The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  Sweden also had a very sizable feminist movement. Invoking old traditions, Swedish women demanded the right “to education, work, and liberty.” It was largely women writers who led the fight, and it was the moral aspect of the problem that interested them at first; then, grouped in powerful associations, they won over the liberals but ran up against the hostility of the conservatives. Norwegian women in 1907 and Finnish women in 1906 obtained the suffrage that Swedish women would have to wait years to attain.

  In Latin and Eastern countries woman was oppressed by customs more than by laws. In Italy, fascism systematically hindered feminism’s progress. Seeking the alliance of the Church, which continued to uphold family tradition and a tradition of feminine slavery, Fascist Italy held woman in double bondage: to public authority and to her husband. The situation was very different in Germany. In 1790, Hippel, a student, launched the first German feminist manifesto. Sentimental feminism analogous to that of George Sand flourished at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1848, the first German woman feminist, Louise Otto, demanded the right for women to assist in the transformation of their country: her feminism was largely nationalistic. She founded the General German Women’s Association in 1865. German socialists, along with Bebel, advocated the abolition of the inequality of the sexes. In 1892, Clara Zetkin joined the party’s council. Women workers and women socialists grouped together in a federation. German women failed in 1914 to establish a women’s national army, but they took an active part in the war. After the German defeat, they obtained the right to vote and participated in political life: Rosa Luxemburg fought next to Liebknecht in the Spartacus group and was assassinated in 1919. The majority of German women chose the party of order; several took seats in the Reichstag. It was thus upon emancipated women that Hitler imposed the new Napoleonic ideal: “Kinder, Küche, Kirche.” “Woman’s presence dishonors the Reichstag,” he declared. As Nazism was anti-Catholic and antibourgeois, he gave the mother a privileged place; protection granted to unmarried mothers and illegitimate children greatly freed woman from marriage; as in Sparta, she was more dependent on the state than on any individual, giving her both more and less autonomy than a bourgeois woman living under a capitalist regime.

  In Soviet Russia the feminist movement made the greatest advances. It began at the end of the nineteenth century among women students of the intelligentsia; they were less attached to their personal cause than to revolutionary action in general; they “went to the people” and used nihilistic methods against the Okhrana: in 1878 Vera Zasulich shot the police chief Trepov. During the Russo-Japanese War, women replaced men in many areas of work; their consciousness raised, the Russian Union for Women’s rights demanded political equality of the sexes; in the first Duma, a parliamentary women’s rights group was created, but it was powerless. Women workers’ emancipation would come from the revolution. Already in 1905, they were actively participating in the mass political strikes that broke out in the country, and they mounted the barricades. On March 8, 1917, International Women’s Day and a few days before the revolution, they massively demonstrated in the streets of St. Petersburg demanding bread, peace, and their husbands’ return. They took part in the October insurrection; between 1918 and 1920, they played an important economic and even military role in the U.S.S.R.’s fight against the invaders. True to Marxist tradition, Lenin linked women’s liberation to that of the workers; he gave them political and economic equality.

  Article 122 of the 1936 constitution stipulates: “In the U.S.S.R., woman enjoys the same rights as man in all aspects of economic, official, cultural, public, and political life.” And these principles were spelled out by the Communist International. It demands “social equality of man and woman before the law and in daily life. Radical transformation in conjugal rights and in the family code. Recognition of maternity as a social function. Entrusting society with the care and education of children and adolescents. Organization of a civil effort against ideology and traditions that make woman a slave.” In the economic area, woman’s conquests were stunning. She obtained equal wages with male workers, and she took on a highly active role in production; thereby gaining considerable political and social importance. The brochure recently published by the Association France-U.S.S.R. reports that in the 1939 general elections there were 457,000 women deputies in the regional, district, town, and village soviets; 1,480 in the socialist republics of higher soviets, and 227 seated in the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. Close to 10 million are members of unions. They constitute 40 percent of the population of U.S.S.R. workers and employees, and a great number of workers among the Stakhanovites are women. The role of Russian women in the last war is well-known; they provided an enormous labor force even in production branches where masculine professions are dominant: metallurgy and mining, timber rafting and railways, and so forth. They distinguished themselves as pilots and parachutists, and they formed partisan armies.

  This participation of woman in public life has raised a difficult problem: her role in family life. For a long while, means were sought to free her from her domestic constraints: on November 16, 1942, the plenary assembly of the Comintern proclaimed, “The revolution is impotent as long as the notion of family and family relations subsists.” Respect for free unions, liberalization of divorce, and legalization of abortion ensured woman’s liberty relative to men; laws for maternity leave, child-care centers, kindergartens, and so on lightened the burdens of motherhood. From passionate and contradictory witness reports, it is difficult to discern what woman’s concrete situation really was; what is sure is that today the demands of repopulation have given rise to a different family policy: the family has become the elementary social cell, and woman is both worker and housekeeper.7 Sexual morality is at its strictest; since the law of June 1936, reinforced by that of June 7, 1941, abortion has been banned and divorce almost suppressed; adultery is condemned by moral standards. Strictly subordinated to the state like all workers, strictly bound to the home, but with access to political life and the dignity that productive work gives, the Russian woman is in a singular situation that would be worth studying in its singularity; circumstances unfortunately prevent me from doing this.

  The recent session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women demanded that equal rights for both sexes be recognized in all nations, and several motions were passed to make this legal status a concrete reality. It would seem, then, that the match is won. The future can only bring greater and greater assimilation of women in a hitherto masculine society.

  Several conclusions come to the fore when taking a look at this history as a whole. And first of all this one: women’s entire history has been written by men. Just as in America there is no black problem but a white one,8 just as “anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem, it’s our problem,”9 so the problem of woman has always been a problem of men. Why they had moral prestige at the outset along with physical strength has been discussed; they created the values, customs, and religions; never did women attempt to vie for that empire. A few isolated women—Sappho, Christine de Pizan, Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges—protested against their harsh destiny; and there were some collective demonstrations: but Roman matrons in league against the Oppian Law or Anglo-Saxon suffragettes only managed to wield pressure because men were willing to submit to it. Men always held woman’s lot in their hands; and they did not decide on it based on her interest; it is their own projects, fears, and needs that counted. When they revered the Mother Goddess, it is because Nature frightened them, and as soon as the bronze tool enabled them to assert themselves against Nature, they instituted patriarchy; henceforth it was the family-state conflict that has defined woman’s status; it is the attitude of the Christian before God, the world, and his own flesh that is reflected in the condition he assigned to her; what was called the querelle des femmes in the Middle Ages was a quarrel between clergy and laity about marriage and celibacy; it is the social regime founded on private property that brought about the
married woman’s wardship, and it is the technical revolution realized by men that enfranchised today’s women. It is an evolution of the masculine ethic that led to the decrease in family size by birth control and partially freed woman from the servitude of motherhood. Feminism itself has never been an autonomous movement: it was partially an instrument in the hands of politicians and partially an epiphenomenon reflecting a deeper social drama. Never did women form a separate caste: and in reality they never sought to play a role in history as a sex. The doctrines that call for the advent of woman as flesh, life, immanence, or the Other are masculine ideologies that do not in any way express feminine claims. For the most part, women resign themselves to their lot without attempting any action; those who did try to change attempted to overcome their singularity and not to confine themselves in it triumphantly. When they intervened in world affairs, it was in concert with men and from a masculine point of view.

  This intervention, in general, was secondary and occasional. The women who enjoyed a certain economic autonomy and took part in production were the oppressed classes, and as workers they were even more enslaved than male workers. In the ruling classes woman was a parasite and as such was subjugated to masculine laws: in both cases, it was almost impossible for her to act. Law and custom did not always coincide: and a balance was set up between them so that woman was never concretely free. In the ancient Roman Republic, economic conditions give the matron concrete powers: but she has no legal independence; the same is often true in peasant civilizations and among lower-middle-class tradesmen; mistress-servant inside the home, woman is socially a minor. Inversely, in periods when society fragments, woman becomes freer, but she loses her fief when she ceases to be man’s vassal; she has nothing but a negative freedom that is expressed only in license and dissipation, as for example, during the Roman decadence, the Renaissance, the eighteenth century, and the Directoire. Either she finds work but is enslaved, or she is enfranchised but can do nothing else with herself. It is worth noting among other points that the married woman had her place in society but without benefiting from any rights, while the single woman, honest girl or prostitute, had all man’s capacities; but until this century she was more or less excluded from social life. The opposition between law and custom produced this among other curious paradoxes: free love is not prohibited by law, but adultery is a crime; the girl that “falls,” however, is often dishonored, while the wife’s shocking behavior is treated indulgently: from the eighteenth century to today many young girls got married so that they could freely have lovers. This ingenious system kept the great mass of women under guardianship: it takes exceptional circumstances for a feminine personality to be able to affirm itself between these two series of constraints, abstract or concrete. Women who have accomplished works comparable to men’s are those whom the force of social institutions had exalted beyond any sexual differentiation. Isabella the Catholic, Elizabeth of England, and Catherine of Russia were neither male nor female: they were sovereigns. It is remarkable that once socially abolished, their femininity no longer constituted inferiority: there were infinitely more queens with great reigns than kings. Religion undergoes the same transformation: Catherine of Siena and Saint Teresa are saintly souls, beyond any physiological condition; their lay life and their mystical life, their actions and their writings, rise to heights that few men ever attain. It is legitimate to think that if other women failed to mark the world deeply, it is because they were trapped by their conditions. They were only able to intervene in a negative or indirect way. Judith, Charlotte Corday, and Vera Zasulich assassinate; the Frondeuses conspire; during the Revolution and the Commune, women fight alongside men against the established order; intransigent refusal and revolt against a freedom without rights and power are permitted, whereas it is forbidden for a woman to participate in positive construction; at best she will manage to insinuate herself into masculine enterprises by indirect means. Aspasia, Mme de Maintenon, and the princesse des Ursins were precious advisers: but someone still had to consent to listen to them. Men tend to exaggerate the scope of this influence when trying to convince woman she has the greater role; but in fact feminine voices are silenced when concrete action begins; they might foment wars, not suggest battle tactics; they oriented politics only inasmuch as politics was limited to intrigue: the real reins of the world have never been in women’s hands; they had no role either in technology or in economy, they neither made nor unmade states, they did not discover worlds. They did set off some events: but they were pretexts more than agents. Lucretia’s suicide had no more than a symbolic value. Martyrdom remains allowed for the oppressed; during Christian persecutions and in the aftermath of social or national defeats, women played this role of witness; but a martyr has never changed the face of the world. Even feminine demonstrations and initiatives were only worth something if a masculine decision positively prolonged them. The American women united around Harriet Beecher Stowe aroused public opinion to fever pitch against slavery; but the real reasons for the Civil War were not sentimental. The March 8, 1917, “woman’s day” might have triggered the Russian Revolution: but it was nonetheless merely a signal. Most feminine heroines are extravagant: adventurers or eccentrics notable less for their actions than for their unique destinies; take Joan of Arc, Mme Roland, and Flora Tristan: if they are compared with Richelieu, Danton, or Lenin, it is clear their greatness is mainly subjective; they are exemplary figures more than historical agents. A great man springs from the mass and is carried by circumstances: the mass of women is at the fringes of history, and for each of them circumstances are an obstacle and not a springboard. To change the face of the world, one has first to be firmly anchored to it; but women firmly rooted in society are those subjugated by it; unless they are designated for action by divine right—and in this case they are shown to be as capable as men—the ambitious woman and the heroine are strange monsters. Only since women have begun to feel at home on this earth has a Rosa Luxemburg or a Mme Curie emerged. They brilliantly demonstrate that it is not women’s inferiority that has determined their historical insignificance: it is their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority.10

  This fact is striking in the cultural field, the area in which they have been the most successful in asserting themselves. Their lot has been closely linked to literature and the arts; among the ancient Germans, the roles of prophetess and priestess fell to women; because they are marginal to the world, men will look to them when they strive, through culture, to bridge the limits of their universe and reach what is other. Courtly mysticism, humanist curiosity, and the taste for beauty that thrive in the Italian Renaissance, the preciousness of the seventeenth century, and the progressive ideal of the eighteenth century bring about an exaltation of femininity in diverse forms. Woman is thus the main pole of poetry and the substance of works of art; her leisure allows her to devote herself to the pleasures of the mind: inspiration, critic, writer’s audience, she emulates the writer; she can often impose a type of sensitivity, an ethic that feeds men’s hearts, which is how she intervenes in her own destiny: women’s education is mainly a feminine conquest. And yet as important as this collective role played by intellectual women is, their individual contributions are, on the whole, of a lesser order. Woman holds a privileged place in the fields of the mind and art because she is not involved in action; but art and thinking derive their impetus in action. Being on the fringes of the world is not the best place for someone who intends to re-create it: here again, to go beyond the given, one must be deeply rooted in it. Personal accomplishments are almost impossible in human categories collectively kept in an inferior situation. “Where can one go in skirts?” asked Marie Bashkirtseff. And Stendhal: “All the geniuses who are born women are lost for the public good.” If truth be told, one is not born, but becomes, a genius; and the feminine condition has, until now, rendered this becoming impossible.

  Antifeminists draw two contradictory arguments from examining history: (1) women have nev
er created anything grand; (2) woman’s situation has never prevented great women personalities from blossoming. There is bad faith in both of these assertions; the successes of some few privileged women neither compensate for nor excuse the systematic degrading of the collective level; and the very fact that these successes are so rare and limited is proof of their unfavorable circumstances. As Christine de Pizan, Poulain de la Barre, Condorcet, John Stuart Mill, and Stendhal stated, women have never been given their chances in any area. This explains why many of them today demand a new status; and once again, their demand is not to be exalted in their femininity: they want transcendence to prevail over immanence in themselves as in all of humanity; they want abstract rights and concrete possibilities to be granted to them, without which freedom is merely mystification.11

  This will is being fulfilled. But this is a period of transition; this world that has always belonged to men is still in their hands; patriarchal civilization’s institutions and values are still, to a great extent, alive. Abstract rights are far from being wholly granted to women: in Switzerland, women still cannot vote; in France, the 1942 law upholds the husband’s prerogatives in a weaker form. And abstract rights, as has just been said, have never been sufficient to guarantee woman a concrete hold on the world: there is not yet real equality today between the two sexes.