The Second Sex

Overview

The Second Sex is eight hundred pages and it is two books bound together. The first, Facts and Myths, is an argument. The second, Lived Experience, is a description. They do different work, they read completely differently, and courses usually assign selections from both.

Beauvoir’s method comes out of the philosophy she and Sartre were writing in the 1940s, and three of its terms do most of the labour. A free being either reaches outward into projects that change the world, which she calls transcendence, or is confined to maintaining what already exists, which she calls immanence. And consciousness, on this view, always tries to set itself up as the essential one and to make others inessential, the Other. Beauvoir’s question is why, in the case of the sexes, one side has succeeded so completely and for so long that the arrangement looks like nature.

The book is not a list of grievances and it proposes almost no policy. It is an attempt to describe a situation so thoroughly that nobody can go on calling it a destiny.

The argument

Volume I, Part One: Destiny. Three chapters test the three explanations on offer. Biology first, and Beauvoir gives it a long and serious hearing, through the whole animal kingdom and then human reproduction, before concluding that the facts are real and settle nothing: the body is a situation, not a sentence, and what a fact about ovaries means depends on the society it is lived in. Then psychoanalysis, where she accepts Freud’s insight that sexuality is lived rather than merely undergone but rejects his account of penis envy as taking the male as the standard and calling the result a discovery. Then historical materialism, where Engels is credited with seeing that property changed everything and faulted for reducing a whole existence to an economic function.

Part Two: History. Five chapters from nomadic societies to 1949. The argument here is that woman’s subordination was never a single event that could be reversed. Her claim is that women have not organised themselves as an oppressed group because, unlike any other, they are distributed one by one among the oppressors, bound to them by home, bed and child, with no shared past, no territory and no memory of a time before.

Part Three: Myths. How literature and religion turn the situation into an image. Woman as nature, as flesh, as death, as muse, as the inessential mystery that saves or destroys a man. Beauvoir then reads five male writers in detail, among them Montherlant, D. H. Lawrence, Claudel, Breton and Stendhal, to show the same figure being made and remade, with Stendhal singled out because he alone writes women as equals.

Volume II: Lived Experience. This is the half people remember. It follows a life. Childhood, where a girl learns that she is looked at. Adolescence and the arrival of a body that is suddenly a problem. Sexual initiation, marriage, housework, motherhood, social life, prostitution, and then the passage from maturity into old age, described with a flatness that is harder to read than any of the polemic. Then three chapters on what Beauvoir calls justifications, the ways out that are not ways out: the narcissist, who makes herself into the object she is told she is; the woman in love, who hands her freedom to a man and calls it devotion; and the mystic, who hands it to God.

The last part, Toward Liberation, is short. The independent woman exists, she works, and she is exhausted by carrying two full lives at once, because nothing around her has changed to make room for her. Beauvoir’s conclusion is that the change required is not in women but in the world, and that the brotherhood she wants is only possible between people who are equally free.

How to read it

Do not start at page one and grind. Read the Introduction, which is thirty pages and contains the entire thesis. Then go straight to Volume II and read the opening of Childhood, The Married Woman, and The Woman in Love. If you have time after that, come back for Biology, History and the Stendhal chapter.

Get the Borde and Malovany-Chevallier translation if you can. The 1953 version by Parshley cut roughly ten percent, including much of the historical material and many names, and he sometimes rendered Beauvoir’s technical vocabulary as ordinary English, so that arguments turn into opinions. If you are working from Parshley, do not build a case on a single sentence.

Watch for the word “situation.” It is the hinge of the whole book. Beauvoir never says the body is irrelevant and never says it is decisive; she says it is one of the conditions in which a freedom has to act, and she is interested in what that freedom does with it.

Expect to be uncomfortable with the tone in places. Beauvoir is hard on women, sometimes contemptuous, particularly about the woman in love and the mother. Read those passages as descriptions of what a trap does to people rather than as verdicts on the people it catches, and then ask whether that reading survives the text.

The most common misreading is to take “one is not born a woman” as a claim that biology is irrelevant. Beauvoir has just spent seventy pages on biology. The claim is that the meaning of the facts is made, not given.

Questions it raises

• Beauvoir says a woman’s body is a situation rather than a destiny. Where is the line between a condition you are free within and one that decides for you?
• Why have women not constituted themselves as a group with a history? Is her answer, that they are scattered among the men they live with, sufficient?
• Is the ideal of transcendence Beauvoir holds up a neutral account of human flourishing, or a specifically masculine one she has borrowed without noticing?
• The chapters on the mother and the woman in love describe lives many people choose. Can a life be freely chosen and still be, as she says, a refusal of freedom?
• The book ends by asking the world to change rather than women. Seventy-five years on, how much of what she describes is the world and how much of it was the law?
• If becoming a woman is something a society does to a girl, what exactly would it mean for it to stop?