women representation

The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
Introduction
Woman as Other
FOR a long time I have hesitated to write a book on woman.
The subject is irritating, especially to women; and it is not new. Enough ink
has been spilled in quarrelling over feminism, and perhaps we should say no
more about it. It is still talked about, however, for the voluminous nonsense
uttered during the last century seems to have done little to illuminate the
problem. After all, is there a problem? And if so, what is it? Are there women,
really? Most assuredly the theory of the eternal feminine still has its
adherents who will whisper in your ear: ‘Even in Russia women still are
women’; and other erudite persons – sometimes the very same – say with a
sigh: ‘Woman is losing her way, woman is lost.’ One wonders if women still
exist, if they will always exist, whether or not it is desirable that they should,
what place they occupy in this world, what their place should be. ‘What has
become of women?’ was asked recently in an ephemeral magazine.
But first we must ask: what is a woman? ‘Tota mulier in utero’, says one,
‘woman is a womb’. But in speaking of certain women, connoisseurs declare
that they are not women, although they are equipped with a uterus like the
rest. All agree in recognising the fact that females exist in the human species;
today as always they make up about one half of humanity. And yet we are told
that femininity is in danger; we are exhorted to be women, remain women,
become women. It would appear, then, that every female human being is not
necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious
and threatened reality known as femininity. Is this attribute something
secreted by the ovaries? Or is it a Platonic essence, a product of the
philosophic imagination? Is a rustling petticoat enough to bring it down to
earth? Although some women try zealously to incarnate this essence, it is
hardly patentable. It is frequently described in vague and dazzling terms that

seem to have been borrowed from the vocabulary of the seers, and indeed in
the times of St Thomas it was considered an essence as certainly defined as
the somniferous virtue of the poppy
But conceptualism has lost ground. The biological and social sciences no
longer admit the existence of unchangeably fixed entities that determine
given characteristics, such as those ascribed to woman, the Jew, or the Negro.
Science regards any characteristic as a reaction dependent in part upon a
situation. If today femininity no longer exists, then it never existed. But does
the word woman, then, have no specific content? This is stoutly affirmed by
those who hold to the philosophy of the enlightenment, of rationalism, of
nominalism; women, to them, are merely the human beings arbitrarily
designated by the word woman. Many American women particularly are
prepared to think that there is no longer any place for woman as such; if a
backward individual still takes herself for a woman, her friends advise her to
be psychoanalysed and thus get rid of this obsession. In regard to a work,
Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, which in other respects has its irritating
features, Dorothy Parker has written: ‘I cannot be just to books which treat of
woman as woman ... My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, should be
regarded as human beings.’ But nominalism is a rather inadequate doctrine,
and the antifeminists have had no trouble in showing that women simply are
not men. Surely woman is, like man, a human being; but such a declaration is
abstract. The fact is that every concrete human being is always a singular,
separate individual. To decline to accept such notions as the eternal feminine,
the black soul, the Jewish character, is not to deny that Jews, Negroes, women
exist today – this denial does not represent a liberation for those concerned,
but rather a flight from reality. Some years ago a well-known woman writer
refused to permit her portrait to appear in a series of photographs especially
devoted to women writers; she wished to be counted among the men. But in
order to gain this privilege she made use of her husband’s influence! Women
who assert that they are men lay claim none the less to masculine
consideration and respect. I recall also a young Trotskyite standing on a
platform at a boisterous meeting and getting ready to use her fists, in spite of
her evident fragility. She was denying her feminine weakness; but it was for
love of a militant male whose equal she wished to be. The attitude of defiance
of many American women proves that they are haunted by a sense of their

femininity. In truth, to go for a walk with one’s eyes open is enough to
demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose
clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly
different. Perhaps these differences are superficial, perhaps they are destined
to disappear. What is certain is that they do most obviously exist.
If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline
also to explain her through ‘the eternal feminine’, and if nevertheless we
admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question
“what is a woman”?
To state the question is, to me, to suggest, at once, a preliminary answer.
The fact that I ask it is in itself significant. A man would never set out to write
a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. But if I wish to define
myself, I must first of all say: ‘I am a woman’; on this truth must be based all
further discussion. A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual
of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man. The terms masculine
and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal
papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two
electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is
indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general;
whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria,
without reciprocity. In the midst of an abstract discussion it is vexing to hear
a man say: ‘You think thus and so because you are a woman’; but I know that
my only defence is to reply: ‘I think thus and so because it is true,’ thereby
removing my subjective self from the argument. It would be out of the
question to reply: ‘And you think the contrary because you are a man’, forit is
understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity. A man is in the right
in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong. It amounts to this: just as
for the ancients there was an absolute vertical with reference to which the
oblique was defined, so there is an absolute human type, the masculine.
Woman has ovaries, a uterus: these peculiarities imprison her in her
subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature. It is often
said that she thinks with her glands. Man superbly ignores the fact that his
anatomy also includes glands, such as the testicles, and that they secrete
hormones. He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the

world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the
body of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything
peculiar to it. ‘The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’
said Aristotle; ‘we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural
defectiveness.’ And St Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be an
‘imperfect man’,an ‘incidental’ being. This is symbolised in Genesis whereEve
is depicted as made from what Bossuet called ‘a supernumerary bone’ of
Adam.
Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as
relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. Michelet writes:
‘Woman, the relative being ...’ And Benda is most positive in his Rapport
d’Uriel: ‘The bodyofmanmakes sensein itself quite apartfromthat ofwoman,
whereas the latter seems wanting in significance by itself ... Man can think of
himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man.’ And she is
simply what man decrees; thus she is called ‘the sex’, by which is meant that
she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex –
absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man
and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as
opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the
Other.’
The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the
most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the
expression of a duality – that of the Self and the Other. This duality was not
originally attached to the division ofthe sexes; it was not dependentuponany
empirical facts. It is revealed in such works as that of Granet on Chinese
thought and those of Dumézil on the East Indies and Rome. The feminine
element was at first no more involved in such pairs as Varuna-Mitra, Uranus-
Zeus,Sun-Moon,and Day-Night thanit was in the contrastsbetween Goodand
Evil, lucky and unlucky auspices, right and left, God and Lucifer. Otherness is
a fundamental category of human thought.
Thus it is that no groupeversets itself up asthe One without at oncesetting
up the Other over against itself. If three travellers chance to occupy the same
compartment, that is enough to make vaguely hostile ‘others’ out of all the

rest of the passengers on the train. In small-town eyes all persons not
belonging to the village are ‘strangers’ and suspect; to the native of a country
all who inhabit other countries are ‘foreigners’; Jews are ‘different’ for the
anti-Semite, Negroes are ‘inferior’ for American racists, aborigines are
‘natives’ for colonists, proletarians are the ‘lower class’ for the privileged.
Lévi-Strauss, at the end of a profound work on the various forms of
primitive societies, reaches the following conclusion: ‘Passage from the state
of Nature to the state of Culture is marked by man’s ability to view biological
relations as a series of contrasts; duality, alternation, opposition, and
symmetry, whether under definite or vague forms, constitute not so much
phenomena to be explained as fundamental and immediately given data of
social reality.’ These phenomena would be incomprehensible if in fact human
society were simply a Mitsein or fellowship based on solidarity and
friendliness. Things become clear, on the contrary, if, following Hegel, we find
in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility towards every other
consciousness; the subject can be posed only in being opposed – he sets
himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object.
But the other consciousness, the other ego, sets up a reciprocal claim. The
native travelling abroad is shocked to find himself in turn regarded as a
‘stranger’ by the natives of neighbouring countries. As a matter of fact, wars,
festivals, trading, treaties, and contests among tribes, nations, and classes
tend to deprive the concept Other of its absolute sense and to make manifest
its relativity; willy-nilly, individuals and groups are forced to realize the
reciprocity of their relations. How is it, then, that this reciprocity has not been
recognised between the sexes, that one of the contrasting terms is set up as
the sole essential, denying any relativity in regard to its correlative and
defining the latter as pure otherness? Why is it that women do not dispute
male sovereignty? No subject will readily volunteer to become the object, the
inessential; it is not the Other who, in defining himself as the Other,
establishes the One. The Other is posed as such by the One in defining himself
as the One. But if the Other is not to regainthe status of being the One, he must
be submissive enough to accept this alien point of view. Whence comes this
submission in the case of woman?

There are, to be sure, other cases in which a certain category has been able
to dominate another completely for a time. Very often this privilege depends
upon inequality of numbers – the majority imposes its rule upon the minority
or persecutes it. But women are not a minority, like the American Negroes or
the Jews; there are as many women as men on earth. Again, the two groups
concerned have often been originally independent; they may have been
formerly unaware of each other’s existence, or perhaps they recognised each
other’s autonomy. But a historical event has resulted in the subjugation of the
weaker by the stronger.The scattering of the Jews, the introduction ofslavery
into America, the conquests of imperialism are examples in point. In these
cases the oppressed retained at least the memory of former days; they
possessed in common a past, a tradition, sometimes a religion or a culture.
The parallel drawn by Bebel between women and the proletariat is valid in
that neither ever formed a minority or a separate collective unit of mankind.
And instead of a single historical event it is in both cases a historical
development that explains their status as a class and accounts for the
membership of particular individuals in that class. But proletarians have not
always existed, whereas there have always been women. They are women in
virtue of their anatomy and physiology. Throughout history they have always
been subordinated to men, and hence their dependency is not the result of a
historical event or a social change – it was not something that occurred. The
reason why otherness in this case seems to be an absolute is in part that it
lacks the contingent or incidental nature of historical facts. A condition
brought about at a certain time can be abolished at some other time, as the
Negroes of Haiti and others have proved: but it might seem that natural
condition is beyond the possibility of change. In truth, however, the nature of
things is no more immutably given, once for all, than is historical reality. If
woman seems to be the inessential which never becomes the essential, it is
because she herself fails to bring about this change. Proletarians say ‘We’;
Negroes also. Regarding themselves as subjects, they transform the
bourgeois, the whites, into ‘others’. But women do not say ‘We’, except at
some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say
‘women’, and women use the same word in referring to themselves. They do
not authentically assume a subjective attitude. The proletarians have
accomplished the revolution in Russia, the Negroes in Haiti, the Indo-Chinese

are battling for it in Indo-China; but the women’s effort has never been
anything more than a symbolic agitation. They have gained only what men
have been willing to grant; they have taken nothing, they have only received.
The reason for this is that women lack concrete means for organising
themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit.
They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such
solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat. They are not even
promiscuously herded together in the way that creates community feeling
among the American Negroes, the ghetto Jews, the workers of Saint-Denis, or
the factory hands of Renault. They live dispersed among the males, attached
through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to
certain men – fathers or husbands – more firmly than they are to other
women. If they belong to the bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with men of that
class, not with proletarian women; if they are white, their allegiance is to
white men, not to Negro women. The proletariat can propose to massacre the
ruling class, and a sufficiently fanatical Jew or Negro might dream of getting
sole possession of the atomic bomb and making humanity wholly Jewish or
black; but woman cannot even dream of exterminating the males. The bond
that unites her to her oppressors is not comparable to any other. The division
ofthe sexesis a biological fact, not anevent in human history. Maleand female
stand opposed within a primordial Mitsein, and woman has not broken it. The
couple is a fundamental unity with its two halves riveted together, and the
cleavage of society along the line of sex is impossible. Here is to be found the
basic trait of woman: she is the Other in a totality of which the two
components are necessary to one another.
One could supposethatthis reciprocity might have facilitated the liberation
of woman. When Hercules sat at the feet of Omphale and helped with her
spinning, his desire for her held him captive; but why did she fail to gain a
lasting power? To revenge herself on Jason, Medea killed their children; and
this grim legend would seem to suggest that she might have obtained a
formidable influence over him through his love for his offspring. In Lysistrata
Aristophanes gaily depicts a band of women who joined forces to gain social
ends through the sexual needs of their men; but this is only a play. In the
legend of the Sabine women, the latter soon abandoned their plan of

remaining sterile to punish their ravishers. In truth woman has not been
socially emancipated through man’s need – sexual desire and the desire for
offspring – which makes the male dependent for satisfaction upon the female.
Master and slave, also, are united by a reciprocal need, in this case
economic, which does not liberate the slave. In the relation of master to slave
the master does not make a point of the need that he has for the other; he has
in his grasp the powerofsatisfying this need throughhis ownaction; whereas
the slave, in his dependent condition, his hope and fear, is quite conscious of
the need he has for his master. Even if the need is at bottom equally urgent
forboth,it always worksin favouroftheoppressorandagainsttheoppressed.
That is why the liberation of the working class, for example, has been slow.
Now, woman has always been man’s dependant, if not his slave; the two
sexes have never shared the world in equality. And even today woman is
heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change. Almost
nowhereis herlegal status the same as man’s,and frequently it is much to her
disadvantage. Even when her rights are legally recognised in the abstract,
long-standing custom prevents their full expression in the mores. In the
economic sphere men and women can almost be said to make up two castes;
other things being equal, the former hold the better jobs, get higher wages,
and have more opportunity for success than their new competitors. In
industry and politics men have a great many more positions and they
monopolise the most important posts. In addition to all this, they enjoy a
traditional prestige that the education of children tends in every way to
support, for the present enshrines the past – and in the past all history has
been made by men. At the present time, when women are beginning to take
part in the affairs of the world, it is still a world that belongs to men – they
have no doubt of it at all and women have scarcely any. To decline to be the
Other, to refuse to be a party to the deal – this would be for women to
renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance with the
superior caste. Man-the-sovereign will provide woman-the-liege with
material protection and will undertake the moral justification of her
existence; thus she can evade at once both economic risk and the
metaphysical risk of a liberty in which ends and aims must be contrived
without assistance. Indeed, along with the ethical urge of each individual to

affirm his subjective existence, there is also the temptation to forgo liberty
and becomea thing. This is an inauspicious road,for he who takes it – passive,
lost, ruined – becomes henceforth the creature of another’s will, frustrated in
his transcendenceanddeprived ofeveryvalue. But it is an easy road;onit one
avoids the strain involved in undertaking an authentic existence. When man
makes of woman the Other, he may, then, expect to manifest deep-seated
tendencies towards complicity. Thus, woman may fail to lay claim to the
status of subject because she lacks definite resources, because she feels the
necessarybondthat ties her to man regardlessofreciprocity, andbecauseshe
is often very well pleased with her role as the Other.
But it will be asked at once: how did all this begin? It is easy to see that the
duality of the sexes, like any duality, gives rise to conflict. And doubtless the
winner will assume the status of absolute. But why should man have won
from the start? It seems possible that women could have won the victory; or
that the outcome of the conflict might never have been decided. How is it that
this world has always belonged to the men and that things have begun to
change only recently? Is this change a good thing? Will it bring about an equal
sharing of the world between men and women?
These questions are not new, and they have often been answered. But the
very fact that woman is the Other tends to cast suspicion upon all the
justifications that men have everbeenable to provideforit. These haveall too
evidently been dictated by men’s interest. A little-known feminist of the
seventeenth century, Poulain de la Barre, put it this way: ‘All that has been
written aboutwomen by men shouldbesuspect, forthe men areat oncejudge
and party to the lawsuit.’ Everywhere, at all times, the males have displayed
their satisfaction in feeling that they are the lords of creation. ‘Blessed be God
... that He did not make me a woman,’ say the Jews in their morning prayers,
while their wives pray on a note of resignation: ‘Blessed be the Lord, who
created me according to His will.’ The first among the blessings for which
Plato thanked the gods was that he had been created free, not enslaved; the
second, a man, not a woman. But the males could not enjoy this privilege fully
unless they believed it to be founded on the absolute and the eternal; they
sought to make the fact of their supremacy into a right. ‘Being men, those who
have made and compiled the laws have favoured their own sex, and jurists

have elevated these laws into principles’, to quote Poulain de la Barre once
more.
Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, and scientists have striven to
show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and
advantageous on earth. The religions invented by men reflect this wish for
domination. In the legends of Eve and Pandora men have taken up arms
against women. They have made use of philosophy and theology, as the
quotations from Aristotle and St Thomas have shown. Since ancient times
satirists and moralists have delighted in showing up the weaknesses of
women. We are familiar with the savage indictments hurled against women
throughout French literature. Montherlant, for example, follows the tradition
of Jean de Meung, though with less gusto. This hostility may at times be well
founded, often it is gratuitous; but in truth it more or less successfully
concealsa desireforself-justification. As Montaignesays, ‘It is easierto accuse
one sex than to excuse the other’. Sometimes what is going on is clear enough.
Forinstance, the Romanlaw limiting the rights ofwoman cited ‘theimbecility,
the instability of the sex’ just when the weakening of family ties seemed to
threaten the interests of male heirs. And in the effort to keep the married
woman under guardianship, appeal was made in the sixteenth century to the
authority of St Augustine, who declared that ‘woman is a creature neither
decisive nor constant’, at a time when the single woman was thought capable
of managing her property. Montaigne understood clearly how arbitrary and
unjust was woman’s appointed lot: ‘Women are not in the wrong when they
decline to accept the rules laid down forthem, since the men make theserules
without consulting them. No wonder intrigue and strife abound.’ But he did
not go so far as to champion their cause.
It was only later, in the eighteenth century, that genuinely democratic men
began to view the matter objectively. Diderot, among others, strove to show
that woman is, like man, a human being. Later John Stuart Mill came fervently
to her defence. But these philosophers displayed unusual impartiality. In the
nineteenth century the feminist quarrel became again a quarrel of partisans.
One of the consequences of the industrial revolution was the entrance of
women into productive labour, and it was just here that the claims of the
feminists emerged from the realm of theory and acquired an economic basis,

while their opponents became the more aggressive. Although landed
property lost power to some extent, the bourgeoisie clung to the old morality
that found the guarantee of private property in the solidity of the family.
Woman was ordered back into the home the more harshly as her
emancipation became a real menace. Even within the working class the men
endeavoured to restrain woman’s liberation, because they began to see the
women as dangerous competitors – the more so because they were
accustomed to work for lower wages.
In proving woman’s inferiority, the anti-feminists then began to draw not
only upon religion, philosophy, and theology, as before, but also upon science
– biology, experimental psychology, etc. At most they were willing to grant
‘equality in difference’ to the other sex. That profitable formula is most
significant; it is precisely like the ‘equal but separate’ formula of the Jim Crow
laws aimed at the North American Negroes. As is well known, this so-called
equalitarian segregation has resulted only in the most extreme
discrimination. The similarity just noted is in no way due to chance, for
whether it is a race, a caste, a class, or a sex that is reduced to a position of
inferiority, the methods of justification are the same. ‘The eternal feminine’
corresponds to ‘the black soul’ and to ‘the Jewish character’. True, the Jewish
problemis on the whole verydifferent from the other two – to the anti-Semite
the Jew is not so much an inferior as he is an enemy for whom there is to be
granted no place on earth, for whom annihilation is the fate desired. But there
are deep similarities between the situation of woman and that of the Negro.
Both are being emancipated today from a like paternalism, and the former
master class wishes to ‘keep them in their place’ – that is, the place chosen for
them. In both cases the former masters lavish more or less sincere eulogies,
either onthe virtuesof‘the goodNegro’ withhis dormant,childish, merrysoul
– thesubmissive Negro – oronthemerits ofthe woman who is ‘truly feminine’
– that is, frivolous, infantile, irresponsible the submissive woman. In both
cases the dominant class bases its argument on a state of affairs that it has
itself created. As George Bernard Shaw puts it, in substance, ‘The American
white relegates the black to the rank of shoeshine boy; and he concludesfrom
this that the black is good for nothing but shining shoes.’ This vicious circle is
met with in all analogous circumstances; when an individual (or a group of
individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior.

But the significance of the verb to be must be rightly understood here; it is in
badfaith to give it a static value when it really hasthe dynamic Hegelian sense
of ‘to have become’. Yes, women on the whole are today inferior to men; that
is, their situation affordsthem fewerpossibilities. The question is: shouldthat
state of affairs continue?
Many men hope that it will continue; not all have given up the battle. The
conservative bourgeoisie still see in the emancipation of women a menace to
their morality and their interests. Some men dread feminine competition.
Recently a male student wrote in the Hebdo-Latin: ‘Everywoman student who
goes into medicine or law robs us of a job.’ He never questioned his rights in
this world. And economic interests are not the only ones concerned. One of
the benefits that oppression confers upon the oppressors is that the most
humble among them is made to feel superior; thus, a ‘poor white’ in the South
can console himself with the thought that he is not a ‘dirty nigger’ – and the
more prosperous whites cleverly exploit this pride.
Similarly, the most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared
with women. It was much easier for M. de Montherlant to think himself a hero
when hefacedwomen (andwomen chosenforhis purpose)thanwhenhe was
obliged to act the man among men – something many women have done
better than he, for that matter. And in September 1948, in one of his articles
in the Figaro littéraire, Claude Mauriac – whose great originality is admired
by all – could write regarding woman: ‘We listen on a tone [sic!] of polite
indifference ... to the most brilliant among them, well knowing that her wit
reflects more or less luminously ideas that come from us.’ Evidently the
speaker referred to is not reflecting the ideas of Mauriac himself, for no one
knows ofhis havingany. It may bethat shereflects ideas originating with men,
but then, even among men there are those who have been known to
appropriate ideas not their own; and one can well ask whether Claude
Mauriac might not find more interesting a conversation reflecting Descartes,
Marx, or Gide rather than himself. What is really remarkable is that by using
the questionable we he identifies himself with St Paul, Hegel, Lenin, and
Nietzsche, and from the lofty eminence of their grandeur looks down
disdainfully upon the bevy of women who make bold to converse with him on

a footing of equality. In truth, I know of more than one woman who would
refuse to suffer with patience Mauriac’s ‘tone of polite indifference’.
I have lingered on this example because the masculine attitude is here
displayed with disarming ingenuousness.But men profit in many moresubtle
ways from the otherness, the alterity of woman. Here is a miraculous balm for
those afflicted with an inferiority complex, and indeed no one is more
arrogant towards women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is
anxious about his virility. Those who are not fear-ridden in the presence of
their fellow men are much more disposed to recognise a fellow creature in
woman; but even to thesethe myth ofWoman, the Other, is preciousformany
reasons. They cannot be blamed for not cheerfully relinquishing all the
benefits they derive from the myth, for they realize what they would lose in
relinquishing woman as they fancy her to be, while they fail to realize what
they have to gain from the woman of tomorrow. Refusal to pose oneself as the
Subject, unique andabsolute,requiresgreatself-denial. Furthermore,thevast
majority of men make no such claim explicitly. They do not postulate woman
as inferior, for today they are too thoroughly imbued with the ideal of
democracy not to recognise all human beings as equals.
In the bosomofthefamily, womanseems in the eyesofchildhoodandyouth
to be clothed in the same social dignity as the adult males. Later on, the young
man, desiring and loving, experiences the resistance, the independence of the
woman desired and loved; in marriage, he respects woman as wife and
mother, andin the concreteevents ofconjugal life shestands therebeforehim
as a free being. He can therefore feel that social subordination as between the
sexes no longer exists and that on the whole, in spite of differences, woman is
an equal. As, however, he observes some points of inferiority – the most
important being unfitness for the professions – he attributes these to natural
causes. When he is in a co-operative and benevolent relation with woman, his
theme is the principle of abstract equality, and he does not base his attitude
upon such inequality as may exist. But when he is in conflict with her, the
situation is reversed: his theme will be the existing inequality, and he will
even take it as justification for denying abstract equality.

So it is that many men will affirm as if in good faith that women are the
equals of man and that they have nothing to clamour for, while at the same
time they will say that women can never be the equals of man and that their
demands are in vain. It is, in point of fact, a difficult matter for man to realize
the extreme importance of social discriminations which seem outwardly
insignificant but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so
profound that they appear to spring from her original nature. The most
sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman’s concrete situation. And
there is no reason to put much trust in the men when they rush to the defence
of privileges whose full extent they can hardly measure. We shall not, then,
permit ourselves to be intimidated by the number and violence of the attacks
launched against women, nor to be entrapped by the self-seeking eulogies
bestowed on the ‘true woman’, nor to profit by the enthusiasm for woman’s
destiny manifested by men who would not for the world have any part of it.
We should consider the arguments of the feminists with no less suspicion,
however,forveryoftentheir controversialaim deprivesthem ofall real value.
If the ‘woman question’ seems trivial, it is because masculine arrogance has
made of it a ‘quarrel’; and when quarrelling one no longer reasons well.
People have tirelessly sought to prove that woman is superior, inferior, or
equal to man. Some say that, having been created after Adam, she is evidently
a secondary being: others say on the contrary that Adam was only a rough
draft and that God succeeded in producing the human being in perfection
when He created Eve. Woman’s brain is smaller; yes, but it is relatively larger.
Christ was made a man; yes, but perhaps for his greater humility. Each
argument at oncesuggestsits opposite, andboth areoftenfallacious. If we are
to gain understanding, we must get out of these ruts; we must discard the
vague notions of superiority, inferiority, equality which have hitherto
corrupted every discussion of the subject and start afresh.
Very well, but just how shall we pose the question? And, to begin with, who
are we to propound it at all? Man is at once judge and party to the case; but so
is woman. What we need is an angel – neither man nor woman – but where
shall we find one? Still, the angel would be poorly qualified to speak, for an
angel is ignorant of all the basic facts involved in the problem. With a
hermaphrodite we should be no better off, for here the situation is most

peculiar; the hermaphrodite is not really the combination of a whole man and
a whole woman, but consists of parts of each and thus is neither. It looks to
me as if there are, after all, certain women who are best qualified to elucidate
the situation of woman. Let us not be misled by the sophism that because
Epimenides was a Cretan he was necessarily a liar; it is not a mysterious
essence that compels men and women to act in good or in bad faith, it is their
situation that inclines them more or less towards the search for truth. Many
of today’s women, fortunate in the restoration of all the privileges pertaining
to the estate of the human being, can afford the luxury of impartiality – we
even recognise its necessity. We are no longer like our partisan elders; by and
large we have won the game. In recent debates on the status of women the
United Nations has persistently maintained that the equality of the sexes is
now becoming a reality, and already some of us have never had to sense in
our femininity an inconvenience or an obstacle. Many problems appear to us
to be more pressing than those which concern us in particular, and this
detachment even allows us to hopethat ourattitude will beobjective. Still, we
know the feminine world more intimately than do the men because we have
our roots in it, we grasp more immediately than do men what it means to a
human being to be feminine; and we are more concerned with such
knowledge. I have said that there are more pressing problems, but this does
not prevent us from seeing some importance in asking how the fact of being
women will affect our lives. What opportunities precisely have been given us
andwhat withheld? What fateawaits ouryoungersisters,and what directions
should they take? It is significant that books by women on women are in
general animated in our day less by a wish to demand our rights than by an
effort towards clarity and understanding. As we emerge from an era of
excessive controversy, this book is offered as one attempt among others to
confirm that statement.
But it is doubtless impossible to approach any human problem with a mind
free from bias. The way in which questions are put, the points of view
assumed, presuppose a relativity of interest; all characteristics imply values,
and every objective description, so called, implies an ethical background.
Rather than attempt to conceal principles more or less definitely implied, it is
better to state them openly, at the beginning. This will make it unnecessary to
specify on every page in just what sense one uses such words as superior,

inferior, better, worse, progress, reaction, and the like. If we survey some of the
works on woman, we note that one of the points of view most frequently
adopted is that of the public good, the general interest; and one always means
by this the benefit of society as one wishes it to be maintained or established.
For our part, we hold that the only public good is that which assures the
private goodofthecitizens; we shall passjudgement on institutions according
to their effectiveness in giving concrete opportunities to individuals. But we
do not confuse the idea of private interest with that of happiness, although
that is another common point of view. Are not women of the harem more
happy than women voters? Is not the housekeeper happier than the working-
woman? It is not too clear just what the wordhappy really means and still less
what true values it may mask. There is no possibility of measuring the
happiness of others, and it is always easy to describe as happy the situation in
which one wishes to place them.
In particular thosewho arecondemnedto stagnation areoften pronounced
happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being at rest. This notion we
reject, for our perspective is that of existentialist ethics. Every subject plays
his part as such specifically through exploits or projects that serve as a mode
of transcendence; he achieves liberty only through a continual reaching out
towards other liberties. There is no justification for present existence other
than its expansion into an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence
falls back into immanence, stagnation, there is a degradation of existence into
the ‘en-sois’ – the brutish life of subjection to given conditions – and of liberty
into constraint and contingence. This downfall represents a moral fault if the
subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it spells frustration and
oppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil. Every individual concerned to
justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to
transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects.
Now, what peculiarly signalises the situation of woman is that she – a free
and autonomous being like all human creatures – nevertheless finds herself
living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other.
They propose to stabilise her as object and to doom her to immanence since
her transcendence is to be overshadowed and for ever transcended by
another ego (conscience) which is essential and sovereign. The drama of

woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every
subject (ego) – who always regards the self as the essential and the
compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential. How can a human
being in woman’s situation attain fulfilment? What roads are open to her?
Which are blocked? How can independence be recovered in a state of
dependency? What circumstances limit woman’s liberty and how can they be
overcome? These are the fundamental questions on which I would fain throw
some light. This means that I am interested in the fortunes of the individual
as defined not in terms of happiness but in terms of liberty.
Quite evidently this problem would be without significance if we were to
believe that woman’s destiny is inevitably determined by physiological,
psychological, or economic forces. Hence I shall discuss first of all the light in
which woman is viewed by biology, psychoanalysis, and historical
materialism. Next I shall try to show exactly how the concept of the ‘truly
feminine’ has been fashioned – why woman has been defined as the Other –
and what have been the consequences from man’s point of view. Then from
woman’s point of view I shall describe the world in which women must live;
and thus we shall be able to envisage the difficulties in their way as,
endeavouring to make their escape from the sphere hitherto assigned them,
they aspire to full membership in the human race.
The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
Introduction
Woman as Other
FOR a long time I have hesitated to write a book on woman.
The subject is irritating, especially to women; and it is not new. Enough ink
has been spilled in quarrelling over feminism, and perhaps we should say no
more about it. It is still talked about, however, for the voluminous nonsense
uttered during the last century seems to have done little to illuminate the

problem. After all, is there a problem? And if so, what is it? Are there women,
really? Most assuredly the theory of the eternal feminine still has its
adherents who will whisper in your ear: ‘Even in Russia women still are
women’; and other erudite persons – sometimes the very same – say with a
sigh: ‘Woman is losing her way, woman is lost.’ One wonders if women still
exist, if they will always exist, whether or not it is desirable that they should,
what place they occupy in this world, what their place should be. ‘What has
become of women?’ was asked recently in an ephemeral magazine.
But first we must ask: what is a woman? ‘Tota mulier in utero’, says one,
‘woman is a womb’. But in speaking of certain women, connoisseurs declare
that they are not women, although they are equipped with a uterus like the
rest. All agree in recognising the fact that females exist in the human species;
today as always they make up about one half of humanity. And yet we are told
that femininity is in danger; we are exhorted to be women, remain women,
become women. It would appear, then, that every female human being is not
necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious
and threatened reality known as femininity. Is this attribute something
secreted by the ovaries? Or is it a Platonic essence, a product of the
philosophic imagination? Is a rustling petticoat enough to bring it down to
earth? Although some women try zealously to incarnate this essence, it is
hardly patentable. It is frequently described in vague and dazzling terms that
seem to have been borrowed from the vocabulary of the seers, and indeed in
the times of St Thomas it was considered an essence as certainly defined as
the somniferous virtue of the poppy
But conceptualism has lost ground. The biological and social sciences no
longer admit the existence of unchangeably fixed entities that determine
given characteristics, such as those ascribed to woman, the Jew, or the Negro.
Science regards any characteristic as a reaction dependent in part upon a
situation. If today femininity no longer exists, then it never existed. But does
the word woman, then, have no specific content? This is stoutly affirmed by
those who hold to the philosophy of the enlightenment, of rationalism, of
nominalism; women, to them, are merely the human beings arbitrarily
designated by the word woman. Many American women particularly are
prepared to think that there is no longer any place for woman as such; if a

backward individual still takes herself for a woman, her friends advise her to
be psychoanalysed and thus get rid of this obsession. In regard to a work,
Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, which in other respects has its irritating
features, Dorothy Parker has written: ‘I cannot be just to books which treat of
woman as woman ... My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, should be
regarded as human beings.’ But nominalism is a rather inadequate doctrine,
and the antifeminists have had no trouble in showing that women simply are
not men. Surely woman is, like man, a human being; but such a declaration is
abstract. The fact is that every concrete human being is always a singular,
separate individual. To decline to accept such notions as the eternal feminine,
the black soul, the Jewish character, is not to deny that Jews, Negroes, women
exist today – this denial does not represent a liberation for those concerned,
but rather a flight from reality. Some years ago a well-known woman writer
refused to permit her portrait to appear in a series of photographs especially
devoted to women writers; she wished to be counted among the men. But in
order to gain this privilege she made use of her husband’s influence! Women
who assert that they are men lay claim none the less to masculine
consideration and respect. I recall also a young Trotskyite standing on a
platform at a boisterous meeting and getting ready to use her fists, in spite of
her evident fragility. She was denying her feminine weakness; but it was for
love of a militant male whose equal she wished to be. The attitude of defiance
of many American women proves that they are haunted by a sense of their
femininity. In truth, to go for a walk with one’s eyes open is enough to
demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose
clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly
different. Perhaps these differences are superficial, perhaps they are destined
to disappear. What is certain is that they do most obviously exist.
If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline
also to explain her through ‘the eternal feminine’, and if nevertheless we
admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question
“what is a woman”?
To state the question is, to me, to suggest, at once, a preliminary answer.
The fact that I ask it is in itself significant. A man would never set out to write
a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. But if I wish to define

myself, I must first of all say: ‘I am a woman’; on this truth must be based all
further discussion. A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual
of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man. The terms masculine
and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal
papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two
electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is
indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general;
whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria,
without reciprocity. In the midst of an abstract discussion it is vexing to hear
a man say: ‘You think thus and so because you are a woman’; but I know that
my only defence is to reply: ‘I think thus and so because it is true,’ thereby
removing my subjective self from the argument. It would be out of the
question to reply: ‘And you think the contrary because you are a man’, for it is
understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity. A man is in the right
in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong. It amounts to this: just as
for the ancients there was an absolute vertical with reference to which the
oblique was defined, so there is an absolute human type, the masculine.
Woman has ovaries, a uterus: these peculiarities imprison her in her
subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature. It is often
said that she thinks with her glands. Man superbly ignores the fact that his
anatomy also includes glands, such as the testicles, and that they secrete
hormones. He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the
world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the
body of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything
peculiar to it. ‘The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’
said Aristotle; ‘we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural
defectiveness.’ And St Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be an
‘imperfect man’,an ‘incidental’ being. This is symbolised in Genesis whereEve
is depicted as made from what Bossuet called ‘a supernumerary bone’ of
Adam.
Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as
relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. Michelet writes:
‘Woman, the relative being ...’ And Benda is most positive in his Rapport
d’Uriel: ‘The bodyofmanmakes sensein itself quite apartfromthat ofwoman,
whereas the latter seems wanting in significance by itself ... Man can think of

himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man.’ And she is
simply what man decrees; thus she is called ‘the sex’, by which is meant that
she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex –
absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man
and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as
opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the
Other.’
The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the
most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the
expression of a duality – that of the Self and the Other. This duality was not
originally attached to the division ofthe sexes; it was not dependentuponany
empirical facts. It is revealed in such works as that of Granet on Chinese
thought and those of Dumézil on the East Indies and Rome. The feminine
element was at first no more involved in such pairs as Varuna-Mitra, Uranus-
Zeus,Sun-Moon,and Day-Night thanit was in the contrastsbetween Goodand
Evil, lucky and unlucky auspices, right and left, God and Lucifer. Otherness is
a fundamental category of human thought.
Thus it is that no groupeversets itself up asthe One without at oncesetting
up the Other over against itself. If three travellers chance to occupy the same
compartment, that is enough to make vaguely hostile ‘others’ out of all the
rest of the passengers on the train. In small-town eyes all persons not
belonging to the village are ‘strangers’ and suspect; to the native of a country
all who inhabit other countries are ‘foreigners’; Jews are ‘different’ for the
anti-Semite, Negroes are ‘inferior’ for American racists, aborigines are
‘natives’ for colonists, proletarians are the ‘lower class’ for the privileged.
Lévi-Strauss, at the end of a profound work on the various forms of
primitive societies, reaches the following conclusion: ‘Passage from the state
of Nature to the state of Culture is marked by man’s ability to view biological
relations as a series of contrasts; duality, alternation, opposition, and
symmetry, whether under definite or vague forms, constitute not so much
phenomena to be explained as fundamental and immediately given data of
social reality.’ These phenomena would be incomprehensible if in fact human
society were simply a Mitsein or fellowship based on solidarity and

friendliness. Things become clear, on the contrary, if, following Hegel, we find
in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility towards every other
consciousness; the subject can be posed only in being opposed – he sets
himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object.
But the other consciousness, the other ego, sets up a reciprocal claim. The
native travelling abroad is shocked to find himself in turn regarded as a
‘stranger’ by the natives of neighbouring countries. As a matter of fact, wars,
festivals, trading, treaties, and contests among tribes, nations, and classes
tend to deprive the concept Other of its absolute sense and to make manifest
its relativity; willy-nilly, individuals and groups are forced to realize the
reciprocity of their relations. How is it, then, that this reciprocity has not been
recognised between the sexes, that one of the contrasting terms is set up as
the sole essential, denying any relativity in regard to its correlative and
defining the latter as pure otherness? Why is it that women do not dispute
male sovereignty? No subject will readily volunteer to become the object, the
inessential; it is not the Other who, in defining himself as the Other,
establishes the One. The Other is posed as such by the One in defining himself
as the One. But if the Other is not to regainthe status of being the One, he must
be submissive enough to accept this alien point of view. Whence comes this
submission in the case of woman?
There are, to be sure, other cases in which a certain category has been able
to dominate another completely for a time. Very often this privilege depends
upon inequality of numbers – the majority imposes its rule upon the minority
or persecutes it. But women are not a minority, like the American Negroes or
the Jews; there are as many women as men on earth. Again, the two groups
concerned have often been originally independent; they may have been
formerly unaware of each other’s existence, or perhaps they recognised each
other’s autonomy. But a historical event has resulted in the subjugation of the
weaker by the stronger.The scattering of the Jews, the introduction ofslavery
into America, the conquests of imperialism are examples in point. In these
cases the oppressed retained at least the memory of former days; they
possessed in common a past, a tradition, sometimes a religion or a culture.

The parallel drawn by Bebel between women and the proletariat is valid in
that neither ever formed a minority or a separate collective unit of mankind.
And instead of a single historical event it is in both cases a historical
development that explains their status as a class and accounts for the
membership of particular individuals in that class. But proletarians have not
always existed, whereas there have always been women. They are women in
virtue of their anatomy and physiology. Throughout history they have always
been subordinated to men, and hence their dependency is not the result of a
historical event or a social change – it was not something that occurred. The
reason why otherness in this case seems to be an absolute is in part that it
lacks the contingent or incidental nature of historical facts. A condition
brought about at a certain time can be abolished at some other time, as the
Negroes of Haiti and others have proved: but it might seem that natural
condition is beyond the possibility of change. In truth, however, the nature of
things is no more immutably given, once for all, than is historical reality. If
woman seems to be the inessential which never becomes the essential, it is
because she herself fails to bring about this change. Proletarians say ‘We’;
Negroes also. Regarding themselves as subjects, they transform the
bourgeois, the whites, into ‘others’. But women do not say ‘We’, except at
some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say
‘women’, and women use the same word in referring to themselves. They do
not authentically assume a subjective attitude. The proletarians have
accomplished the revolution in Russia, the Negroes in Haiti, the Indo-Chinese
are battling for it in Indo-China; but the women’s effort has never been
anything more than a symbolic agitation. They have gained only what men
have been willing to grant; they have taken nothing, they have only received.
The reason for this is that women lack concrete means for organising
themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit.
They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such
solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat. They are not even
promiscuously herded together in the way that creates community feeling
among the American Negroes, the ghetto Jews, the workers of Saint-Denis, or
the factory hands of Renault. They live dispersed among the males, attached
through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to
certain men – fathers or husbands – more firmly than they are to other

women. If they belong to the bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with men of that
class, not with proletarian women; if they are white, their allegiance is to
white men, not to Negro women. The proletariat can propose to massacre the
ruling class, and a sufficiently fanatical Jew or Negro might dream of getting
sole possession of the atomic bomb and making humanity wholly Jewish or
black; but woman cannot even dream of exterminating the males. The bond
that unites her to her oppressors is not comparable to any other. The division
ofthe sexesis a biological fact, not anevent in human history. Maleand female
stand opposed within a primordial Mitsein, and woman has not broken it. The
couple is a fundamental unity with its two halves riveted together, and the
cleavage of society along the line of sex is impossible. Here is to be found the
basic trait of woman: she is the Other in a totality of which the two
components are necessary to one another.
One could supposethatthis reciprocity might have facilitated the liberation
of woman. When Hercules sat at the feet of Omphale and helped with her
spinning, his desire for her held him captive; but why did she fail to gain a
lasting power? To revenge herself on Jason, Medea killed their children; and
this grim legend would seem to suggest that she might have obtained a
formidable influence over him through his love for his offspring. In Lysistrata
Aristophanes gaily depicts a band of women who joined forces to gain social
ends through the sexual needs of their men; but this is only a play. In the
legend of the Sabine women, the latter soon abandoned their plan of
remaining sterile to punish their ravishers. In truth woman has not been
socially emancipated through man’s need – sexual desire and the desire for
offspring – which makes the male dependent for satisfaction upon the female.
Master and slave, also, are united by a reciprocal need, in this case
economic, which does not liberate the slave. In the relation of master to slave
the master does not make a point of the need that he has for the other; he has
in his grasp the powerofsatisfying this need throughhis ownaction; whereas
the slave, in his dependent condition, his hope and fear, is quite conscious of
the need he has for his master. Even if the need is at bottom equally urgent
forboth,it always worksin favouroftheoppressorandagainsttheoppressed.
That is why the liberation of the working class, for example, has been slow.

Now, woman has always been man’s dependant, if not his slave; the two
sexes have never shared the world in equality. And even today woman is
heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change. Almost
nowhereis herlegal status the same as man’s,and frequently it is much to her
disadvantage. Even when her rights are legally recognised in the abstract,
long-standing custom prevents their full expression in the mores. In the
economic sphere men and women can almost be said to make up two castes;
other things being equal, the former hold the better jobs, get higher wages,
and have more opportunity for success than their new competitors. In
industry and politics men have a great many more positions and they
monopolise the most important posts. In addition to all this, they enjoy a
traditional prestige that the education of children tends in every way to
support, for the present enshrines the past – and in the past all history has
been made by men. At the present time, when women are beginning to take
part in the affairs of the world, it is still a world that belongs to men – they
have no doubt of it at all and women have scarcely any. To decline to be the
Other, to refuse to be a party to the deal – this would be for women to
renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance with the
superior caste. Man-the-sovereign will provide woman-the-liege with
material protection and will undertake the moral justification of her
existence; thus she can evade at once both economic risk and the
metaphysical risk of a liberty in which ends and aims must be contrived
without assistance. Indeed, along with the ethical urge of each individual to
affirm his subjective existence, there is also the temptation to forgo liberty
and becomea thing. This is an inauspicious road,for he who takes it – passive,
lost, ruined – becomes henceforth the creature of another’s will, frustrated in
his transcendenceanddeprived ofeveryvalue. But it is an easy road;onit one
avoids the strain involved in undertaking an authentic existence. When man
makes of woman the Other, he may, then, expect to manifest deep-seated
tendencies towards complicity. Thus, woman may fail to lay claim to the
status of subject because she lacks definite resources, because she feels the
necessarybondthat ties her to man regardlessofreciprocity, andbecauseshe
is often very well pleased with her role as the Other.
But it will be asked at once: how did all this begin? It is easy to see that the
duality of the sexes, like any duality, gives rise to conflict. And doubtless the

winner will assume the status of absolute. But why should man have won
from the start? It seems possible that women could have won the victory; or
that the outcome of the conflict might never have been decided. How is it that
this world has always belonged to the men and that things have begun to
change only recently? Is this change a good thing? Will it bring about an equal
sharing of the world between men and women?
These questions are not new, and they have often been answered. But the
very fact that woman is the Other tends to cast suspicion upon all the
justifications that men have everbeenable to provideforit. These haveall too
evidently been dictated by men’s interest. A little-known feminist of the
seventeenth century, Poulain de la Barre, put it this way: ‘All that has been
written aboutwomen by men shouldbesuspect, forthe men areat oncejudge
and party to the lawsuit.’ Everywhere, at all times, the males have displayed
their satisfaction in feeling that they are the lords of creation. ‘Blessed be God
... that He did not make me a woman,’ say the Jews in their morning prayers,
while their wives pray on a note of resignation: ‘Blessed be the Lord, who
created me according to His will.’ The first among the blessings for which
Plato thanked the gods was that he had been created free, not enslaved; the
second, a man, not a woman. But the males could not enjoy this privilege fully
unless they believed it to be founded on the absolute and the eternal; they
sought to make the fact of their supremacy into a right. ‘Being men, those who
have made and compiled the laws have favoured their own sex, and jurists
have elevated these laws into principles’, to quote Poulain de la Barre once
more.
Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, and scientists have striven to
show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and
advantageous on earth. The religions invented by men reflect this wish for
domination. In the legends of Eve and Pandora men have taken up arms
against women. They have made use of philosophy and theology, as the
quotations from Aristotle and St Thomas have shown. Since ancient times
satirists and moralists have delighted in showing up the weaknesses of
women. We are familiar with the savage indictments hurled against women
throughout French literature. Montherlant, for example, follows the tradition
of Jean de Meung, though with less gusto. This hostility may at times be well

founded, often it is gratuitous; but in truth it more or less successfully
concealsa desireforself-justification. As Montaignesays, ‘It is easierto accuse
one sex than to excuse the other’. Sometimes what is going on is clear enough.
Forinstance, the Romanlaw limiting the rights ofwoman cited ‘theimbecility ,
the instability of the sex’ just when the weakening of family ties seemed to
threaten the interests of male heirs. And in the effort to keep the married
woman under guardianship, appeal was made in the sixteenth century to the
authority of St Augustine, who declared that ‘woman is a creature neither
decisive nor constant’, at a time when the single woman was thought capable
of managing her property. Montaigne understood clearly how arbitrary and
unjust was woman’s appointed lot: ‘Women are not in the wrong when they
decline to accept the rules laid down forthem, since the men make theserules
without consulting them. No wonder intrigue and strife abound.’ But he did
not go so far as to champion their cause.
It was only later, in the eighteenth century, that genuinely democratic men
began to view the matter objectively. Diderot, among others, strove to show
that woman is, like man, a human being. Later John Stuart Mill came fervently
to her defence. But these philosophers displayed unusual impartiality. In the
nineteenth century the feminist quarrel became again a quarrel of partisans.
One of the consequences of the industrial revolution was the entrance of
women into productive labour, and it was just here that the claims of the
feminists emerged from the realm of theory and acquired an economic basis,
while their opponents became the more aggressive. Although landed
property lost power to some extent, the bourgeoisie clung to the old morality
that found the guarantee of private property in the solidity of the family.
Woman was ordered back into the home the more harshly as her
emancipation became a real menace. Even within the working class the men
endeavoured to restrain woman’s liberation, because they began to see the
women as dangerous competitors – the more so because they were
accustomed to work for lower wages.
In proving woman’s inferiority, the anti-feminists then began to draw not
only upon religion, philosophy, and theology, as before, but also upon science
– biology, experimental psychology, etc. At most they were willing to grant
‘equality in difference’ to the other sex. That profitable formula is most

significant; it is precisely like the ‘equal but separate’ formula of the Jim Crow
laws aimed at the North American Negroes. As is well known, this so-called
equalitarian segregation has resulted only in the most extreme
discrimination. The similarity just noted is in no way due to chance, for
whether it is a race, a caste, a class, or a sex that is reduced to a position of
inferiority, the methods of justification are the same. ‘The eternal feminine’
corresponds to ‘the black soul’ and to ‘the Jewish character’. True, the Jewish
problemis on the whole verydifferent from the other two – to the anti-Semite
the Jew is not so much an inferior as he is an enemy for whom there is to be
granted no place on earth, for whom annihilation is the fate desired. But there
are deep similarities between the situation of woman and that of the Negro.
Both are being emancipated today from a like paternalism, and the former
master class wishes to ‘keep them in their place’ – that is, the place chosen for
them. In both cases the former masters lavish more or less sincere eulogies,
either onthe virtuesof‘the goodNegro’ withhis dormant,childish, merrysoul
– thesubmissive Negro – oronthemerits ofthe woman who is ‘truly feminine’
– that is, frivolous, infantile, irresponsible the submissive woman. In both
cases the dominant class bases its argument on a state of affairs that it has
itself created. As George Bernard Shaw puts it, in substance, ‘The American
white relegates the black to the rank of shoeshine boy; and he concludesfrom
this that the black is good for nothing but shining shoes.’ This vicious circle is
met with in all analogous circumstances; when an individual (or a group of
individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior.
But the significance of the verb to be must be rightly understood here; it is in
badfaith to give it a static value when it really hasthe dynamic Hegelian sense
of ‘to have become’. Yes, women on the whole are today inferior to men; that
is, their situation affordsthem fewerpossibilities. The question is: shouldthat
state of affairs continue?
Many men hope that it will continue; not all have given up the battle. The
conservative bourgeoisie still see in the emancipation of women a menace to
their morality and their interests. Some men dread feminine competition.
Recently a male student wrote in the Hebdo-Latin: ‘Everywoman student who
goes into medicine or law robs us of a job.’ He never questioned his rights in
this world. And economic interests are not the only ones concerned. One of
the benefits that oppression confers upon the oppressors is that the most

humble among them is made to feel superior; thus, a ‘poor white’ in the South
can console himself with the thought that he is not a ‘dirty nigger’ – and the
more prosperous whites cleverly exploit this pride.
Similarly, the most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared
with women. It was much easier for M. de Montherlant to think himself a hero
when hefacedwomen (andwomen chosenforhis purpose)thanwhenhe was
obliged to act the man among men – something many women have done
better than he, for that matter. And in September 1948, in one of his articles
in the Figaro littéraire, Claude Mauriac – whose great originality is admired
by all – could write regarding woman: ‘We listen on a tone [sic!] of polite
indifference ... to the most brilliant among them, well knowing that her wit
reflects more or less luminously ideas that come from us.’ Evidently the
speaker referred to is not reflecting the ideas of Mauriac himself, for no one
knows ofhis havingany. It may bethat shereflects ideas originating with men,
but then, even among men there are those who have been known to
appropriate ideas not their own; and one can well ask whether Claude
Mauriac might not find more interesting a conversation reflecting Descartes,
Marx, or Gide rather than himself. What is really remarkable is that by using
the questionable we he identifies himself with St Paul, Hegel, Lenin, and
Nietzsche, and from the lofty eminence of their grandeur looks down
disdainfully upon the bevy of women who make bold to converse with him on
a footing of equality. In truth, I know of more than one woman who would
refuse to suffer with patience Mauriac’s ‘tone of polite indifference’.
I have lingered on this example because the masculine attitude is here
displayed with disarming ingenuousness.But men profit in many moresubtle
ways from the otherness, the alterity of woman. Here is a miraculous balm for
those afflicted with an inferiority complex, and indeed no one is more
arrogant towards women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is
anxious about his virility. Those who are not fear-ridden in the presence of
their fellow men are much more disposed to recognise a fellow creature in
woman; but even to thesethe myth ofWoman, the Other, is preciousformany
reasons. They cannot be blamed for not cheerfully relinquishing all the
benefits they derive from the myth, for they realize what they would lose in
relinquishing woman as they fancy her to be, while they fail to realize what

they have to gain from the woman of tomorrow. Refusal to pose oneself as the
Subject, unique andabsolute,requiresgreatself-denial. Furthermore,thevast
majority of men make no such claim explicitly. They do not postulate woman
as inferior, for today they are too thoroughly imbued with the ideal of
democracy not to recognise all human beings as equals.
In the bosomofthefamily, womanseems in the eyesofchildhoodandyouth
to be clothed in the same social dignity as the adult males. Later on, the young
man, desiring and loving, experiences the resistance, the independence of the
woman desired and loved; in marriage, he respects woman as wife and
mother, andin the concreteevents ofconjugal life shestands therebeforehim
as a free being. He can therefore feel that social subordination as between the
sexes no longer exists and that on the whole, in spite of differences, woman is
an equal. As, however, he observes some points of inferiority – the most
important being unfitness for the professions – he attributes these to natural
causes. When he is in a co-operative and benevolent relation with woman, his
theme is the principle of abstract equality, and he does not base his attitude
upon such inequality as may exist. But when he is in conflict with her, the
situation is reversed: his theme will be the existing inequality, and he will
even take it as justification for denying abstract equality.
So it is that many men will affirm as if in good faith that women are the
equals of man and that they have nothing to clamour for, while at the same
time they will say that women can never be the equals of man and that their
demands are in vain. It is, in point of fact, a difficult matter for man to realize
the extreme importance of social discriminations which seem outwardly
insignificant but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so
profound that they appear to spring from her original nature. The most
sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman’s concrete situation. And
there is no reason to put much trust in the men when they rush to the defence
of privileges whose full extent they can hardly measure. We shall not, then,
permit ourselves to be intimidated by the number and violence of the attacks
launched against women, nor to be entrapped by the self-seeking eulogies
bestowed on the ‘true woman’, nor to profit by the enthusiasm for woman’s
destiny manifested by men who would not for the world have any part of it.

We should consider the arguments of the feminists with no less suspicion,
however,forveryoftentheir controversialaim deprivesthem ofall real value.
If the ‘woman question’ seems trivial, it is because masculine arrogance has
made of it a ‘quarrel’; and when quarrelling one no longer reasons well.
People have tirelessly sought to prove that woman is superior, inferior, or
equal to man. Some say that, having been created after Adam, she is evidently
a secondary being: others say on the contrary that Adam was only a rough
draft and that God succeeded in producing the human being in perfection
when He created Eve. Woman’s brain is smaller; yes, but it is relatively larger.
Christ was made a man; yes, but perhaps for his greater humility. Each
argument at oncesuggestsits opposite, andboth areoftenfallacious. If we are
to gain understanding, we must get out of these ruts; we must discard the
vague notions of superiority, inferiority, equality which have hitherto
corrupted every discussion of the subject and start afresh.
Very well, but just how shall we pose the question? And, to begin with, who
are we to propound it at all? Man is at once judge and party to the case; but so
is woman. What we need is an angel – neither man nor woman – but where
shall we find one? Still, the angel would be poorly qualified to speak, for an
angel is ignorant of all the basic facts involved in the problem. With a
hermaphrodite we should be no better off, for here the situation is most
peculiar; the hermaphrodite is not really the combination of a whole man and
a whole woman, but consists of parts of each and thus is neither. It looks to
me as if there are, after all, certain women who are best qualified to elucidate
the situation of woman. Let us not be misled by the sophism that because
Epimenides was a Cretan he was necessarily a liar; it is not a mysterious
essence that compels men and women to act in good or in bad faith, it is their
situation that inclines them more or less towards the search for truth. Many
of today’s women, fortunate in the restoration of all the privileges pertaining
to the estate of the human being, can afford the luxury of impartiality – we
even recognise its necessity. We are no longer like our partisan elders; by and
large we have won the game. In recent debates on the status of women the
United Nations has persistently maintained that the equality of the sexes is
now becoming a reality, and already some of us have never had to sense in
our femininity an inconvenience or an obstacle. Many problems appear to us
to be more pressing than those which concern us in particular, and this

detachment even allows us to hopethat ourattitude will beobjective. Still, we
know the feminine world more intimately than do the men because we have
our roots in it, we grasp more immediately than do men what it means to a
human being to be feminine; and we are more concerned with such
knowledge. I have said that there are more pressing problems, but this does
not prevent us from seeing some importance in asking how the fact of being
women will affect our lives. What opportunities precisely have been given us
andwhat withheld? What fateawaits ouryoungersisters,and what directions
should they take? It is significant that books by women on women are in
general animated in our day less by a wish to demand our rights than by an
effort towards clarity and understanding. As we emerge from an era of
excessive controversy, this book is offered as one attempt among others to
confirm that statement.
But it is doubtless impossible to approach any human problem with a mind
free from bias. The way in which questions are put, the points of view
assumed, presuppose a relativity of interest; all characteristics imply values,
and every objective description, so called, implies an ethical background.
Rather than attempt to conceal principles more or less definitely implied, it is
better to state them openly, at the beginning. This will make it unnecessary to
specify on every page in just what sense one uses such words as superior,
inferior, better, worse, progress, reaction, and the like. If we survey some of the
works on woman, we note that one of the points of view most frequently
adopted is that of the public good, the general interest; and one always means
by this the benefit of society as one wishes it to be maintained or established.
For our part, we hold that the only public good is that which assures the
private goodofthecitizens; we shall passjudgement on institutions according
to their effectiveness in giving concrete opportunities to individuals. But we
do not confuse the idea of private interest with that of happiness, although
that is another common point of view. Are not women of the harem more
happy than women voters? Is not the housekeeper happier than the working-
woman? It is not too clear just what the word happy really means and still less
what true values it may mask. There is no possibility of measuring the
happiness of others, and it is always easy to describe as happy the situation in
which one wishes to place them.

In particular thosewho arecondemnedto stagnation areoften pronounced
happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being at rest. This notion we
reject, for our perspective is that of existentialist ethics. Every subject plays
his part as such specifically through exploits or projects that serve as a mode
of transcendence; he achieves liberty only through a continual reaching out
towards other liberties. There is no justification for present existence other
than its expansion into an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence
falls back into immanence, stagnation, there is a degradation of existence into
the ‘en-sois’ – the brutish life of subjection to given conditions – and of liberty
into constraint and contingence. This downfall represents a moral fault if the
subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it spells frustration and
oppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil. Every individual concerned to
justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to
transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects.
Now, what peculiarly signalises the situation of woman is that she – a free
and autonomous being like all human creatures – nevertheless finds herself
living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other.
They propose to stabilise her as object and to doom her to immanence since
her transcendence is to be overshadowed and for ever transcended by
another ego (conscience) which is essential and sovereign. The drama of
woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every
subject (ego) – who always regards the self as the essential and the
compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential. How can a human
being in woman’s situation attain fulfilment? What roads are open to her?
Which are blocked? How can independence be recovered in a state of
dependency? What circumstances limit woman’s liberty and how can they be
overcome? These are the fundamental questions on which I would fain throw
some light. This means that I am interested in the fortunes of the individual
as defined not in terms of happiness but in terms of liberty.
Quite evidently this problem would be without significance if we were to
believe that woman’s destiny is inevitably determined by physiological,
psychological, or economic forces. Hence I shall discuss first of all the light in
which woman is viewed by biology, psychoanalysis, and historical
materialism. Next I shall try to show exactly how the concept of the ‘truly

feminine’ has been fashioned – why woman has been defined as the Other –
and what have been the consequences from man’s point of view. Then from
woman’s point of view I shall describe the world in which women must live;
and thus we shall be able to envisage the difficulties in their way as,
endeavouring to make their escape from the sphere hitherto assigned them,
they aspire to full membership in the human race.

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