitutes can gain recognition as individuals and aim higher. On abortion, she argued that procedures performed legally by doctors carry little risk, and that the question is not one of morality but of "masculine sadism" toward woman. She challenged the Catholic Church's reasoning on the souls of the unborn, calling it contradictory to other Church teachings.

• 7. Solitude And Escape

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  Menopause, in Beauvoir's view, might arouse a woman's homosexual feelings, which she believed are latent in most women. When a woman agrees to grow old, she becomes elderly with half of her adult life still ahead. She might live through her children, often a son, or through grandchildren, yet she faces "solitude, regret, and ennui." To pass the time she might take up useless "women's handiwork," watercolors, music, reading, or charitable organizations. The highest freedom a "woman-parasite" can reach, Beauvoir concluded, is "stoic defiance or skeptical irony."

  Harmony, Beauvoir argued, is one of the keys to the female universe. A woman demands a Good that is a living Harmony in which she rests, achieving through passive participation what men seek through action. She pointed to Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and to Katherine Mansfield's magnum opus, as illustrations. Still, she judged the man's situation "infinitely preferable," and wrote that "for woman there is no other way out than to work for her liberation."

  Love could be transformed, Beauvoir believed, on "the day when it will be possible for the woman to love in her strength and not in her weakness." She named a few who reached something like equality, singling out in a footnote Clara and Robert Schumann. Actresses, dancers, and singers might win independence. Among writers she chose only Emily Brontë, Woolf, and "sometimes" Mary Webb as those who approached nature "in its inhuman freedom," while mentioning Colette and Mansfield. A woman, she wrote, could not have been Vincent van Gogh or Franz Kafka. Perhaps only Saint Teresa lived her life for herself. Beauvoir's conclusion looked toward a future of equals, something "the Soviet revolution promised" but never delivered, and called for men and women to "unequivocally affirm their brotherhood."

• 8. Scandal And Survival

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  "Camus was furious; he reacted with typical Mediterranean machismo, saying I had ridiculed the French male." Beauvoir remembered that reaction in a 1974 interview, recalling how professors hurled the book across the room and people sniggered at her in restaurants. The fact that she had spoken about female sexuality was, she said, absolutely scandalous at the time. Men kept pointing to the book's vulgarity, she believed, because they were furious at its suggestion of equality between the sexes.

  The censors moved quickly. The Spanish-language translation, printed in Argentina, was banned in Francoist Spain in 1955, and Spanish feminists smuggled in copies and circulated them in secret. A full Castilian Spanish translation appeared only in 1998. The Catholic Church added the book to its Index Librorum Prohibitorum, where it stayed until the policy of prohibition itself was abolished in 1966.

  The attack on psychoanalysis in The Second Sex helped inspire later feminist arguments, including Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in 1963, Kate Millett's Sexual Politics in 1969, and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch in 1970. Millett admitted in 1989 that she had not realized how much Beauvoir had influenced her. Camille Paglia praised the book as "brilliant" and "the supreme work of modern feminism," arguing that most modern feminists merely repeat or qualify it without realizing their debt. Not everyone agreed: the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey found it interesting as literature but of no value to science, and biographer Deirdre Bair recorded the "sustained criticism" that Beauvoir was "guilty of unconscious misogyny."

  A single sentence has carried much of the book's later afterlife. Judith Butler reads "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" as distinguishing sex from gender, suggesting gender is an aspect of identity "gradually acquired." Toril Moi and Nancy Bauer contest that reading. The 1953 English translation by H. M. Parshley drew lasting complaints, with one reviewer noting the translator had "a college undergraduate's knowledge of French." Beauvoir herself asked for a new translation in a 1985 interview, wanting one "much more faithful; more complete and more faithful." Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier delivered that version in November 2009, restoring excised passages, though Moi and others remained critical of its style and syntax. The book has since been translated into 40 languages.