The Second Sex

Study Guide by Course Hero

between the terms masculine and feminine, or male and female,

What's Inside
j Book Basics ................................................................................................. 1
a Main Ideas ................................................................................................... 2
d In Context .................................................................................................... 3
a Author Biography ..................................................................................... 5
h Key Figures ................................................................................................. 6
k Plot Summary ............................................................................................. 7
c Chapter Summaries ................................................................................ 9
g Quotes ........................................................................................................ 32
m Glossary ..................................................................................................... 34
e Suggested Reading .............................................................................. 35
j Book Basics
introducing the sensible yet surprising notion that the terms
are not opposites. Instead, she argues that alterity
characterizes the relation between the terms and between the
sexes. By alterity—a word derived from the same root as
alternate and alternative—Beauvoir points to the definitive
differences that characterize the relationship between these
two closely related terms. Although, biologically, male and
female complement each other and have sometimes been
seen as two parts of a whole, they are not opposites. They are
related by difference. Beauvoir traces the history of the
woman's body—distinctively different from the history of the
man's body—as a means of examining the subordination of
women over time. Domination in this text is the patriarchal
prerogative in which women are complicit. The text attempts to
answer how and why women are complicit in their own
oppression and why female is the second sex. No writer has
ever taken quite this approach, either before or after Beauvoir.
It is important to keep in mind that in the years (1946–49) in
which Beauvoir labored on this text, the sex/gender distinction
in 21st-century usage was not appreciated, nor were the range
of sexualities that might have influenced the number in her title.
Still, the commentary here addresses the 21st-century reader
despite shifting attitudes and practices.

PERSPECTIVE AND NARRATOR

AUTHOR
The Second Sex is written in the second person. In her use of
Simone de Beauvoir
direct address, Beauvoir sometimes appears to be speaking to
an audience of like-minded women, while her scholarly
YEAR PUBLISHED
narratives, her wit, confidence, and determination address all
1949
of humankind.
GENRE
ABOUT THE TITLE
Women's Studies
The Second Sex refers to the secondary place of women in
AT A GLANCE relation to a world population nearly equally divided between
Completed in 1949, The Second Sex is a contemporary text, men and women. There are not, nor have there been in human
and its compelling argument still new. Simone de history, two "first"—or equal—sexes.
Beauvoir—working across disciplines in the social sciences,
psychoanalysis, history, biology, philosophy, and
anthropology—challenges ideas about the relationship
The Second Sex Study Guide Main Ideas 2

relation is relativity, and reciprocity is the functional

a Main Ideas consequence. The liberated woman, rejecting her otherness,
bids for individuation by operating reciprocally.

Alterity and Opposition

Transcendence and
Man and woman are not opposites, although linguistically, they
are constituted as an opposing pair. One might say humanity
Immanence
consists of two kinds of individuals, and the relation between
Transcendence is the expansion of the individual toward an
them is just the notion of asymmetrical differences—or alterity.
open future. The moral subject accomplishes his freedom only
The human infant's first recognition of the boundaries of his
by perpetual surpassing towards other freedoms. The moral
body, and his separateness from other bodies and objects in
life consists of a reaching out, a progress toward the good of
his world, is characterized by the British analyst D.W. Winnicott
humankind. Immanence is a turning inward. Beauvoir states
as "me" and "not-me." In other words, the earliest trope of
that when woman is defined as Other, as a womb or sexual
cognition recognizes difference. For the infant this difference
body, "an attempt is made to freeze her as an object, and
can be as great as his body and the string of pearls he has
doom her to immanence." Even the independent woman finds
often grasped when feeding. "Not-me" may be a foul odor or
herself divided between her femininity, her potential
the sweet scent of a mother's fragrance. If a person is
immanence, and her desire to function as a transcendent
essential, the other is the negative of that person. Beauvoir
human being.
follows the German philosopher Hegel (1770–1831) when she
states, "The subject ... asserts itself as the essential and sets
up the other as inessential, as the object." The male, the
sovereign subject, operates through opposition. The Dream of a Common
Reality
Alterity and Reciprocity
In the conclusion to The Second Sex—"Men and women must ...
beyond their natural differentiations, unequivocally affirm their
Alterity is the term for the relation between the sexes, best
brotherhood"—two words stand out: differentiations and
understood as a cognitive mode, a way of perceiving
brotherhood. The first is a transcendent process, the act of
difference. For example: in a foreign land, a stranger appears,
sorting out differences, holding them in one's hand, and
easel under her arm, an artist seeking new vistas. She is a
examining them. Beauvoir's history and biology of women has
standout at nearly seven feet tall. The locals raise their
clearly done the sorting, and with the sorting she has provided
eyebrows and look away. She is seen not as she is, but as
an understanding, an appreciation for the act of respecting
alien, as Other. This response to difference is—in an existential
difference rather than reading it as oppositional. The second
vocabulary—oppositional. Oppositional alterity characterizes
word, brotherhood, reveals that in a world of appreciation for
male perception. The man sees himself as essential, and the
difference, in acceptance of difference, self and other
other as non-essential. The initial response is defensive.
dissipate. What takes their place is self and self, two sovereign
If, however, one local is brave enough to wish to dance with the selves in which biological sex is no longer the determining
suave foreigner, or, perhaps, he is intrigued by novelty, he must factor of a relationship. In such a world, alterity is a richness,
recognize her not as Other but as an individual who both sees and leads to potential for exchange, a community of sovereign
him and can be seen. In this scenario, both are sovereign selves, and a brotherhood of individual human beings.
subjects, related by difference and capable of functioning in a
reciprocal relation. The picture they present is not a regulation-
size male dancing with a towering female, but one of animated
conversation, smiles and laughter, and perhaps eventually
tears: Self and Self, rather than Self and Other. This alternative

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The Second Sex Study Guide In Context 3

First is "the realist or empiricist approach to a particular

d In Context dimension of experience." For example, in The Second Sex,
the historical details of the conditions of women's
subordination characterize the empirical approach. The

Guide to Structure of The survey of the traumas of the girl's sexual initiation versus
that of the boy's is another part of the realist account.

Second Sex Second is an "idealist or intellectualist alternative" to the

The formal qualities of The Second Sex owe a great deal to
Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945).
In fact, the principles in Phenomenology provide a guide to
reading Beauvoir.
As Maurice Merleau-Ponty explains in his text, the field of
phenomenology studies
The structures of consciousness
as experienced from the first-
person point of view. The central
structure of an experience is its
intentionality, its being directed
toward something, as it is an
experience of or about some
object. An experience is directed
toward an object by virtue of its
content or meaning (which
represents the object) together
with enabling conditions.
Beauvoir evaluates the problem of the subordination of women
according to Merleau-Ponty. She employs a phenomenological
analysis to the general problem and the overall structure of
The Second Sex, and, similarly, she applies the same principles
to each individual section. In that sense, Phenomenology's
basic principles serve as an outline for the entire work as well
as a structural guide to the arrangements of the argument of
each chapter.
Merleau-Ponty approaches these principles of a
phenomenological approach in several ways.
first approach. In Beauvoir's opinion, a Marxist analysis of
the details of sex difference as a determining factor in
women's subordination and an economic solution that would
affect not just the marketplace but ordinary life, in general,
represents an idealist approach. Psychoanalytic approaches
to sex difference represent an "intellectualist alternative.
The third approach deals with the problem common to the
first two approaches, namely, "the prejudice that the
objective world exists as a ready-made and fully present
reality." In The Second Sex, evidence from the past and
scientific accounts, i.e., archaeological artifacts and
scientific research, are useful, and Beauvoir presents
primary research in several parts of her argument. In
Chapter 1, "Biological Data," for example, she cites the
scientific account of multiplication in one-celled animals.
Also, and key to the problem of the objective world
argument in opting for the phenomenological approach, she
expands the notion of "intentionality" by pushing her
accounts of each aspect of her argument—Part One:
Destiny; Part Two: History; etc. She does this by employing
narratives based in "the structure of various types of
experience ranging from perception, thought, memory,
imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily
awareness, embodied action, and social activity." This
argument, while not directly responding to the prejudice,
presents an expansive point of view demonstrating at best
our individual human resources with optimal accounts of
just how much we can know about an object or an
experience.
And finally, Beauvoir, in her departure from Sartre's
existentialism, expands the notion of intentionality by
marking not only the individual point of view but a reciprocal
account from an Other. This principal and telling difference
between Sartre's existentialism and Beauvoir's starts in her
recognition of potential for an ethical universe beginning in
the relation between Self and Other. She sees the Other as
necessary to the subject's freedom, while Sartre posits the
Other as a threat to his subjectivity, to his freedom. For
Sartre's sovereign subject, the Other is oppositional. For
Beauvoir, the relation of Self and Other is reciprocal,

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The Second Sex Study Guide
relative. This ethic, set out in Beauvoir's earliest
philosophical essay, Pyrrhus and Cineas, is the very
beginning of what she posits in The Second Sex as basic to
the alterity of sex difference—and key to reconciliation of
the sexes.
Each chapter of The Second Sex is structured according to
the principles named above. Since the objective world is not
ready-made, the third way leaves space for the consciousness
of the commentator—and the reader—as a valid component of
a present reality. In the text, Beauvoir's direct and personal
commentary (she often refers to "we" and "us") that closes
most sections, and addresses each reader, is part of the world
she investigates. This engaging structure provides guidance
for the uninitiated reader.
Reading The Second Sex
Reciprocity, a term Beauvoir learned from German philosopher
Edmund Husserl, implicates the reader as well as the writer.
Husserl views reciprocity as necessary for "relating to the
other: to see the other requires that you see him/her as
seeing." In other words, both "self" and an "other" are subjects.
For Beauvoir, "true alterity is that of a consciousness separate
from mine and identical with mine." True alterity for the student
of Beauvoir offers the opportunity to engage the difficulties, as
well as the lightheartedness of the text without fear. In such a
text, the reader is not an alienated other, but a co-conspirator,
a subject, a maker of the moment.
French Intellectuals
Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de
Beauvoir
Intellectuals in France have traditionally played key roles in
public life. As described by Sudhir Hazareesingh in a Politico
article called "The Decline of the French Intellectual," they are
"expected to provide moral guidance about general social and
political issues. Indeed, the most eminent French intellectuals
are almost sacred figures, who became global symbols of the
causes they championed." The decades after World War II
(1939–45) were particularly rich in political foment, and chief
among the public intellectuals—and revolutionaries—of the
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In Context 4
time, were Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. They
shared disdain for the public institutions—especially, as
Hazareesingh notes, "the republican State, the Communist
Party, the French colonial regime in Algeria, [and] the university
system."
In their 50-plus years of association, Sartre and Beauvoir
consistently read and edited each other's work and spread the
word. First and foremost, they emphasized the public role of
the citizen. Foundational to Beauvoir and Sartre's existentialist
philosophy is the sense that in a godless world the duty to
protect moral value rests with the individual. Ethical action is
the guarantor of citizenship. In Beauvoir's take on
existentialism, freedom for the individual lay in bonding with
others to incite action. To be human is to rupture individual
being through spontaneous projects, to transcend the
stubborn inwardness (the immanence) of the individual's (the
existent's) life.
Beauvoir's intellectual break with Sartre's existentialism was
based on her understanding that the ethic of a free subject, the
base of freedom, is derived from the responsibility to consider
other free subjects in the world. Passivity is bad faith. In a
world without God, the individual must share in ethical acts
with others. By contrast, for Sartre, "hell is other people."
Beauvoir and Her Circle
For the French, intellectual life with its political imperatives was
a given. When Beauvoir placed second to Sartre in the
daunting philosophy agrégation, it was well known that Sartre's
victory had come on his second try, and after elaborate
preparation. Thus, at 21, Beauvoir was known as France's most
promising intellectual. Her victory, moreover, gave her access
to an intellectual circle that, by late mid-century came to
dominate not only French thought, but academic life
worldwide. The unique nature of Beauvoir's work and the
impact of The Second Sex, in particular, have much to do with
her association with the major intellectuals of the period. This
is not to say she was merely an accomplished assimilator of
others' work, but that foundational to her interdisciplinary
courage was not only her prize-winning intellect, but her ability
to create a synthesis of materials not conventionally placed
side by side.
The Second Sex Study Guide
Beauvoir and Feminism
In an earlier era, the author of The Second Sex might have
been called male-identified. Beauvoir's father was the first to
provide her with books, and many of the intellectual men who
were initially classmates and then collaborators in the vivid
intellectual life of post-war France provided intellectual models
and methodologies that have dominated 20th-century
academic life across many disciplines. With the publication of
The Second Sex and her subsequent activism in the feminist
movement, Beauvoir found herself amidst an international
community of brilliant and determined women.
Second wave feminism is the feminism that asserted itself
alongside the liberation movements of the 1960s. It begins to a
great degree with the notion of female difference: Women's
affiliative tendencies, not necessarily beginning with
motherhood, but rooted in a natural response to the woman's
distinctive patterns of development and her lifelong economic
dependency. Beauvoir's contribution does not necessarily
contradict the notion of biology as destiny, but instead amends
the notion of this destiny through an existential, Marxist,
psychoanalytic, and phenomenological consideration of the
female body.
Practical application is among the features of second wave
feminism. Small groups of women must engage in
consciousness raising and the sharing of responses to
patriarchy. Women must also address Beauvoir's assertion that
women are complicit in their own subordination. Thus, The
Second Sex offers both analysis in the notion of an ethics of
affiliation, and potential for resolution through such an
affiliation.
a Author Biography
Early Life and Education
Born in Paris on January 9, 1908, to a devout Catholic mother
and an atheist father, Simone de Beauvoir laid claim early on to
radical differences between the sexes. She inherited her
father's distrust of organized religion and his love of books. At
age 14, she abandoned her commitment to Catholicism,
announcing there was no God. Still, she attended a private
Catholic girls' school until she was 17.
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Author Biography 5
Having decided to study philosophy and become a teacher,
Beauvoir passed her baccalaureate in mathematics and
philosophy in 1925. In 1926 she gained certificates for teaching
Latin and French literature and went on to the prestigious
university the Sorbonne, receiving certificates for History of
Philosophy, General Philosophy, Greek, and Logic in 1927, and
Ethics, Sociology, and Psychology in 1928. Beauvoir attended
classes at the famed École Normale Supérieure, where she
placed second in the notoriously competitive written exam in
Philosophy, called the agrégation. At age 21 Beauvoir was
publicly acknowledged as one of France's most brilliant
woman.
Relationship with Sartre
First place for the agrégation went to French author and
philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Shortly thereafter, Sartre
arranged to meet Simone, and they quickly became a couple.
They pledged to each other an "essential" love in the name of
freedom. This meant they frequently had lovers whom they
sometimes shared. Based on their bohemian lifestyle, their
groundbreaking work, and their radical politics, Sartre and
Beauvoir became the most notorious intellectual couple of the
20th century. Although they never married or even lived
together in one house, their liaison was lifelong.
Publications and Death
In 1943 Beauvoir's first novel, She Came to Stay, a bold
autobiographical account of a three-way relationship with a
student, gained her recognition. From 1941–43, she wrote The
Blood of Others, reputedly the most important novel of the
French Resistance against the Nazi occupation of France
during World War II (1939–45). During this period Beauvoir
published her first philosophical essay, Pyrrhus and Cineas.
This work demonstrates her departure from aspects of
Sartre's philosophy. Although she agrees with the basic
premise of Sartre's existentialism—the idea that individuals
determine fate through free will—she lays the groundwork in
her essay for the principles of relativity and reciprocity that
explain a sense of otherness that defines traditional gender
roles, the backbones of her argument in The Second Sex.
Although Beauvoir rejected the title of philosopher and gave
Sartre all the credit, current commentary confirms her gifts as
an original thinker, second to no man.
The Second Sex Study Guide Key Figures 6

Beauvoir continued to write novels and essays about ethics

and philosophy, and with Sartre, French philosopher Maurice Jean-Paul Sartre
Merleau-Ponty, and other intellectuals, she published the leftist
journal Modern Times in 1945. It was The Second Sex, Sartre was a Marxist intellectual whose radical life style

however, that established her credentials as a feminist. Her included his rejection of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964

love of travel resulted in two books, America Day by Day (1948) and a much-scrutinized open relationship with Simone de

and The Long March (1957), written after a lecture tour in Beauvoir. He was Beauvoir's closest associate and intellectual

China. Later publications include a four-volume autobiography, soul mate. He was also her critic.

a work attacking the French war in Algeria, and The Coming of

Age (1970), a study of mistreatment of the elderly. In 1981, a
year after Sartre's death, she published Adieux: A Farewell to
Sartre. She died April 14, 1986. More than 30 years after her
death, Beauvoir's ideas on gender equality, and her study of
the dynamics between men and women, continue to resonate
with readers in the 21st century.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Lévi-Strauss's work in structuralism influenced not only his
field, but provided a methodology for generations of scholars
in philosophy, comparative religion, literature, and film. His
work in anthropology influenced Beauvoir.

h Key Figures

Frederick Engels
Frederick Engels completed volume 2 of Das Kapital after
Marx's death, and wrote The Origin of the Family, Private
Property, and the State in 1884. His work is the basis for much
of the history in The Second Sex.

Martin Heidegger
The influence of Heidegger's notion of "authenticity," the
individual's positive engagement with the world by heeding "a
call of conscious," operates throughout Beauvoir's appreciation
for transcendence as an ethical principle.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Merleau-Ponty's work in perception, although grounded in
phenomenology as a method, went beyond it in his focus in
bodily behavior as an original source of knowledge. Intensely
political and a Marxist, he broke with Sartre in a disagreement
over the Korean War.

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The Second Sex Study Guide Plot Summary 7

Full Key Figure List D.H. Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence was a prolific English
author of novels, short stories, and
poems.
Key Figure Description
Henry de Montherlant was French a
Henry de novelist and playwright. His sardonic
Frederick Engels was a German
Frederick Montherlant and misogynist novels enjoyed some
Socialist philosopher, and Karl Marx's
Engels popular attention in his day.
closest associate.

Stekel was an Austrian physician and

Martin Heidegger was a German
philosopher known for his
Martin
groundbreaking work in
Heidegger
existentialism—a profound influence
on 20th-​century art and letters.
A French phenomenological
philosopher and classmate of
Beauvoir's, Maurice Merleau-​Ponty's
Maurice
Phenomenology of Perception deeply
Merleau-​Ponty
influenced her approach to knowledge
and to organization in The Second
Sex.
psychoanalyst. He was one of
Wilhelm Stekel
Sigmund Freud's students, but he
broke relations with Freud in 1912.
Stendhal was a French writer, known
for his works of fiction. His most
Stendhal
celebrated novels are Le Rouge et le
(Marie-​Henri
noir (The Red and the Black), and La
Beyle)
Chartreuse de Parma (The
Charterhouse of Parma).

Jean-​Paul
Jean-​Paul Sartre was a French k Plot Summary
philosopher, novelist, playwright, and
Sartre
proponent of existentialism.

Claude Lévi-
Claude Lévi-​Strauss was a French
anthropologist and intellectual, and a
Strauss
classmate of Beauvoir's.
André Breton was a French poet,
essayist, and critic. He is considered
André Breton the father of surrealism—a mode of
making art in which the lines between
dream and reality are obscured
Paul Claudel was a French poet,
playwright, and novelist. He is best
Paul Claudel
known for his symbolist plays and lyric
poetry.
Sidonie-​Gabrielle Colette was a
Sidonie- successful French novelist whose
Gabrielle deeply and convincingly sensual work
Colette focused on women and love. She is
quoted often in The Second Sex.
Jules Laforgue was a French
Symbolist poet whose linguistic
Jules Laforgue
inventions deeply influenced the
modernist poets of the 20th century.
Volume 1, Part 1
The Second Sex consists of two volumes. The first, "Facts and
Myths," has an "Introduction" and three parts. The first word of
the "Introduction" is "I." Thus, the reader is introduced to the
unconventional nature of a seemingly academic work as the
narrator announces herself informally in the first person.
Moreover, she is identified by her sex. The second shocking
element is the author's point of view: not only is the female
subordinate to the male, but she is complicit in the plot of male
dominance.
Chapter 1, "Biological Data," considers females in the animal
world in order to consider the unique nature of human females.
Chapter 2, "The Psychoanalytic Point of View" presents
Beauvoir's criticism of the Freudian approach to sexuality in
women, particularly the notion that girls are developmentally
delayed and thus prone to remaining in an "infantile state" or
"developing neuroses." Chapter 3, "The Point of View of
Historical Materialism," refuses the definition of woman as a
sexed organism and makes the argument that women's work
and her society's economic structure determine identity.

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The Second Sex Study Guide Plot Summary 8

three chapters, different feminine types or situations are

Volume 1, Parts 2 and 3 explored for the possibilities of independent co-existence or
successful matches with men.
Part 2, "History," consists of five chapters. The first begins in
the pre-agricultural world, where, presumably, women worked Part 4 stresses economic independence for women. The
as hard as men and assisted men in battle. The second Second Sex concludes with a hopeful prediction: That men and
explores women's roles in the agricultural world in which women recognize the Other as other and appreciate the
women have prestige because of their childbearing capacity differences while not doing away with the miracles that the
and the need for large numbers of children to work the land. divide human beings into two separate categories.
The third speculates on women's loss of prestige with the
advent of private property. The fourth demonstrates some
fluctuation in women's prestige and notes the role of
Christianity in diminishing women's position. The fifth,
recognizes that economic independence is a necessary
condition for women's equality with men.

Part 3, "Myths," Beauvoir observes that "the representation of

woman in myths is never a story about the individual woman
but a projection of what men desire and fear." The six chapters
in this section explore myths from various cultures as well as
the mythologizing of woman—for better and worse— in the
work of writers whom Beauvoir studied.

Volume 2, Part 1
The title of Volume 2 is "Lived Experience," which consists of
an introduction and four parts: "Formative Years," "Situation,"
"Justifications," and "Toward Liberation." The introduction
explores the "common ground from which all singular feminine
existence stems." "Childhood" is the first chapter of "The
Formative Years." Beginning with the oft-quoted sentence,
"One is not born, but rather becomes a woman," this chapter
emphasizes the distinction between the individual woman and
the subordinated object, woman. The evolution of the
stereotype begins somewhere in the second half of the first
year of life when infant girls are treated differently from boy
babies. The succeeding chapters continue this developmental
study.

Volume 2, Parts 2, 3, and 4

Part 2, "Situation," consists of six chapters that focus on
women's situation with respect to men as the foundational
organizational premise.

Part 3, "Justifications," is made up of three chapters. In these

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The Second Sex Study Guide
c Chapter Summaries
The Second Sex is divided into two volumes—Facts and Myth
and Lived Experience. Each volume is then broken up into
parts. Volume 1 has three parts, while Volume 2 has four.
Finally, each part is further divided into chapters, only some of
which have titles. The book begins with an introduction and
ends with a conclusion.
Introduction
Summary
The Second Sex opens with the question, "What is a woman?"
and defines a problem especially "irritating" to its female
author. It is not simply a matter that man has always been the
One, but that woman, as the Other, has always been complicit
in this hierarchical ranking. The Second Sex examines how
women's reality has been constituted and what the
consequences of women as Other are from the man's point of
view and from the woman's.
First and foremost, the reader is reminded that the
binarism—man/woman—is oppositional as a linguistic
convenience only. Alterity, the relation of male to female,
provides for difference in specifically individual terms, and yet
it is this very individuality that is denied to the woman. Man, as
subject, is an individual, but for women, difference from men is
biological fact—only beginning with anatomy, the bedrock of a
collective identity. Woman is a sexual object, a reproductive
body, while man, as subject, is anything he declares himself to
be, everything within the range of his ambition and imagination.
In search of answers—or at the very least the right
questions—the balance of the introduction explores questions
of alterity with respect to historical situations of dominance
and subordination. Whether it is the situation of "American
blacks" (her term in 1949) or Jews, Beauvoir observes that
alterity gives way to relativity. That is, the oppressed group
finds its particular identity in its recognition of radical
difference rather than in the binarism implied by anti-Semitic or
anti-Black prejudice. Moreover, Jews and blacks—or for that
matter, minority groups—each in their own communities, come
to say we, thus assuming subjectivity. Those who refuse to be
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Chapter Summaries 9
objectified value community identity as the one thing that sets
them apart. The shift from oppressed Other—or object—to
individualized self and subject, is constituted by assuming
specific aspects of difference (belief, habits, skin color, and
other physical differences, food preferences, goals,
sympathies, etc.).
Beauvoir argues that for women, unlike minorities, alterity is a
given, an absolute "because it falls outside ... of historical fact."
Rather than a specific moment in the history of humanity, the
division of the sexes is a biological given. Furthermore, women
live dispersed among men, not in isolated communities.
Biological need, sexual desire, and the wish for posterity have
not liberated women socially. Like master and slave, man and
woman are linked by an economic need in which the slave is
not freed. For women, the link insures no disruption of
protection and economic freedom. Woman is sometimes
complicit in her Otherness because her dependence is
comfortable, and she can derive satisfaction in that role. There
would be little need for this book if this were the definitive
answer.
Finally, the book attempts to answer these questions: how did
it get this way? Why has the world always belonged to men?
Only today this is beginning to change. Is it a good thing? Will it
give rise to greater equality?
Analysis
Beauvoir defines alterity as "the fundamental category of
human thought." She cites German philosopher Hegel, who
said, "a fundamental hostility to any other consciousness is
found in consciousness itself." Hegel goes on to claim that the
subject positions itself in opposition, and asserts itself as
essential, while the object (the Other) is non-essential. What he
can know is essential; what he cannot fathom is inessential.
For the Other, the woman, in contrast to the man's oppositional
hostility, the matter of alterity is one of relativity and reciprocity
in relation. That is, the woman has configured her world
differently from the man. The moment people think socially, an
opposition in cognitive processes between men and women
begins to take shape. This opens the key question: Why do
women submit to male sovereignty, to themselves as Other,
defined in alterity—when, in fact, they know better?
Beauvoir argues that historically, men sought to make "the fact
The Second Sex Study Guide
of their supremacy a right," creating laws they turned into
principles. Simone de Beauvoir's short list of history's
sympathizers includes Christian theologian Saint Augustine,
who concedes that the unmarried woman is perfectly adept at
managing her personal affairs; French philosopher Denis
Diderot, who sees man and woman as human beings; and
English philosopher John Stuart Mill, whose ardent defense of
women is a matter of record. Beauvoir also observes that for
men, fear of competition, threats to morality, economic
competition, and concerns over their own virility perpetuate the
oppositions.
In sum, change can only occur when vague notions of
inferiority, superiority, and equality are abandoned. "There is no
public good other than one that assures the citizens' private
good," she concludes. Women's struggle is between the
fundamental claim of every subject to posit herself as
essential, while the demands of her culture deem her
inessential. Individual possibility—different from individual
happiness—is the measure of freedom.
Volume 1, Part 1, Chapter 1
Summary
Chapter 1, titled "Biological Data," opens with a simple
definition: Woman is "a womb, an ovary." Insult or exaltation,
the male version "roots woman in nature," and "confines her in
her sex" where, taking value from the animal world, she
castrates and cannibalizes, like the praying mantis or the
spider, or flirts and succumbs, like the monkey and the wildcat.
To stop thinking in commonplaces, Beauvoir advises the
reader to ask what the female represents in the animal
kingdom and what "unique kind of female is realized in
woman?"
Studying reproduction in the lower animals, Beauvoir
concludes that (1) sexual differentiation cannot be deduced at
the cellular level, and (2) with respect to reproduction,
differentiation occurs "as an irreducible and contingent fact."
An early history of theories of reproduction favors male
"energy" and the feminine body as nurture without actual
participation in the formation of the individual. In 1887 the
sperm was identified penetrating the starfish egg, and not until
1883 was their fusion analyzed. The notion of the male as
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Chapter Summaries 10
active, and the female passive with respect to reproduction
proceeds from Aristotle through Hegel. Across time allegories
of sperm and egg, and dubious narratives about sexual
differentiation, sustain the myth of feminine passivity and
masculine energy. Science, meanwhile, increasingly pursues
notions of symmetry and equality between the sexual organs
and the processes of spermatogenesis and
oogenesis—respectively, the formation of sperm cells and egg
cells.
Similarly, reproductive behaviors assume narratives of violence
between the sexes: the giant female spider, bigger and
stronger than the male, eats the male after coupling and
carries off the eggs; under stress conditions, the praying
mantis cannibalizes her partner. Yet the battle of the sexes
goes on, the male of the species often more beautifully and
colorfully marked, and fully indolent after coitus occurs, while
many females are enslaved for a lifetime, laying, incubating,
and caring for larvae. Beauvoir—in heightened sexual
language—describes the individualism and aggression of the
male fish and birds, while arguing that the "suppressed" female
is inhabited and much of her life "absorbed." In species more
given to the "flourishing of individual life," the male is at an
advantage. He is usually larger than the female, often lacks
paternal instinct, and is stronger and more adventurous.
In the animal kingdom the male and the female perform two
diverse aspects of the life of the species. Here the male can
"affirm himself in his autonomy," in Beauvoir's words. The
female is the continuity of life, which "explains why sexual
opposition increases ... when the individuality of organisms
asserts itself." The process of giving birth is more painful for
cows and mares than for mice or rabbits. Furthermore, "woman
... is also the most fragile ... and ... distinguishes herself most
significantly from her male."
Because a woman's body is her sole possession in the world,
the world appears different to her depending on how it is
understood. These ideas are among the keys that help women
understand what is woman, but they are not the basis of the
sexual hierarchy. Furthermore, these ideas do not offer an
explanation as to why woman is Other, nor do they place her in
a subjugated role.
The Second Sex Study Guide
Analysis
In describing the relation between growth and development in
the human male and female, Beauvoir charts a simple linear
trajectory for the maturation of boys, while women's bodies
register discomfort and conflict in each hormonal stage from
the onset of puberty through the menstrual cycle. Also
emphasized is the influence of hormones on mood, health, and
bodily comfort throughout the life cycle. Describing
physiological changes with each menstrual period, she states,
"this is when [the woman] feels most acutely that her body is
an alienated opaque thing."
Evaluating the woman's alienation from her body through
pregnancies and menopause, Beauvoir concludes, "in no other
[female mammal] is the subordination ... to the reproductive
function more imperious."
This narrative epitomizes alterity, and changes—for all
time—the conversation about woman, and the nature of her
subordination.
Volume 1, Part 1, Chapter 2
Summary
Beauvoir opens her criticism of this chapter, titled "The
Psychoanalytical Point of View," noting that "Freud was not
very concerned with woman's destiny." Taking up Freud's
notion that the libido, the sex drive, is masculine whether it
occurs in a man or woman, Beauvoir returns to her theme of
radical difference between the sexes, and closes with radical
similarity of opportunity between them. She recalls the
Freudian distinctions: for the boy, sexual development is
genitally organized and he needs to move only from auto-
eroticism to a heteroerotic attitude. Girls, however, do not
complete their development until they move in a more
complicated process from clitoral to vaginal orgasm. In this
sense, for Freud, the woman "runs a greater risk of not
completing her sexual development." Alfred Adler goes beyond
Freud, substituting motives and goals for sex drives, not to
discount the role of sexuality, but to assimilate sex drives and
life's practical desires. Adler, however, emphasizes a woman's
shame of her femininity, noting that her inferiority complex, and
her sense of male privilege and superiority, limits her. Proof is
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Chapter Summaries 11
recorded in the woman's coital position underneath the man,
an additional "humiliation." The girl's drama thus operates
somewhere between her "viriloid," and her "feminine"
tendencies. Viriloid is drawn from viril, or masculine sexual
potency.
Analysis
Systematically disabling the psychoanalytic reliance on
sexuality as the basis of personality and the accompanying
insistence on anatomy as destiny, Beauvoir comments on the
psychoanalytic recognition of difference with respect to
masculine and feminine behaviors, of which, she insists, both
sexes are capable. Finally, making a myth of psychoanalytic
narratives, and preferring choice over psychoanalytic
determinism, she notes that a girl climbing a tree is not
emulating her father, nor is she exhibiting virile behavior when
she paints, writes, or engages in politics. These activities are
not only "good sublimations," but "ends desired in themselves."
Sublimation here provides an unusual comment on sexual
energy and the creation of art. For the psychoanalyst,
sublimation is the substitution of an acceptable and creative
act such as making art for an impulsive and likely sexually
inappropriate one, an unconscious conversion of sexual
energy. One might say that a dollop of talent and a burst of
sexual energy constitute genius.
Moreover, the young girl, torn between "viriloid" and "feminine"
tendencies, and required by psychoanalysis to identify with her
father or her mother, is conceived by the author as hesitating
"between the role of object ... that is proposed to her and her
claim for freedom." For us, Beauvoir says, "woman is defined as
a human being in search of values."
Freud's major French commentator, the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan—whose lectures Beauvoir
attended—refurbished Freud's reputation when he brought the
notion of the girl's unresolved sexuality into the late 1950s.
Lacan's positive assessment of the developmental hesitations
Freud labeled "infantile" and "incomplete" in girls is a significant
revision. He certified that those who combine the traits of
"incomplete" development, more typical of girls but distributed
across individuals, are capable of living in search of values. It is
not clear whether Lacan's reiteration of Freud demonstrates a
change in value across time or a situation in which the
preferred trait arises from something "incomplete," or
unresolved. Analogously, the notion of transcendence
The Second Sex Study Guide
borrowed from historical materialism, in Beauvoir's analysis,
has to do with the unfinished nature of striving: the ethical life
developing from concerted moves beyond succeeding
freedoms.
Most riveting in this analysis is Beauvoir's assertion that the
woman's sexual initiation begins in trauma. That is, Freud talks
about the difficulty for the woman in shifting from the clitoral
orgasm to the vaginal orgasm. But it is Beauvoir who makes
the point that deflowering is a rape. Developmentally, two
things are important in this insight. First, sexual initiation is
traumatic for women in the way it is not for men, and second,
the women's sexual initiation necessarily begins with a
masculine intervention. There is a good deal of discussion of
sexual frigidity in the text, as Beauvoir's insights wash the
romance from sexual initiation and take up the conventionally
unspoken aspects of experience that are foundational to
identity and perspective.
In the meantime, Beauvoir has rhetorically put her arm around
the shoulders of her readers, saying we and us, making
community for readers of all sexes. This is community of the
sort that she studied in "The Introduction," one made of
subordinates, ethnic Others, who find their individuality in
resistance. Thus the feminist finds her model in the lives of
racially identified Others, in retrieving—hopefully
celebrating—individuality and the specifics of difference in their
community.
Volume 1, Part 1, Chapter 3
Summary
In this chapter, "The Point of View of Historical Materialism,"
historical materialism refuses the definition of woman as a
sexed organism. As Beauvoir points out, humanity in historical
materialist theory is a "historical reality. ... Only those with
concrete value in action have any importance." Woman's work
and her society's economic structure determine her identity.
Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the
State (1884) chronicles the importance of women in the Stone
Age. A primitive division of labor meant equality between the
sexes, the men hunting and fishing and the women gardening
and making pottery and cloth. Equal participation in the
economy and equal status led to discoveries of tin, copper,
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Chapter Summaries 12
iron, and bronze; the advent of the plow; the acquisition of
private property, including land and slaves; and what Engels
called "the world historical defeat of the female sex." Changes
included women's restriction to housework, domination by
man, the replacement of maternal right with paternal right, and
the transmission of property from father to son rather than
woman to her clan.
In this history, Beauvoir surveys the nature of man who seeks
possession, thinking of the chief as a model for autonomy and
accomplishment, as well as the acquisition of goods. Still, she
questions this individual whose interest in his property is an
"intelligible relationship."
Similarly, she says, "It is impossible to deduce woman's
oppression from private property." She sees a chain reaction,
citing the "imperialism of human consciousness."
But woman is not simply a worker, and there are times during
which her ability to reproduce is as important as her ability to
produce. Engels wanted to eliminate the family in a socialist
state, enabling women to work. In a collective society in which
everything is shared, including child-rearing, the woman thus
becomes an erotic object, while finding her subjectivity in her
public life. One might say she manifests the "doubleness"
extolled by Lacan extolls, something Freud saw as incomplete
development.
Analysis
Nothing goes to waste in this text. Even as Beauvoir rejects a
point of view or a discipline that does not satisfy her original
questions, she gathers information that she puts to good use in
following chapters. In this section, the reader begins to receive
notice for what they likely have always already known but need
to hear again—that no matter how satisfying and/or oppressive
domestic life can be for women, equality between the sexes
necessarily begins in the shared enterprise of meaningful work.
The lesson of historical materialism is the one that places
women in a position of equality with men: for Engels in the
economic structure, but for Beauvoir in the recognition of the
encounter with the imperative of existentialist morality. The
imperative is to live a life of freedom accomplished in the
challenge of sustaining a life of process, of progress—always
moving beyond to succeeding freedoms. To be human is to
break through the world of givens with an individually chosen
transcendence. To be passive is also a choice. In Sartre's
The Second Sex Study Guide
existentialism, passivity is a sign of "bad faith."
Volume 1, Part 2, Chapter 1
Summary
Beauvoir's historical account begins in the pre-agricultural
world, of which little is reliably known. She speculates on
women's roles: carrying heavy loads and accompanying men in
battle. Physical strength—a key value for survival—was,
however, limited for women by the reproductive demands
placed upon them. And without understanding even how
pregnancy occurs, the horde has too many children. For the
women, this means continued dependence on men for
protection and sustenance. Women's lives are characterized
as repetitious throughout their childbearing years, while men's
lives are creative. Women are caught in "repetition," in cycles
of pregnancy and birth, and the tolls on the body exacted by
many births. The men build boats and weapons, hunt and fish.
They also face danger for the good of the horde and reap the
benefits of prestige and accomplishment. Thus men find value
in diverse challenges and self-worth in achievements.
Analysis
"By transcending Life through Existence," Beauvoir says, man
has his lessons and woman, hers—but only vicariously. That is,
he participates in life, and she celebrates his accomplishment
in festivals. Destined only to repeat life rather than to surpass
it, the woman does not find in her life reasons for being.
Moreover, her complicity is revealed to all because
"transcendence ... inhabits her," and her project "is not
repetition but surpassing herself toward another future." Thus,
according to Engels, the feminine is imagined as equivalent to
the masculine in desire for the fullness of a creative life, while
"her misfortune is to have been biologically destined to repeat
Life," or to live inside the confines of a procreative life. This
living inside is called immanence.
Volume 1, Part 2, Chapter 2
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Chapter Summaries 13
Summary
When nomads become farmers, the law appears and social
structures develop. Women are highly esteemed and valued,
largely because large numbers of children are needed to work
the land. The concept of time takes on significance both in
terms of the seasons, but also because the history of the land
encourages ideas of ownership and the concept of times past,
present, and future. Without knowledge of the father's role in
procreation, many tribes are matrilineal, recognizing the
importance of the mother in birth and care of children. Women
are trusted to perform agricultural work because they are
associated with the mysterious fertility of the earth and the
female body. Following Lévi-Strauss, however, Beauvoir argues
that for men, women are not peers. In their mystery, women
are Other, and always under men's guardianship. According to
Beauvoir, "the woman is never anything more than a symbol of
her lineage," and continues to remain under the rule of her
father or eldest brother.
Beauvoir claims the story of the "devaluation of woman
represents a necessary stage in the history of humanity." As
man's practical intelligence grows—by making tools and
making laws—woman is seen as mysterious, mystical. Homo
faber—he who makes things—is sovereign. Mystery is intriguing
but suspect, and woman is the perplexing Other. As man gains
land, wealth, and slaves, woman is deprived of her domestic
duties (pottery, cloth, and management of the tribe's wealth).
By dominating the world, man triumphs over woman. Children
and women become possessions like the land. He is order and
accomplishment; she is mystery and chaos.
Analysis
As men grew wealthier and more powerful, women's prestige
diminished. Even maternity was devalued. Pregnancy, it was
believed, resulted from semen mixed with menses (menstrual
flow). Thus men came to see themselves as progenitors, and
matrilineal descent was replaced by agnation: that is, the
father holds the rights and transmits them. When "the mother
is no parent of that which is called her child," she "is lowered to
the rank of wet nurse or servant." These affirmations, Beauvoir
declares, "are not the results of scientific discoveries," but acts
of faith.
The Second Sex Study Guide Chapter Summaries 14

Volume 1, Part 2, Chapter 3
Summary
According to Beauvoir, "once woman is dethroned by ... private
property, her fate is linked to it for centuries." She lives with
her husband's family, she cannot inherit his wealth, and his
children are not hers. Owning nothing, she is hardly a person.
She can be disowned at will, male prenuptial chastity is not a
value, and a husband's adultery is not judged severely. She is
sent without her consent from her father's house to her
husband's family where she is little more than a servant. She
tends to the children of her body who are not considered hers.
professions."
Analysis
Beauvoir states, the "Roman woman ... has a place ... but ... is
still chained ... by lack of ... rights and ... independence." Thus,
this chapter circles back to a theme developing from the
book's opening sections: happiness is not the necessary
component or condition of freedom. Value in life is a matter of
surpassing freedom by "transcending Life through Existence."
Freedom begins in individual choice. Women need to have the
courage, the imagination, and the proper legal circumstances
in order to find their place in the world.

This chapter lists the shifts in women's situations as patriarchy

makes adjustments to local custom and law. A problem, for
Volume 1, Part 2, Chapter 4
example, for societies founded in agnation is the family without
a male heir. The Greek solution was to have the female heir
marry her oldest relative in her father's family. Thus, the
Summary
inheritance would remain in the same family. Sparta was an
As economic, social, and political life change, women continue
interesting exception—a rare place in which community
to suffer. Christian ideology regulates women's lives,
property prevailed. Beauvoir observes that if family property is
specifically their positions in the Church and in marriage. Saint
denied, the importance of the family and its conventions fail.
Paul writes: "For the husband is the head of the wife, even as
The Spartan model included near equality for women in
Christ is the head of the church." Woman become the most
education; girls and boys were brought up the same; the
dangerous temptation. The story of the Virgin birth
woman was not confined to her husband's home; and the
acknowledges that the woman's body is dirty and a place of
disappearance of the notion of adultery when the notion of
sin. The only marriage recognized by canon law is one by
possession was no longer part of the culture. No one, or no
dowry. Thus women are rendered helpless. If a woman with
one thing, is owned. Aside from Sparta, some free unmarried
children is widowed, she becomes their tutor, and her dowry,
women have been noted across several societies. They were,
their patrimony.
for the most part, prostitutes, and, depending on the specific
social arrangements, some prostitutes achieved considerable
Through the Middle Ages (c. 6th–16th centuries), women's
rank, some earned a good deal of money, and some, in fact,
privileges and rights fluctuate across cultures. German families
came from families of rank. For example, in the ancient
are strong, and the organization is somewhere between
republic of Rome, well-born matrons who had no work to
matrilineal and patrilineal. Women are powerless and sold into
occupy them registered as prostitutes in order to freely indulge
marriage; however, they inherit their dowries and are equal
in debaucheries.
partners in marriage. Some women are priestesses and
prophets—thus, presumably, beneficiaries of educations
Finally, the deeply imperfect freedom of Roman women cannot
superior to those of men. Things are worse among the
go without scrutiny. Beauvoir points out this woman "can
Carolingians and Merovingians of modern-day France:
inherit, ... has equal rights with the father concerning the
polygamy is tolerated, and women can be forced to marry
children, ... can will her property," and can divorce and remarry.
without consent. They can also be repudiated by husbands
She has, however, no means of employment. The result,
who hold the right of life or death over them. Women who bear
according to Roman poet Juvenal (55–60? C.E.-after 127?), is
many children are celebrated, but they lose all worth when
women on the rampage. Juvenal "reproaches their hedonism
their childbearing years end.
and gluttony; he accuses them of aspiring to men's

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The Second Sex Study Guide
Around the 11th century the feudal system accepts women's
succession as head of her household. Military service,
however, was required of vassals, so a woman still needs a
male guardian to hold her fiefdom—a plot of land granted to
vassals in return for labor. Her domain is not her property, but
instead belongs to the local lord, as does she and her children,
who are to be turned over to him as vassals. In a warlike
culture in which women are scorned—and horses
preferred—women share the activities of men. Women ride
horses and participate in hunts. Such ladies of the manor,
called "viragoes," are admired, Beauvoir says, because "they
behave exactly like men ... greedy, treacherous, and cruel."
Equality between men and women happens, however, when
"service of the fief" is "converted to a monetary fee." Since
men and women could be taxed identically, both sexes are
considered equal. In the countries of Italy, Switzerland, and
Germany, women remain subject to wardship. French and
German women, unmarried or widowed, have the same rights
as men. Still, a married woman remains subject to her
husband's guardianship.
The chapter ends with observations by writers from the
16th-18th centuries, both men and women, who attempt to
come to grips with the unequal and unbalanced circumstances
of the lives of men and women. Awareness and the will to
change surface in the writing of a growing number of
emancipated men and women.
Analysis
Beauvoir states, "the woman most fully integrated into society
is the one with the fewest privileges." And in common law as
well as feudal law, the only true emancipation for women is
outside of marriage. What was true for the privileged class was
not necessarily the case for the class of released serfs. With
the abolishment of serfdom, rural communities developed in
which spouses lived on equal footing, each doing work to
sustain the family. In environments of this nature—across time
and cultures—women won autonomy because they had viable
economic and social roles.
In this observation, the reader finds the repetition of the key
theme: the idea that women's emancipation comes not with
idleness and luxury—so-called material blessings—but from the
work of her hands, her willing partnership that depends upon
work equal to that of men in order to sustain life. At the same
Copyright © 2018 Course Hero, Inc.
Chapter Summaries 15
time, it is the wealthy woman who pays for her idleness with
submission. And, if the reader is to draw conclusions from the
historical narrative, one would be that not only does the
women pay with her life, but with her divorce from life itself.
The uncomfortable corollary is the male resentment of women,
their fear of women, the belief that women fake submission in
order to trap men into taking care of them and that women are
manipulative and scheming.
Even if people believe in historical notions of progress, and see
some elements of women's lives improving in the historical
narrative, the 16th century is marked by a turn against women.
Beauvoir states, "European codes ... were unfavorable to ...
woman, and all ... countries recognized private property and
the family." Prostitution remained an important part of society.
Wives remained in servitude to the family, and public women
kept the male population honest. "Getting rid of prostitutes,"
according to Saint Augustine, would "trouble society by
dissoluteness."
Volume 1, Part 2, Chapter 5
Summary
The shop girls and tradeswomen of the ancient regime in
France have no more restrictions on their lives and movements
than do the men around them. This freedom is part of the
mutuality of working-class men and women, and the coming
together of their goals.
There is, moreover, some feminist support around the French
Revolution. In 1791 French writer Olympe de Gouges proposes
a "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen."
She also founds a newspaper, which disappears with a few
other short-lived papers. In 1793 French actress Rose
LaCombe, along with a delegation of women, forces open the
doors of the Conseil Général, a general assembly of the
departments of France. She is greeted by assembly members
asking "Since when are women allowed to renounce their sex
and become men?" Women are banned from entering
thereafter. In 1790 the right of the firstborn and masculine
privilege are eradicated, and in 1792 divorce law is established.
Most women, however, namely women supported by men—in
the book referred to as a "parasitic woman"—remain too
"integrated into the family to find ... solidarity with each other,"
The Second Sex Study Guide
and they do not seek change. During the aftermath of the
French Revolution, women enjoy an anarchic freedom. The
Napoleonic Code that follows in the early 19th century,
however, delays women's emancipation in France for over a
century.
Beauvoir says that in the 19th and 20th centuries, "participation
in production and freedom from reproductive slavery ... explain
the evolution of woman's condition." Nothing happens,
however, without a fight. From the 1890s through the first
decades of the 20th century, feminists and their supporters
rally in favor of reproductive rights, abortion, divorce initiated
by women, and, above all, women's suffrage. At the same time,
the bourgeoisie claims new rights. Refusing to be revolutionary,
they want to reform behavior by ridding society of prostitution,
alcohol, and pornographic literature. In 1897 French women
won the right to testify in court and admittance to the National
Council for Public Health Services and the École des Beaux-
Arts. In 1901, recalling a familiar prejudice, the case for the
women's vote is presented to French parliament, limiting the
right to unmarried and divorced women. Women's suffrage is
delayed through the 1920s, despite the support of the Catholic
Church. Many believe the political resistance has more to do
with the potentially conservative nature of a swing vote of
Catholic women, than to the principle of women voting.
Analysis
Beauvoir notes that women's history has been written
exclusively by men. A telling list from the official record of
French Parliament in 1932 reveals common versions of women
by the average, educated Frenchmen. Some of the recorded
objections of members of parliament to giving women the vote
included: "We love women too much to let them vote ... she has
everything to lose," and "voting is a duty and not a right; women
are not worthy of it." Despite these objections, French women
win the vote in 1945.
Volume 1, Part 3, Chapter 1
Summary
In this untitled chapter, Beauvoir claims that woman, in the
eyes of all men, remains a singular value. In Italy, for example,
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Chapter Summaries 16
woman is mother and lover. There are governing myths, the
beliefs of a culture transmitted in familiar stories—legends,
fairy tales, folk tales—that transmit certain beliefs or habits of
mind from one generation to another. The objectification of
women, and the generalizations that define women, are
common in myths across human culture. Just as the history of
women has been written by men, the mythological
infrastructure that defines woman is a male projection.
Inescapable is the governing myth of Judeo-Christian culture,
the story of Eve, who was not Adam's equal, but was made
from his flank. Eve, one might say, was God's afterthought, a
companion for Adam, the first human, who might otherwise
have been lonely in the Garden of Eden. From the beginning,
Eve's potential as an individual is irrelevant. Eve is a
convenience for Adam: a thing, an object.
Key life principles are immortalized in the story impressed
upon people's collective memory as well as in the poetry and
song of the myth. English poet William Blake called the earth,
"The Matron Clay." An Indian prophet told her disciples not to
dig in the ground, saying, "It is a sin to hurt or cut, to tear our
common mother." The Baidya, a Hindu caste community in
central India, thought it was a sin "to rip the breast of their
earth mother with the plow." Often, the objectification of
women is cloaked in language of lasting beauty.
Finally, the myth of woman is All. For Beauvoir, woman is "all in
that which is inessential: she is wholly the Other." That is, her
stories, her mythic identity, have been constituted by him.
These are the myths, not the individual woman. Beauvoir
explains, "being all, she is never exactly this that she should be;
she is everlasting disappointment." This is the relation of
alterity, the relation between man and woman, ontologically
described—the nature of Being.
Analysis
Beauvoir states that the more women assert themselves as
humans, "the more the marvelous quality of Other dies in
them." The myth has a long life, though. Even as people resist
the myth, they guard it as part of their heritage, their
membership in culture. Today, people study the myths and
speculate on the real lives of individual women who wrest
independence and individuation from the chokehold of the
myth. Part of the answer to why women are complicit in their
subordination has to do with the staying power of the myth, the
early life lessons that remain even for women who strike out on
The Second Sex Study Guide
their own, and the cultural practices that recall the myth.
According to Beauvoir, the subordination of women serves
men's economic interests and suits their "ontological and moral
ambitions." This important statement points to the powerful
ways in which the subordination of women describes culture
and people's place in it. As an ontological example: Mother
Earth—an objectified version of woman—is both the source of
nurture, and the realm of "chaos, where everything comes from
and must return one day." Thus, Mother Earth is both life and
death—and the oft-cited masculine fear of the feminine is
rooted in such myths of power and loss of control.
Power is reinstated, and control over fear regained in myths
that diminish the feminine. For example, in many cultures,
menstruating women are viewed as unclean. In some cultures
they are separated from the general population for a week
each month. In others, there are purifying rituals. In the late
19th century the British Medical Journal reported the
"indisputable fact that meat goes bad when touched by
menstruating women." Menstruating women have been known
to destroy products in factories, turning sugar black and opium
bitter.
The moral ambition tends to emerge in the study of taboo,
unspoken rules about unspeakable practices. For example, the
little boy who loves his mother's flesh grows up to be
frightened of it. If he wants to see her as chaste, he cannot
acknowledge her body.
Volume 1, Part 3, Chapter 2
Summary
This is the only chapter in the book containing topics broken
out by Roman numerals. There are six topics, five of which
contain titles.
The chapter examines the singular forms the feminine myth
takes in the work of five writers.
I. Montherlant or the Bread of Disgust
Henry-Marie-Joseph-Millon de Montherlant (1895–1972), a
popular French novelist and dramatist, was best known for four
Copyright © 2018 Course Hero, Inc.
Chapter Summaries 17
novels in which a libertine novelist seduces and abuses his
willing victims. His earlier work is unabashedly
autobiographical, and reflects an egocentric and autocratic
personality.
In considering Montherlant's work, Beauvoir isolates the
writer's habits of mind that elevate male subjectivity, and
reduce women to objects of masculine disgust. As Beauvoir
observes, a woman in Montherlant's work is not merely Other,
but "monster." Femininity is defined negatively: "woman was
woman through a lack of virility." In other words, woman is
woman because she lacks masculine vital energy. For
Montherlant, this energy would include sadism, aggression,
contempt, and a sense of entitlement.
Montherlant's work demonstrates a misogyny that the
preceding chapter on myth suggests is derived from man's
hatred of his carnal origins and, therefore, his sensual mother.
The mother's body is a site of disgust. In his earlier
autobiographical work, Montherlant presents a mother who
cannot let her son, Alban, go. In a later work, Alban identifies
his lover with his mother. Love is her trap—her demand for his
vulnerability, and her focus on his troubles. He makes a
distinction between masculine strength and autonomy, and
feminine lack of self-sufficiency. She is a "parasite." For him, to
be unmarried, unattached, is to be free. Marriage is a burden.
Another representation of the need for domination is revealed
in Alban's sexual practice. His pleasure is solely to give
pleasure, to remain in control, to dominate. The loss of control
that signals consummation is exactly what he avoids. He
prefers a "haughty solitude of domination," and "cerebral, not
sensual, satisfactions in women."
A brief exception to Alban's disgust of the woman is the
sportswoman who can "acquire a spirit, a soul, thanks to the
autonomous exercise of their body." But, alas, once a
sportswoman falls in love, "she who had been all spirit and all
soul sweated, gave off body odors." That is, at the height of
intimacy, she moved from venerated sexual object to repulsive
human individual.
For Alban, the Oriental woman is another acceptable object,
"totally stupid and totally subjugated." Two examples: Douce,
"admirably silly and always lusted after;" and Rhadidja, "a quiet
beast of love who docilely accepts pleasure and money."
Montherlant's acceptance—he was elected to the French
Academy in 1960—and his publication successes point to a
The Second Sex Study Guide
readership agreeably attracted to these works that glorify a
male predator and the plight of his victims.
II. D.H. Lawrence or Phallic Pride
David Herbert Lawrence (1885–1930), a British writer who
eventually settled in Taos, New Mexico, was known for his
short stories, poems, and novels. In his work he presented sex
and nature as remedies for the evils of modern society,
including industrialization. His work was frequently involved in
notorious censorship cases, especially his novel Lady
Chatterley's Lover (1928).
While elevating the masculine, Lawrence—in contrast to
Montherlant—has enduring faith in the feminine. According to
Beauvoir, "She is as real as the man." And sexual intercourse is
an ideal union in which personality is put aside. Still, Lawrence
presents women as overpowered by the sexual attraction of
men—not the opposite. Women are subjugated by the male
animal, by the troubling and powerful spell of the mystery of life
that men exude.
According to Lawrence, life's deep mystery and great
communion lies in the sexual union of man and woman and the
abolishment of claims to personality, in which "each one is a
complete being, perfectly polarized," and in which "each
acknowledges the perfection of the polarized sex circuit."
Subjectivity—the sort of individuation Beauvoir sees as
essential to women's liberation—is not an issue in Lawrence's
work. Subjectivity in lovers generates nothing but a fever
analogous to that achieved with alcohol or opium. The will to
dominate debases woman. As French novelist André Malraux
notes in the preface to the translation of Lady Chatterley's
Lover, Lawrence believes it isn't enough for a woman to be the
"occasion for ... contact with the infinite ... that would be
another way of making her an object." For Lawrence, the
phallic marriage is infallible: "When the virility-femininity circuit
is established, desire for change is inconceivable."
It is the ideal of the "real woman," that Lawrence offers the
reader, that is, "the woman who unhesitatingly assents to
defining herself as the Other." Thus, Lawrence's woman is the
woman who not merely complies, but willingly participates in
her own subordination.
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Chapter Summaries 18
III. Claudel or the Handmaiden of the
Lord
Paul-Louis-Charles-Marie Claudel (1868–1955), was a French
writer of prophetic, faith-based work. Throughout his work,
Claudel maintained the conventional Roman Catholic view of
Eve, the temptation in the Garden of Eden, and the expulsion
as a result of her sin. Woman's risk paves the way for
mankind's salvation. Without the first sin, there would be no
salvation. Beauvoir identifies Claudel's themes, saying, "It is
good that man should know the temptations of the flesh." The
"enemy within" gives life its drama. Man is made aware of his
soul not only by the spirit, but by the flesh of woman. Love is,
thus, a deeply perturbing element, and in that, redemptive.
There is no equality in this enterprise—the roles of men and
women are not symmetrical. "Man's primacy is evident,"
Beauvoir observes. In Claudel, "It is man ... who builds
cathedrals, who fights with the sword, who explores the world."
Claudel's women are loyal, faithful, sweet and humble—in other
words, resigned. Such characters can overcome feminine
weakness, and "modesty through loyalty to the cause," that is,
her master's cause. Thus, Beauvoir notes that in the world,
woman draws "greatness from her very subordination. But in
God's eyes, she is a perfectly autonomous person."
The woman, thus venerated, is finally a servant in the world.
The more surely she moves toward salvation, the more
dedicated she is to her lot in life: her family, her home, her
country, and her church. Beauvoir concludes: "To sanctify this
hierarchy ... does not modify it ... but ... attempts to fix it in the
eternal."
IV. Breton or Poetry
André Breton (1896–1966), a one-time medical student and
reader of Freud, was a French poet, essayist, and critic. He
was also one of the founders of the surrealist movement.
Deeply influenced by Freudian ideas of the unconscious,
Breton advocated automatic writing—"thought free from any
control by the reason and of any aesthetic or moral
preoccupation." Surrealism aimed to eliminate distinctions
between dream and reality, reason and madness, objectivity
and subjectivity. Breton also maintained a lifelong commitment
to Marxist ideals, although he was a member of the Communist
Party for only a few years.
The Second Sex Study Guide
Beauvoir acknowledges the "gulf" between Claudel's religious
orientation, and Breton's poetry, and nonetheless recognizes
the analogous positions to the role each assigns women. For
Breton, it is at the height of "elective love" for a particular
woman that the "floodgates of love for humanity open wide."
Colliding with the mystery of life is the only way of finding it.
Breton finds women the key, and thus prizes women over men.
Beauvoir states, "beauty for Breton ... exists ... only through
passion; only through woman does beauty exist in the world."
And beauty is more than beauty. It fuses with knowledge—it is
truth, eternity, and the absolute. It is love, the reciprocity of one
being to another, the natural and supernatural bridge spanning
life. Breton's definitive statement, the conclusion to this notion
of reciprocal love, claims "the time has come to value the ideas
of woman at the expense of man."
Still Beauvoir objects: "It is exclusively as poetry and thus as
Other that woman is envisaged." Exchanging male privilege for
female privilege is not an adequate solution. If one were to ask
about women's destiny, "The response would be implied in the
ideal of reciprocal love." However, one cannot know if the
answer for her would be the same as for him. Would beauty be
found there? Would beauty be all? Breton, Beauvoir notes,
does not speak of woman as subject. She concludes, "She is
All: once more all in the figure of the other, All except herself."
V. Stendhal or Romancing the Real
Beauvoir calls Stendhal, born Henri Beyle (1783–1842), a
"tender friend of women." In the life and affections and work of
this French novelist of the early 19th century, Beauvoir finds a
model for a moral and credible representation of women.
Stendhal not only understands and reports the situations that
circumscribe women's lives, and therefore their habitual
responses, but also creates female characters whose
identities are made by their specific experiences and needs.
He avoids the mythic woman "disguised as shrew, nymph,
morning star, or mermaid."
Stendhal, whose mother died when he was seven, "loved
women sensually from childhood." Beauvoir claims that
Stendhal has no use for the notion of feminine mystery, or the
idea of the eternal female. Moreover, he understands the
specific lack of opportunity in women's lives and the effects of
oppression. He rejects negative judgments about women's
intelligence and idleness, and supports the notion that women
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Chapter Summaries 19
educated as men would be more successful than their male
counterparts. He also understands that the "deadening
educations" women are given are part of the oppressor's
attempts to diminish those he oppresses.
Beauvoir concludes, "Woman, according to [Stendhal], is ... a
human being: dreams could not invent anything more
intoxicating."
VI. Woman is the "privileged Other"
That is, she is "one of the measures of man, his balance, his
salvation, his adventure, and his happiness." As "privileged
Other," she is beauty, poetry, grace, and giver of peace and
harmony. In her failures, she is an ogress, witch, or praying
mantis who eats her partner. In this final section of "Facts and
Myths," Beauvoir points out that each of the authors she has
treated has a particular and idiosyncratic version of the
woman. Beauvoir believes the difference is "orchestrated
differently for each individual ... according to the ... way the One
chooses to posit himself." The crucial factor is the nature of
each man's freedom. The key, she notes, are men who "posit
themselves as transcendences but feel they are prisoners of
an opaque presence in their own hearts." They blame the
woman for this limit on their freedom. Stendhal's kinder version
is distinct: "He needs woman as she does him."
Beauvoir concludes: "In defining woman, each writer defines
his ... ethic and the ... idea he has of himself." There is an
improvement, however, when a writer—like Stendhal—is
interested in the woman's individual life adventure rather than
merely casting her as Other. Beauvoir laments that the latter
loses importance in an era when "each individual's particular
problems are of secondary import." Still, woman as Other
necessarily plays a role as each writer needs to discover
himself.
Analysis
Beauvoir refuses to allow the reader to lapse into
rationalization, or into a false sense of security with respect to
misogynist writers, as opposed to men who are sympathetic to
women. Although there are significant variations in the ways
these five authors treat notions of femininity or the alterity of
the male/female relation, all—but Stendhal—hold the woman as
Other. Oddly enough, even among the most sympathetic of the
The Second Sex Study Guide
20th-century writers, not one posits a female subject. For
Beauvoir and for the feminists who succeed her, subjectivity is
the liberating criterion. She locates this clarity in the fifth writer,
Stendhal, whom she considers a "tender friend of women."
On Montherlant: his sadomasochistic narratives simply affirm
the extremes of masculine behavior, and the forces of
discontent and disorder that characterize the historical
account of the subordination of women.
On Lawrence: Men and women operate within the respective
cults of virility and femininity. To depart from these assigned
positions means disabling the potential for the perfect union
with the other—something Lawrence posits as ideal, and the
source of all knowledge.
On Claudel: Woman is very specifically objectified in the
persona of the "good Christian woman."
On Breton: Breton's idea that "colliding with the mystery is the
only way of discovering it," is closer to Lawrence's view of the
"sexual shock," the latter's term for the effects of the collision
with life's mystery, and in Breton, the discovery of beauty.
Volume 1, Part 3, Chapter 3
Summary
This final section on myth deals with the relation of the myth of
woman to contemporary reality.
The distinction between alterity and reciprocity, a struggle of
consciousness, marks a place to begin. "It is thus true,"
Beauvoir begins, "that woman is other than man, and this
alterity is ... felt in desire, embrace, ... love." Felt, one might say,
in a primordial sense, while the "real relation is one of
reciprocity." Real relation is not what is felt but what occurs in
the context of action and experience. Beauvoir names the
dramas, "eroticism, love, friendship, and their alternatives of
disappointment, hatred, and rivalry." The passage from alterity
to reciprocity is from "enmity to complicity." The relation of
alterity posits woman as object, and the point of view is that of
the masculine subject. This reeks of enmity. Throughout the
text, alterity has been conceived as the male definition of
difference, the source of the subject/object conflict, while
reciprocity is the feminine response to difference, the
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Chapter Summaries 20
recognition of woman as individual subject in relation to the
masculine subject. Here the reader finds complicity between
the sexes. Hence, one could view the title, The Second Sex, not
as a matter of a secondary sex, but a matter—or dream, or
wish—of two equal sexes.
Women manifest themselves in numerous ways, but myth
interferes, summarizing them as a whole. Men, however, are
perplexed by the many ways women participate in the
archetypes of femininity. Beauvoir claims that men are
condemned to ignorance about the women's body, her "sexual
pleasure, the discomforts of menstruation, and the pains of
childbirth." The same is true for women with respect to men:
"As she is mystery for man, woman is regarded as mystery in
herself."
Here it must be acknowledged that the complex physiology of
the woman, as noted earlier, means her body is not a clear
expression of herself. Does this mean woman is a sphinx,
indefinable to herself?
Beauvoir presents an existential analysis. This is the very
center of her argument. It is not a matter of women's
ambivalent relation to their bodies, or men's oppositional habits
of mind. It is not a matter of hidden truth, too fluctuating to be
described. People have been looking in the wrong places.
Beauvoir states, "An existent is nothing other than what he
does ... the human being is nothing." It is action that defines a
person.
Still, in the male/female conundrum, there is the economic
distinction. Men own the means of production, the power of the
purse. And from this dominant position, a man observes the
moment when the oppressed person hides beneath a false
appearance.
Thus people come to see the Eternal Feminine, or feminine
mystery, as a "more profound reality." According to Beauvoir,
the oppressed—women—learn to hide their real feelings, and
are "taught from adolescence to lie to men." Thus, women live
between their subjectivity and their otherness. Essentially,
facing oneself as Other, and accepting the bargain with
experience is the beginning of relief. Beauvoir concludes,
quoting Laforgue, that woman will become fully human only
"when woman's infinite servitude is broken, when she lives for
herself and by herself." There is no blameworthy individual,
weak woman, or dominating man. Equality is a two-way street.
The Second Sex Study Guide
Analysis
Psychoanalysis has created the topic of the sexual distinction.
However, it is Beauvoir's movement of these ideas into a
philosophical framework that opens the reader to the
recognition that the feminine is defined by the Freudian
distinction, an unresolved identification with either the mother
or the father, and a woman's acceptance of her otherness and
her subjectivity. To factor in Beauvoir's Marxism is to find this
ambivalence in the woman's relation to production.
Volume 2, Part 1, Chapter 1
Summary
Introduction
Although women are overthrowing the myth of femininity,
Beauvoir claims that "their normal destiny is marriage." Thus
male prestige remains on a solid social and economic base.
This section explores the "common ground from which all
singular feminine existence stems."
Volume 2, Part 1, Chapter 1|Lived
Experience|Formative Years
This chapter, titled "Childhood," opens with, "One is not born,
but rather becomes, woman." Thus, the reader begins again
with the distinction between the individual figure of the human
female, and the subordinated, summarized object—woman. The
diction is disruptive, and it works. Beauvoir creates the
emerging consciousness of the sexually undifferentiated body,
and fixes it in a phrase: for children, the body "is the first
radiation of a subjectivity ... they apprehend the universe
through their eyes and hands." And boys and girls are alike,
deriving satisfactions from sucking, from excretory functions,
from exploring their bodies with their hands, and from penis
and clitoris. The soft skin and supple flesh of the mother
supplies the erotic and emotional stimulus, and boys and girls
respond in the same way.
At around six months, the newborn lives the primal drama of
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Chapter Summaries 21
one's relation to the Other. Recognizing the body's boundaries,
humans experience the anguish of separation, and find the
origins of desire for oblivion, for sleep, ecstasy, and death.
When the child grows up, he fights his abandonment,
defensively seducing and aggressively pursuing maternal
warmth and approval. Beauvoir says it is, moreover, "more
satisfying to deny brutal separation than to overcome it."
This scene is set for sexual differentiation: the girl continues to
be doted upon, even if she whines or bemoans the loss of the
mother's undivided attentions, while the boy is admonished not
to cry, to be a little man. The girl is a doll dandled on her
father's knee. The boy finds more is demanded of him because
of his superiority. It is not long before this difference is
embodied in his penis, his difference. Girl's genitalia are
ignored. The boy is celebrated for his penis; in many cultures,
songs are sung to it, it is named, and the boy has the pleasure
of localized sensation. The girl comes to ignore her own body,
perhaps worrying about what might be inside, and even
assuming she has a similar organ on the inside. The boy
experiences erections, and plays with his penis. Often, the girl
gets a doll.
The doll is a passive thing, and not a source of pleasure and
convenience. The girl, however, learns to dress the doll and
pamper her the way she herself has been fussed over. The
predominant first word for girls is "pretty." The boy, as he
grows, uses his body to dominate nature, and as a fighting tool.
He likes his muscles, climbs trees, fights with other boys,
learns to take blows, and suppresses tears. For the girl, she is
taught she must make herself other in order to please, and is
"is treated like a living doll." It is noted that some girls, raised by
fathers or on their own, persist in acting autonomously. Often
such girls are socially castigated or harshly reprimanded. They
are a cause for suspicion, and are themselves uncertain, even
rebellious, and often angry.
As the mother backs off from her son, respecting his maleness,
she often aggressively attempts to regulate her daughters,
inflicting judgments that conflict with a girl's growing attempts
at autonomy. The more the child matures, the more the family
hierarchy asserts itself: the father's power, the mother's
subordination. At school, the girl discovers the stories of
masculine adventure and invention, where "male superiority is
overwhelming." If the family is religious, she likely discovers
another set of harsh rules and values in which she learns
lessons about her place in the world.
The Second Sex Study Guide Chapter Summaries 22

Up to around age 12, girls are as sturdy and self-sufficient as to recognize the plight of women in societies more repressive
boys. A survey of preteen boys and girls establishes that most or conservative than Beauvoir's, this chapter brilliantly
boys are glad they are not girls, while girls in the study are chronicles the development of the small girl.
sorry not to be boys. Beauvoir describes this finding by saying,
"Boys are better ... a boy has more aptitude for school ... a boy
does more interesting work." Volume 2, Part 1, Chapter 2
It is at this point that the girl begins to accept things as they
are. Beauvoir argues that a girl's passivity is condoned by
family; compensating temptations are dangled before her eyes;
Summary
and she yields as the "thrust of her transcendence comes up
In Chapter 2, "The Girl," the separation between boys and girls
against harsher and harsher resistance." The boy's future is
is exacerbated as the girl succumbs to the hormonal
open, while the girl will become a wife, a mother, a
challenges that come with menses. She is often in physical
grandmother. This is why she becomes preoccupied with sex.
pain, emotional distress, and experiences mood swings.
It is her future and her destiny. The secrets of sexuality and of
According to Beauvoir, her body is turned into a "screen
pregnancy frighten her. She does not trust the adults who
between [herself] and the world." She becomes a stranger to a
reassure her. Likely, she has had some experience with pain: a
self whose body is out of control. She is also a "stranger to the
toothache, an appendectomy. In her anxiety, she links sex with
rest of the world."
something dirty, and childbirth with blood and suffering.
Disgust with her developing body, with menses, with unwanted
While the boy at 13 is aggressive, competitive, and ready to put
attention by strangers on the street, and shame at the change
his body on the line to preserve his freedom, a girl's body is
in her appearance are all part of her daily experience.
more fragile, and she is less likely to engage in competitive
athletic activities. Beauvoir writes that a girl, detached from her
With puberty, the insults of a girl's body are compounded.
childhood past, seems to be in a period of discomfort and
Moreover, "puberty has a ... different meaning for the two
transition, during which she "is consumed by ... waiting for
sexes because it does not announce the same future." While
Man." And marriage is not only "an honorable and less
boys may find their bodies an embarrassing presence, there is
strenuous career than many others," it enables her to realize
a good deal of pride in their virility. The pain of menses, the
her sexuality and maternity, as well as attain social dignity.
threat of inappropriate and intentional touch, and unwanted
attention, are all worrisome. A girl's dreams and fantasies
While the young man's erotic drives confirm his pride in his
consist of sensual love and warm caresses, as well as rape and
body, the girl's body challenges her well-being, emotional and
fear of penetration.
physical: "Puberty means ... problems arise ... The anguish of
being a woman eats away at the female body," according to
Beauvoir.
Analysis
Girl's timidity is attributed to her physical fragility. Boys have
The chapter echoes and confirms the book's key point—that access to violence that confirms the power of their choices.
the developmental experience of boys and girls is significantly From puberty, girls lose ground in artistic and intellectual
different. Moreover, the book's opening conundrum—the pursuits. The disparity is seen in part as lack of
question of why and how women are complicit in their encouragement from teachers, but also lack of ambition.
subordination—is so clearly demonstrated that the issue of Beauvoir says that "she becomes an object ... she is existing
blame becomes irrelevant. Patriarchy is a male development, outside of herself." It is unclear whether she wants to be
but not a conspiracy against women. It is this very observation beautiful as the attractive other, or beautiful for herself. Both
that perhaps presents a tipping point for the status quo. are likely the case.

Although the experiential and theoretical models are drawn Confusion, trauma, and secrets to hide her distress are
from the late 1940s, when The Second Sex was written, these characteristic of the girl's transition to womanhood. At 16, she
ideas hold up even as times change. Also, as the reader comes has experienced many uncomfortable episodes: puberty,

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The Second Sex Study Guide
menses, arousal, fear, and disgust. Makeup, padded bras, false
eyelashes compete with extreme modesty, guilty lies, and
secrets. Many girls' earliest sexual encounters are with older
girls or women, placing their trust in their own sex rather than
with men. Thus the adolescent girl, in an age of hope and
ambition, finds herself passive and dependent.
The other side to her complicated vulnerability is her openness,
her ability to dream. The adolescent girl is susceptible to
beauty in the natural world, in loving friendships, and in the
arts. She feels passionately, having dreamed of love at least
since puberty.
Finally, according to Beauvoir, a girl's "character and behavior
express her situation: if it changes, the adolescent girl's
attitude also changes." As it becomes possible for girls to take
their futures into their own hands, as they become involved in
sports, studies, politics, they are less preoccupied with sexual
conflicts and dreams of love. Still, even as she becomes more
independent, a girl leaves room in her life for love. That is, she
is not stuck between, but ensnared, on the double hooks of an
enhancing subjectivity, and her devotion to her destiny as a
woman.
Analysis
Although the contemporary reader may resist the descriptions
of the lives of girls and women that seem old fashioned, they
should keep in mind that for the balance of the world's
population, much of what was true in 1949 is still the case. For
the bastions of enlightened change—primarily among the
educated middle classes in the Western world—the situations
may seem archaic. Still, even as laws of agnation are defunct,
the global economy is patriarchal. And even as the old social
structures and prejudices fail, the girl born today is raised by a
mother and grandmother whose habits are of another time
and—given the dispersal of population in the 21st
century—often another place. The baby girl born in the 21st
century does not know her mother had it worse. She grows
and develops according to the practices of her time. Medical
and law schools in America, for example, are now evenly
divided in their student population between men and women.
On the other hand, working women still handle most of the
parenting duties.
Copyright © 2018 Course Hero, Inc.
Chapter Summaries 23
Volume 2, Part 1, Chapter 3
Summary
This chapter, titled "Sexual Initiation," examines the asymmetry
of male and female eroticism that accounts for differences in
initial sexual experience in the lives of men and women.
Predictably, the complications which make sexual pleasure
more elusive for women than for men originate in the
developmental crises for girls, and the continuing difficulties
for the late adolescent—most notably, sexual initiation.
According to Beauvoir, "woman has a more authentic
experience of herself." This does not mean the woman is
superior, but in her development and the trauma of her sexual
initiation, her pleasure in her sexuality is long in coming, and
often hard won. The loss of virginity is a breaking with the past,
and usually an experience of physical pain even for a girl
matched with a sensitive lover. She leaves the adolescent
world of romantic daydreams for the real and appraising eyes,
and the groping hands of an implacable reality. Finally, there is
in the sexual act the danger and life-changing prospects of a
child. For some women, sexual pleasure is forever elusive. The
statistics for frigidity in women are substantial, but the woman
who accepts her passivity and her otherness, as well as her
subjectivity, can find delight in erotic pleasure.
Man's "anatomical destiny" is different from women's "from the
biological, social, and psychological points of view," Beauvoir
argues. Male sexuality is originally transcendent. He reaches
out for a partner with his hands, his penis, and his mouth.
Consummation is accompanied by his pleasure, as well as by
the fulfillment of his biological imperative, his ejaculation. In his
"aggressive role and satisfied solitude of orgasm ... he
hesitates to recognize himself fully as flesh." That is, he fails to
find himself objectified in the very ways the woman is flesh to
him. Still, according to Beauvoir, if he covets the flesh of his
partner while recognizing her freedom, she feels both desire
and respect in him, and "the lovers can experience shared
pleasure in their own way." Alterity is, therefore, no longer
hostile in character.
The Second Sex Study Guide Chapter Summaries 24

In an earlier section, the reader is introduced to the fear of

Analysis penetration and resistance to domination, which is part of the
girl's experience. While the lesbian is repulsed by the male
The singular achievement of this work rests in the author's
body, she finds the female body to be an object of desire. This
ability to capture both conscious awareness, and an event's
is an utterly natural attraction, since the maternal body is a
registration in the unconscious, in a single stroke. That is,
person's—male and female—first object. Reference is also
perhaps, the way events are registered in a moment of
made to adolescent homosexual experiences in the lives of
experience, and stored as the basis of future experience. In
most boys and girls, connections commonly not pursued in
this case, the primal traumas yield the fact that pain and
maturity.
pleasure, terror and acceptance, revulsion and pleasure,
occupy two sides of a very thin coin. Consider, for example, the
Beauvoir's statement with its alarming diction and point of
view: "The vagina ... becomes an erotic center ... through the
Analysis
intervention of the male, and ... a kind of rape."
While Beauvoir writes compellingly of the nature of

The context here is the developmental shift the girl must make homosexual love, and the roles that lesbian lovers play, she

from pleasure in her clitoris, to vaginal sensitivity—at least as acknowledges that much the same may be said of

an accepted proposition in psychoanalytic theory. If the erotic heterosexual couples. That is, sex play itself—in private and

zone of the mature male is the penis, it is a simple matter for public life—may involve a range of performances by both

the boy/man of what comes naturally, a message from his sexes, including active and passive, virile and feminine. She

body to his receptive mind and memory. For the woman, her also refutes the notion of categorizing lesbians by type,

mature erotic zone is established by a body outside her own, although it may be observed that in today's culture of fluid

and unlike her own. And this adjustment is not easily achieved. sexualities, categories do operate. It's just that in the present,

Finally, the feminine adjustment to sexual pleasure is initiated such categories need not be banned since they are merely

in rape, in the forceful penetration demanded by the virgin descriptive, neither coercive nor pejorative—butch and femme.

body. This speaks volumes, of course, of the strange

complementary connections of the male and female bodies, of
the relation between men and women—of what in this text is
called alterity. In a single statement, alterity is defined not
merely as anatomical complementarity between the sexes, but
as a psychosexual and social phenomenon as well.
Volume 2, Part 1, Chapter 4
The difficulties for lesbian couples, however, come from the
times and places in which the couple are not in compliance, or
cannot be in stride with the conventions of social practice. For
example, there is the pain of not being able to have children, or
to unite in marriage. Today, this sentence is cast in the past
tense in many parts of the world. Finally, Beauvoir makes
normative the lesbian experience by scrutinizing examples in
fiction as well as reports from ordinary lives. She concludes: "It
is wrong to establish a radical distinction between
heterosexual and homosexual."

Summary
Volume 2, Part 2, Chapter 5
In this chapter, "The Lesbian," although Beauvoir uses
inversion—a term for homosexuality contemporaneous with her
work—she assumes an existential position, saying, "The past is
grasped ... by a new choice, and ... must be judged by its
Summary
authenticity." Beauvoir believes "psychoanalysts' great error ...
Drawing on literature, diaries and anecdotes for Chapter 5,
is that they never envisage [homosexuality] as anything but an
"The Married Woman," Beauvoir presents the beleaguered
inauthentic attitude." With this statement, Beauvoir's work
state of the married woman and the burdens of the married
leaps into the 21st century with respect to a non-judgmental
man, developing the view that the failure of marriage is the
appreciation of the fluidity of gender and the range of
failure of the institution, rather than the fault of individuals. The
accompanying identifications and practices.

Copyright © 2018 Course Hero, Inc.

The Second Sex Study Guide
chapter builds on the organizing premise of the book, the
existential understanding that pronounces women's lives cut
off from the mainstream of life itself. In other words, woman, as
biological entity and conjugal object, is destined "to maintain
the species and care for the home, which is to say, to
immanence"—to a turning inward, to an existence bounded by
husband, children, and hearth. Since, according to Beauvoir, "all
human existence is transcendence and immanence at the
same time," the chapter demonstrates how the existence of
the married woman is constricted by the institution of marriage
itself.
Marriage, on the other hand, provides for man the perfect
synthesis of immanence and transcendence, and "these two
moments are implied in every living movement."
Transcendence is the movement beyond the self, the thrust
toward the future, while immanence involves the maintenance
of the self, and the integration of present experience with the
past. This very access to a larger life for the man engenders an
inequality affecting both partners. The disappointments and
problems for women in marriage, as well as the burdens of the
married man, constitute a narrative that quite thoroughly
dismantles marriage. The chapter ends with proposals for the
sort of equality between married partners that can only happen
with the liberation of women, with an access to independence,
and the potential for the woman to fully inhabit her individuality.
Analysis
No biographical account of Beauvoir's life is complete without
the narrative of her longstanding liaison with Jean-Paul Sartre,
the open terms of their sexual arrangement, and, most
prominently, her refusal to marry him although he proposed on
several occasions. While full of engaging examples, this
chapter includes fictional and non-fiction narratives, all of
which are dealt with equally as examples of the plight of the
married woman. The chapter is a welcome synthesis of the
major ideas in the book, and it is perhaps the one that most
forcefully sounds the alarm of women's subordination,
presenting a totally unacceptable solution for love matches,
marriage itself, and the romance of intimately shared lives.
However, the final paragraphs present a note of hope based in
equal opportunities for men and women. In this context,
economic opportunity is presented as the crux.
Copyright © 2018 Course Hero, Inc.
Chapter Summaries 25
Volume 2, Part 2, Chapter 6
Summary
In Chapter 6, "The Mother," Beauvoir claims that since a
woman's body is dedicated to the propagation of the species,
motherhood is the woman's "natural vocation." Human society,
however, is never left to nature. This chapter explores the
interactions between society and maternity that treats the
notion of "natural" as a problem, with respect to the lives of
women. First, the reproductive function, for a very long time,
has not been a matter of biological chance. Birth control
methods range from technique (coitus interruptus and post-
coital douches) to technology (condoms, and birth control
pills). In all cases, the control of reproduction creates tension
between lovers. The legal, moral, and emotional conflicts
generated by abortion represents the extreme example,
including prospects for added danger, shame, and anguish
over the illegal abortion.
Pregnancy is, according to Beauvoir, "a drama playing itself out
in the woman between her and herself." It promises the woman
a "new existence is going to manifest itself and justify her
existence." Still she is the "plaything of obscure forces,"
assaulted by the discomforts of pregnancy and the distortions
of her body as the pregnancy proceeds. Subject to her own
fears of suffering or dying in childbirth, she finds her
appearance is subject to the snickers of young men and the
curiosity of small children.
"Like the woman in love," the new mother feels needed.
According to Beauvoir, maternal love is perhaps more difficult
and great in that there is no reciprocity. She cares for "a little
stammering consciousness, lost in a fragile and contingent
body." Her freedom consists in expecting no compensation for
the gifts she bestows. There is no guarantee, however, that the
natural state of becoming a mother insures for the infant a
good mother. The mother is always subject to her past: her
relationship to her family of origin, to her husband, and to her
own sexual history.
Finally, there are women who, "out of custom ... are still refused
education, culture, responsibilities ... that are the privileges of
men." For Beauvoir, while there is no such person as the
natural mother, but there is a woman for whom people have
the greatest hope, who "can only consent to give life if life has
The Second Sex Study Guide
meaning" and "cannot try to be a mother without playing a role
in economic, political, or social life"—the necessary conditions
for giving birth to "free men."
Analysis
Beauvoir notes that meaningful work for women is not
incompatible with motherhood when the community shares
responsibility in the raising of children. Until women's economic
contributions are equal to men's, however, the subordination of
women is inevitable.
Volume 2, Part 2, Chapter 7
Summary
Chapter 7, titled "Social Life," examines the ways in which the
family is connected to a larger community, usually a group
"socially similar to themselves." Although the man in the family
is connected to the community because he is a producer and a
citizen, it is the wife who assumes the social duties.
Clothing, household furnishings, and elegant parties present
public statements about the family, its wealth, taste, and social
status. Friendships among women, born in this situation,
present opportunities for complicity. Affirmation of their
common universe is sought in the exchange of recipes and
household hints. They often share sexual secrets, tales of
adultery, and admissions of frigidity that negate male sexual
domination. Affirmation of their beauty and elegance is sought
in their wardrobes and in their extravagant parties. These
women are joined in their objectification, and gather to
construct a counter-universe, and a specifically feminine moral
code.
Analysis
Here the woman's adultery—an emphasis in this chapter—is a
cheap thrill, a confirmation of the objectification of the woman
with no less emotional impact than the acquisition of a
designer handbag. The fact that she performs this
objectification on another—even if her lover is a man, does not
give her the status of subject. As Beauvoir concludes, as long
Copyright © 2018 Course Hero, Inc.
Chapter Summaries 26
as "this equality is not ... recognized ... it is ... difficult for ...
woman to act ... equal to ... man."
Volume 2, Part 2, Chapter 8
Summary
Historically, prostitution has been the outlet for male sexual
energy, even viewed as the means of preserving marriage. This
chapter, titled "Prostitutes and Hetaeras," examines the
objectification of the female in the lives of women who have
chosen the profession of sexual object—women who earn their
survival in capitalizing their passivity. Many have suggested the
same is true for the married woman. It is, perhaps, for them,
less blatant a notion.
Choosing is perhaps not the right verb. Although there are
many theories as to what drives a woman to prostitution, most
convincing are the obvious: lack of work and the misery of
inadequate salaries. This chapter offers, anecdotally, the
prevalence of the abuse that transforms a young girl into a
prostitute. The life of a prostitute commonly includes a
girlfriend, sometimes also her lover, who is complicit in their
"counter-universe" in the same way that a best friend is
complicit in the virtuous woman's private life. Beauvoir states,
"it is not their moral and psychological situation that makes
prostitutes' existences miserable." Illness, drug addiction,
alcoholism, humiliating medical checkups, arbitrary cruelty by
police and by clients, and gratuitous violence all reduce the
common prostitute to the level of a thing.
Beauvoir compares the miserable life of the common
prostitute, whose appeal is general to the class of women she
calls hetaeras, to women who traffic in delivering "woman to
the dreams of men who give her fortune and glory in
exchange." Today people might think of women who operate
expensive escort services. These are, according to the author,
"women who use not only their bodies but also their entire
person as exploitable capital." Beauvoir explores the notion of
freedom for a woman whose role as expensive sex object is a
professional choice. This woman's freedom is not so much the
male freedom of transcendence. Instead, she endows her
passive femininity, her willing herself as object, and "engulfs
them with herself in immanence."
Here, money has a "purifying role; it abolishes the war of the
The Second Sex Study Guide
sexes." The prostitute seeks not only the economic advantage,
but the "apotheosis of her narcissism."
Analysis
Up to this point in the text, the reader has encountered the
potential for a moral existence modeled on the opportunities of
male privilege. Thus far in the text, this privilege is denied the
un-individuated woman, the biological generalization, the sex
object. She is all immanence, at least by reputation.
Just as the male model is based in what might be called an
apotheosis of transcendence—from the early analyses of
projection of his body in the boy's sexual initiation, to the
husband's movement out into his community—the apotheosis
of the feminine is revealed here in the hetaera's trap.
In the text, the male lover of the hetaera is trapped in her
immanence, which includes her self-love, just as, historically,
the female object is pinned by the patriarchal projection—her
objectification, her generalization as sexual object. This
chapter operates as a point of comparison, showing the reader
what happens when turnabout is not so much fair play as it is a
model for the harm of extremes at either end of the spectrum.
Could a matriarchal culture have produced a similarly
objectified male, identified only as sperm donor or sex toy?
What does this say about the patriarchal subordination of
woman?
The liberation of women, as this text urges the reader to
conclude, is the liberation of humanity, an equality between the
sexes that replaces the male oppositional response to alterity
with the feminine response. This is neither a destruction of
difference nor an opposition, but an alterity based on
reciprocity and relativity.
Volume 2, Part 2, Chapter 9
Summary
In Chapter 9, "From Maturity to Old Age," Beauvoir explores
the similarity of the repetitions and abrupt shifts that
characterize movement through the earlier stages of a
woman's life, the movement from maturity to old age registers
as a jarringly abrupt change. Beauvoir states, "While the male
Copyright © 2018 Course Hero, Inc.
Chapter Summaries 27
grows older continuously, the woman is brusquely stripped of
her femininity."
Behaving somewhat out of character, the aging woman may
dress inappropriately, indulge in masturbation and sexual
fantasies, and find herself attracted to younger men, to
women, and to religion. She is also susceptible to questionable
authorities: faith healers, prophets, and charlatans. Menopause
and offers a new life. Moments of fervor and depression
alternate, partly the result of hormonal drops, but such mood
swings may also be psychological. Should her sex drive persist,
as it does for many women, she may pursue young men.
A woman's situation changes as she ages. Her husband is
likely at the height of his career as she finds herself in
retirement. She is no longer swayed by public opinion, and she
avoids things she once valued: beauty treatments, social
obligations, etc. Turning to her children, she becomes
overprotective of her sons and often unkind to their wives. If
she is sympathetic to her daughters, she attempts to live
vicariously through them. Her relationships with her
grandchildren are problematic—she wishes to mother them
and is hostile to the little strangers they are to her. Some
grandmothers, however, manage their hostility and become
guardian angels to their grandchildren, demanding nothing and
capable of an unassuming love.
Elderly women find serenity near the ends of their lives. Many,
having married older men, outlive their husbands. They come to
cherish their independence and develop a kind of cynicism
born of "having seen it all." But, according to the author, the
greatest freedom an elderly woman can achieve is "stoic
defiance or skeptical irony. At no time in her life does she
succeed in being both effective and independent."
Analysis
Unlike the preceding sections, there is nothing here that
doesn't sting, that doesn't offer the solace of prospects for
repair or, as in earlier sections, a redeeming wit. As rhetoric,
the advantages are clear: an imperative to ask, "What must
women do?" builds line by line, each line a life sentence to be
avoided at all costs.
The Second Sex Study Guide
Volume 2, Part 2, Chapter 10
Summary
According to the opening paragraph, the announced goal of
this chapter, titled "Woman's Situation and Character," is to
grasp the "Eternal Feminine in her economic, social, and
historical conditioning as a whole." For centuries women in the
Western world have had to endure many indictments, including
being considered argumentative, petty, and selfish, while
lacking a sense of truth, accuracy, and morality.
This chapter consists of an indictment list, in which "a synthetic
point of view" attempts to take the measure of "behaviors ... in
negative form," suggested by the woman's situation. There has
been a shift to abstract and judgmental statements drawn from
psychoanalytic, scientific, and historical research as well as
from literary texts. Something is indeed amiss in the
stereotypes of the "Eternal Female" echoed in this chaotic
chapter. As the "indictments" accumulate, some traits
discussed seem not at all negative, while others do not seem
to be specific to women. Many, at least in a 21st-century
reading, are unbelievable or quaint.
The argument asks the reader to believe these are universal
judgments produced by the woman's situation and reproduced
over time. This argument may not fly for the literate,
contemporary reader, however. While many of these
statements tend to logically follow from the earlier scientific
and historical accounts, they seem strained as conclusions.
They also seem hard to fathom as aspects of the stereotypical
Eternal Female.
For example, Beauvoir claims that "woman's mentality
perpetuates that of ... civilizations that worship ... earth's
magical qualities: she believes in magic." While this statement
echoes the earlier historical account, it does not seem familiar
in thinking stereotypically, or logically, about women. In the
agricultural time of men and machines, certainly there is—or
have been—male farmers who find the seasons magical.
Moreover, believing in magic is not as unfashionable as it once
may have been.
This is possibly Beauvoir's point: that stereotypical thinking
destroys individuation, and thus makes objects out of
individuals. Still, the examples need to be convincing.
Copyright © 2018 Course Hero, Inc.
Chapter Summaries 28
Here is another example, especially odd in an existentialist
text: "Not only is she unaware of what real action is, ... but she
is lost." This sentence, the topic sentence of a new paragraph,
is followed by, "she does not know how to use masculine logic
well." And the supporting evidence (at least this sentence
offers some) states: "A syllogism is not useful in making
mayonnaise." Likely, the example is cancelled out by the
philosopher's wit—but to what end?
The chapter closes with a surprising and nonetheless
rewarding shift in focus. The "transcendence ... prohibits her
from having access to ... human attitudes ... not so common
even in men." Readers may find themselves, quite
appropriately, at the cusp of disappointment in the failure of
existential morality as a human goal.
A final call for liberation, acknowledging that it "can only be
collective"—a project for men and women together—demands
above all "that the economic evolution of the feminine
condition be accomplished." This is a far cry from where the
book started. Still, readers may find themselves disturbed by
the negative nature of women's situation that produces such
rhetoric as common discourse. In this very sense, the synthesis
promised at the opening has found its fulfillment in the end.
Analysis
This chapter loses focus in its overstated examples, as
Beauvoir explores the age-old indictments against women. She
fails to distinguish among those that are blatantly stereotypical
and designed to perpetuate the subordination of women
(Eternal Femininity), and those that seem to have some basis in
the real conditions of the lives of men and women.
The failure of existential morality would seem to be the
underside of this angry and chaotic chapter.
Volume 2, Part 3, Chapter 11
Summary
In Chapter 11, appropriately titled "The Narcissist," woman is
seen as both subject and object, but cannot be joined as a
whole. Her individualism is at stake. According to Beauvoir, a
woman gives herself "sovereign importance because no
The Second Sex Study Guide
important object is accessible to her." She cultivates a
personal style in her clothing and in her surroundings, and she
engages in passionate and unusual interests designed to
represent, rather than occupy her. All this is a failed hedge
against objectification, which doesn't work since she simply
creates and recreates herself as object. Authenticity is lost in
the love of the mirror image. In the context of theater, such a
woman is not a successful actress since her goal is not to
transcend herself in a role, but simply to be in the spotlight, to
be seen. Thus, she is a pretense of a subject—she performs a
subject she cannot be. Women wish to be important, rather
than accomplish something that makes them important. They
prefer to serve as muse to a gifted man. A distinguished lover
is not the man she loves, but the apotheosis of her narcissism.
There is no reciprocity in her need for attention. She cannot
love.
Analysis
Narcissism is the apotheosis of immanence. It is the ultimate,
predictable retreat from objectification and the failure of the
retreat. It is a body trapped in its own immanence: in a sense,
the extreme of the object position. A woman is not even
subject to herself since she is not whole. There is no
integration of the woman and her reflection.
Volume 2, Part 3, Chapter 12
Summary
In this chapter, "The Woman in Love," Beauvoir claims, "The
word 'love' has not at all the same meaning for both sexes."
Women believe love means total devotion, body and soul. For
men, "the woman they love is merely one value among others."
This difference is not a law of nature—it is a matter of
difference in situation. The man is ambitious and reaches out.
The woman chooses to lose herself in another. This loss is her
freedom, and love is her religion.
The adolescent girl seeks out the love of one of the males.
According to Beauvoir, love eventually comes to hold "less
place in feminine life than ... husband, children, home,
pleasures, social life, vanity ... and career." For a woman, rather
than fighting on her own account, the "easy way out" is to seek
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Chapter Summaries 29
love. Worn out by her adventure, she discovers years too late
she has taken the wrong path.
Psychoanalysis suggests that the girl seeks the adoring father
whom she can worship: that love has to do with seeing herself
through his eyes. And once she loves another man, the
difficulties multiply. In love, woman reconciles her sense of
self-love and eroticism. For the woman who can get past the
division between the animality of eroticism and the spirituality
of love, sexual satisfaction awaits. It is then that she wants to
give everything and demand nothing. She finds herself by
loving another and losing herself in him.
Unable to see her lover as a man, she worships him as an idol.
And when he fails her, when his faults or vulnerabilities reveal
he is not a god, she loses everything. In her disappointment,
she refuses him his freedom.
When a man has had enough, he is comfortable with
separation. The woman in love can never give enough. Still, she
is not All for him and strives at least to believe she is
indispensable to him.
Even jealousy is perceived differently. If the woman perceived
his love as dimmed, she invents rivals. For the man jealousy is
just a passing crisis, while for her it is a matter of vigilance and
paranoia. She lives in fear that she can be replaced, even as
she has placed all she has in him. Indeed, she believes "there is
no great distance between betrayal by absence and infidelity."
As soon as she feels unloved, she becomes jealous.
If the woman exists essentially for herself, a condition that
demands economic independence, then she can find love.
According to Beauvoir, for women love is "an attempt to
overcome the dependence to which she is condemned by
assuming it."
Analysis
This chapter is a catalog of the differences between men and
women in the ways they love. The paradox, brought to light in
this analysis is that love is both poison and cure for the
"woman trapped in the feminine universe ... incapable of being
self-sufficient." In 1949 Beauvoir found herself in the "trap" and
imagined the way out. It is for the individual woman to say
whether this is her case in the present. For Beauvoir, the trap
could only be sprung in a socialist economy in which maternity
and its responsibilities, as well as incomes, were shared. A rash
The Second Sex Study Guide
of utopian novels with this model in mind was in vogue in the
1980s. Perhaps there are other models yet to be invented.
Volume 2, Part 3, Chapter 13
Summary
In Chapter 13, titled "The Mystic," the woman in love seeks to
idolize the man she loves. There is another sort of woman who
seeks not god in the man, but chooses to worship "the divinity
in God himself." Although there are men who make similar
choices, there is a prevalence of women who "abandon
themselves to the delights of celestial marriage." According to
Beauvoir, the mystic gropes "for the supreme source of value,"
finding it at times in the figure of a mortal man who holds the
secrets she seeks. Such projections of love (erotomania) take
sometimes platonic, and sometimes sexual forms. The mystic
borrows from earthly love both the words and the physical
effect. Beauvoir cites Italian Renaissance artist Bernini's
famous statue "The Ecstasy of St. Teresa" as an example. Like
all women in love, the mystic seeks to forget herself in love, to
annihilate herself in achieving ecstasy: "They actively apply
themselves to self-annihilation by the destruction of their
flesh."
"Mystical fervor, like love and even narcissism," Beauvoir
concludes, "can be integrated into active and independent
lives." Although the mystic has no grasp on the real world, she
who does is able to accomplish her freedom authentically, by
projecting "a positive action into human society."
Analysis
At the most valuable points in her argument, Beauvoir brings
home the potential for freedom, for spinning gold from the
dross of feminine impulses only harmful in their immanence.
Here the mutilated woman becomes the socially conscious
woman, whose freedom is gained in a transcendent
subjectivity, in acts of charity for others.
Copyright © 2018 Course Hero, Inc.
Chapter Summaries 30
Volume 2, Part 4, Chapter 14
Summary
According to Beauvoir in Chapter 14, "The Independent
Woman," no matter the changes in women's rights, the woman
remains a vassal so long as she has no economic autonomy.
The system supporting her dependence collapses once she
ceases to be a parasite. Work alone can guarantee women's
independence. Yet even the emancipated working woman is
only halfway there.
Beauvoir claims man's advantage is that, from childhood, "his
vocation as a human being in no way contradicts his destiny as
a male." For a woman "to accomplish her femininity, she is
required to be object and prey." The emancipated woman is in
conflict. To confine herself to her femininity would be a
mutilation, but so would rejecting, or refusing to acknowledge
her sex. Woman is only equal to man if she is a "sexed" human
being. Yet for her, the terms are incompatible.
The woman who has made herself a financial success is held
to a high standard in her feminine habits: elegant dress and a
fashionable home. A successful businessman needn't be
bothered with such things in order to sustain his reputation.
Thus, the emancipated woman must adhere to the femininity of
her mother and grandmother, and, at the same time, live like a
man.
The independent woman—and especially the intellectual
woman—will suffer from an inferiority complex. She cannot
compete for men with her beautiful, feminine sisters. And she
must be a "spontaneously offered prey." Yet, she knows she
remains a subject. To fake it makes her awkward, self-
conscious, and would mean she is not authentic, not herself.
As men come to terms with women's new condition, women
feel more at ease. A woman who works hard and has many
responsibilities feels entitled to the same sexual diversions as
a man. This recourse is not so easily available, either in
practical terms—going out on her own at night—or in terms of
negative judgments, especially in the provinces. Beauvoir
mentions a short-lived bordello for women in San Francisco,
and a fictional film based on the same premises.
The basic terms for women remain different from those for
men. Men pursue sexual partners aggressively. Beauvoir
The Second Sex Study Guide Chapter Summaries 31

argues that "a woman who is not afraid of men frightens them," Beauvoir gives of herself as a means of improving humanity at
and ceases to be attractive unless she is taken by the male. If, large. All of this operates in a uniquely personalized and
afterwards, he finds she has "taken" him, he feels as though authentic synthesis of Marxist/existential thought.
she has been dishonest and he has been trapped. Similarly, in
bed, "he wants to take and not receive, not exchange but
ravish." Conclusion
Motherhood is the one female function the woman cannot
undertake in complete freedom. Beauvoir notes that British
and American women have access to birth control, while
Summary
French women do not. Still, women are not free to
The conclusion opens with the question: do people believe the
procreate—or not—as they please. There is the matter of
"battle of the sexes" is "an original curse," or rather "a
painful and dangerous abortions, a lack of respect for single
transitory moment in human history"?
motherhood and their illegitimate offspring, and a lack of
children's services and daycare for working mothers.
The subtle and overt differences between men and women
developed throughout the text are reviewed here in a summary
Thus, the independent woman is caught between her sexual
fashion: Is male superiority defined in its transcendental
and professional desires. Women's health issues are not
proclivities, and female subordination in her "natural"
considered in the marketplace. There is neither sympathy nor
tendencies to immanence? Beauvoir asks if it is true that for
allowances for a menstruating worker. Women often have
men, who have always been dominant, there is no reason to
defeatist attitudes, the result of inferior educations and late
trade their "insolence"?
arrivals in the marketplace. A woman often "lacks confidence,
inspiration, and daring."
The author claims the tension will remain "as long as men and
women do not recognize each other as peers." But what of the
Women who try their hands at creative work have many
woman who wants her freedom and her femininity, and the
obstacles to overcome. Accustomed to idleness, they "play" at
man who demands that she assume her limitations? Beauvoir
working. Unaccustomed to self-discipline, they often do not
reminds the reader that men find "more complicity in their
know how to work hard, acquire solid technique, or persevere
woman companions than the oppressor usually finds in the
to solve a problem. Women are often discouraged by criticism,
oppressed."
and usually called upon to change a lifetime of coddling in
order to learn how to succeed.
It seems little progress is being made. And just how much of
the conflict is built from irreconcilable conviction? Beauvoir
Most of all, culture must be apprehended "through the free
argues that woman is "a distraction ... for the man; for her he is
movement of a transcendence"—a mode women must learn to
the ... justification of her existence." He is the alleviation of her
master. Beauvoir argues that "misfortune and distress are
boredom, the respite for which she had been biding her time.
often learning experiences" that women need to be prepared
Man, on the other hand, values his time in terms of his ambition
to encounter.
for his creativity, his business partners, and his transcendental
inclinations that insure the comforts of his and her world.

Analysis
The deeply personal observations here—convincing to most in
their bare familiarity—represent a daring and stimulating mode
for a polemic. The intimate details reflect the intellectual's self-
consciousness as an innovative approach to argument. From
the earliest sections, where the reader encounters the inner
life of the girl, to these disclosures of the independent woman's
shame and enthusiasm for a sexual life as free as a man's,
Beauvoir thinks about the Soviet vision in which men and
women are equals in education, work life, erotic freedom, and
where maternity is paid for and managed by the state.
However, she immediately recognizes it is not enough "to
change laws, institutions, customs, public opinions and the
whole social context."
Despite the briefest reconsideration and rejection of the
socialist vision, Beauvoir returns to Marx in the end. She

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The Second Sex Study Guide
quotes his belief that the "necessary relation of person to
person is the relation of man to woman." Thus, she reasons,
men and women "must, among other things and their natural
differentiations, unequivocally affirm their brotherhood."
Analysis
This emphasis in the end on the masculine must be evaluated
in a text written in a time when the masculine pronoun was in
ordinary usage as the universal pronoun. This effect of natural
usage enforces the notion of the propriety of cooperation
between the sexes. That is, men and women, recognizing the
other as other, reciprocally appreciate their alterity while "not
doing away with the miracles that the division of human beings
... engenders."
One cannot help but see a movement in the organization of the
sexes as 21st-century practice separates sex from gender. If
there are biologically two sexes forever, there is a range of
sexualities that provides potential for brotherhood across a full
spectrum of human beings, and a full spectrum of human
identities.
g Quotes
"American women ... think ...
woman ... no longer exists ...
friends advise her to ... get rid of
this obsession."
— Narrator, Introduction
Thinking of her purpose in writing a book on woman, Beauvoir
reflects on "the idiocies" on the subject churned out over the
20th century. Here she makes fun of Americans' pragmatic
approach to women in the workforce after World War II, and
the illusion of an equality achieved in commonsense attitudes
with respect to money, work, and happiness so distinct from
the existentialist morality that supports the argument of this
book.
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Quotes 32
"She is the most ... alienated of all
... female mammals, and ... refuses
this alienation ... most violently."
— Narrator, Volume 1, Part 1, Chapter 1
Beauvoir calls this "the most striking conclusion of this study."
The cyclical nature of the female body operates without
direction and governs mood, health, and welfare. That the body
operates outside the volition of the woman herself does not
disqualify it as the source of wholeness and sexual and
reproductive satisfactions.
"Freud was not ... concerned with
woman's destiny ... he modeled ... it
on ... masculine destiny ...
modifying ... the traits."
— Narrator, Volume 1, Part 1, Chapter 2
To Beauvoir—whose emphasis across all the disciplines she
studies is on the difference between the sexes—Freud misses
the point. The greater complexity in feminine development
from masculine development is her topic, and feminine
opportunity and choice as destiny is her conclusion.
"The categories clitoral and
vaginal, like ... bourgeois and
proletarian, are ... inadequate to
encompass a ... woman."
— Narrator, Volume 1, Part 1, Chapter 3
Rejecting both Freud's and Engels's analyses—the personal
emotional conflicts and the economic history of
humanity—Beauvoir holds out for the existential infrastructure
that makes it possible to understand the unique form that is a
life.
The Second Sex Study Guide
"The mother ... recognizes her
inferiority. The ... masculine victory
is consummated in the cult of
Mary."
— Narrator, Volume 1, Part 3, Chapter 1
Beauvoir, a lapsed Catholic, recognizes in the history of the
Church the subordination of women as a rejection of the
sexual woman. The Sacred Virgin is worshipped as a sexless
woman who knows her rightful place.
"Beauty, Poetry, she is All: ... all in
the figure of the other, All except
herself."
— André Breton, Volume 1, Part 3, Chapter 2
Breton's sympathetic view of women and his belief that they
are superior to men, does not posit women as subjects. She is
All, that is, she is summarized and objectified, thus still robbed
of subjectivity and individuality.
"O young women, when will you be
our brothers ... without ulterior
motives of exploitation?"
— Jules Laforgue, Volume 1, Part 3, Chapter 3
Beauvoir quotes the poet Laforgue who recognizes men have
"played doll with the woman," and that it has gone on too long.
The poet has recognized men's longstanding role in the
objectification of women.
"One is not born, but rather
becomes, woman."
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Quotes 33
— Narrator, Volume 2, Part 1, Chapter 1
Perhaps, the most widely quoted and disputed sentence in The
Second Sex, this observation points to usage of the term,
"gender"—determined by behavior, traits acquired by cultural
practice and social position—as distinct from "sex"—biology
and body parts. This observation focuses Beauvoir's dispute
with the popularized Freudian notion that "biology is destiny"
for the woman.
"At sixteen, a woman has already
gone through disturbing
experiences: puberty, menstrual
periods ... fear, disgust."
— Narrator, Volume 2, Part 1, Chapter 2
Adolescent girls have endured shaming and painful episodes
with respect to their changing bodies: the pain and
embarrassment of first menses; often violent, insensitive, or
ordinary painful deflowering; rape; incest; unwanted attention
in public; combat with their mothers; and fear of pregnancy.
The bad habits of girls are developmentally familiar
compensations for the incomprehensible insufficiencies of the
world beyond the girl's childhood experience.
"Man's 'anatomical destiny' is ...
different from women's. Their
moral and social situations are no
less different."
— Narrator, Volume 2, Part 1, Chapter 3
Male sexuality is a natural event, unchanged from early
childhood. The penis is the key source of pleasure. Women's
sexual development is significantly more complex. Standards
for male sexual behavior with respect to adultery and
promiscuity are also different from women's.
The Second Sex Study Guide
"The 'real woman' is an artificial
product ... these supposed
'instincts' ... are inculcated in her."
— Narrator, Volume 2, Part 1, Chapter 4
Beauvoir takes the opportunity in Chapter 4 to begin reflecting
on the social standard that not only condemns homosexuality,
but makes femininity compulsory to humans with the body
parts of women.
"Homosexuality is no more a
deliberate perversion than a ...
curse ... an attitude ... chosen in
situation."
— Narrator, Volume 2, Part 1, Chapter 4
This observation leaps ahead 50 years and establishes
Beauvoir as a voice of the 21st century. Although the notion of
"choice" is periodically under scrutiny, the range of sexualities
as currently conceived is fully within the spectrum of everyday
humanity.
"Marriage must combine two
autonomous existences, not be a
withdrawal ... an escape, a
remedy."
— Narrator, Volume 2, Part 2, Chapter 5
This formula, a welcome note in a chapter in which marriage is
for the most part disparaged, represents a proposal for
change in the traditional forms of marriage, not at all a simple
matter if one factors in the organizing argument of this
book—the foundational objectification of women. Here, in the
hopeful account, are prospects for women's autonomy.
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Glossary 34
"It is not the individuals ...
responsible for the failure of
marriage: it is ... the institution."
— Narrator, Volume 2, Part 2, Chapter 5
The economic inequality fundamental to most marriages
throughout history is just the beginning of the story of the
subordination of women in marriage and the burdens men
bear.
"The day ... woman ... love[s] in her
strength ... love will become for her
... the source of life."
— Narrator, Volume 2, Part 3, Chapter 12
According to Beauvoir, the independent woman who marries
must annihilate herself—that is, she must suppress her
independent transcendent self, her position as subject, and
assume the subordinate position of Other.
m Glossary
agnation (n) patrimonial succession. Inheritance is exclusively
through the male line of the family.
alienation (n) Marxist diction for the worker's estrangement
from himself, his work, and his species. Most powerful in
Beauvoir's usage is the woman's alienation, an estrangement
from her own body recognized as beyond her control.
alterity (n) usually paired terms that are different, one from the
other, in one or more ways, not reciprocal. Derived from the
same root as alternative, this relation occurs between paired
terms (i.e. male/female) in which opposition is the principle of
relation, and one term—male—is subject and individuated, while
the other—female—is summarized and objectified.
binarism or binary opposition (n) an opposing pair. Binarism
refers to two terms paired in opposition.
The Second Sex Study Guide Suggested Reading 35

existential morality (n) in which the subject experiences Benjamin, J., et al. "Simone de Beauvoir: An Interview." Feminist
freedom only by perpetually moving beyond it to other Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2. 1979, pp. 755–800.
freedoms. The individual justifies his existence in experiencing
it as an indefinite need to transcend himself, a commitment to Heinämaa, Sara. "Simone de Beauvoir's Phenomenology of

moving beyond selfish concerns to a larger world. Sexual Difference." Hypatia, Vol. 14, No. 4, 1999, pp. 114–32.

existentialism (n) begins with the premise that existence

precedes essence. Existence is a process which consists of
forever bringing people into being.

immanence (n) in existentialist thought, a mode of being

attributed to the inwardness of the woman. Woman,
constricted by nature and nurture by the biology of
reproduction and a masculine culture that sees her as less able
to tackle worldly things, exists primarily within the body's
boundaries, concerned with self-image, sexuality, and
maternity.

mutilated (adj) used in this text to describe the objectified

woman. This refers to the woman who has been reduced to
feminine reproductive anatomy, stripped of her individuality,
and the elements of her being that make her "whole."

phenomenology (n) study of awareness or consciousness of

experience from a first-person point of view

reciprocity (n) in existential thought, the ability to engage

difference. Women respond, for example, to the paired term
"male/female" by entertaining, in conciliatory fashion, the
specifically individual differences among the sexes.

sublimation (n) an unconscious conversion of sexual energy.

Sublimation is the substitution of an acceptable and creative
act (art, music, etc.) for an impulsive and likely sexually
inappropriate one.

transcendence (n) the moral position in existentialist thought.

The individual subject, the existent, operates outside of pure
self-interest, looking outside the self, functioning for the
benefit of humankind.

e Suggested Reading
Bair, Deirdre. Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography. New York,
Touchstone, 1991.

Bauer, Nancy. Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism.

New York, Columbia UP, 2001.

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