The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  First, the burdens of marriage are still much heavier for woman than for man. We have seen that the constraints of pregnancy have been limited by the overt or clandestine use of birth control, but the practice is neither universally disseminated nor rigorously applied; as abortion is officially forbidden, many women either jeopardize their health by resorting to unregulated abortion methods or are overwhelmed by the number of their pregnancies. Child care, like housekeeping, is still almost exclusively the woman’s burden. In France in particular, the antifeminist tradition is so tenacious that a man would think it demeaning to participate in chores previously reserved for women. The result is that woman has a harder time reconciling her family and work life. In cases where society demands this effort from her, her existence is much more difficult than her spouse’s.

  Take, for example, the lot of peasant women. In France they make up the majority of the women involved in productive labor, and they are generally married. The single woman most often remains a servant in the father’s, brother’s, or sister’s household; she only becomes mistress of a home by accepting a husband’s domination; depending on the region, customs and traditions impose various roles on her: the Norman peasant woman presides over the meal, while the Corsican woman does not sit at the same table as the men; but in any case, as she plays one of the most important roles in the domestic economy, she shares the man’s responsibilities, his interests, and his property; she is respected, and it is often she who really governs: her situation is reminiscent of the place she held in ancient agricultural communities. She often has as much moral prestige as her husband, and sometimes even more; but her concrete condition is much harsher. The care of the garden, barnyard, sheepfold, and pigpen falls on her alone; she takes part in the heavy work: cleaning the cowshed, spreading the manure, sowing, plowing, hoeing, and hay making; she digs, weeds, harvests, picks grapes, and sometimes helps load and unload wagons of straw, hay, wood and sticks, litter, and so on. In addition, she prepares the meals and manages the household: washing, mending, and such. She assumes the heavy burdens of pregnancies and child care. She rises at dawn, feeds the barnyard and small animals, serves the first meal to the men, takes care of the children, and goes out to the fields or the woods or the kitchen garden; she draws water from the well, serves the second meal, washes the dishes, works in the fields again until dinner, and after the last meal occupies her evening by mending, cleaning, husking the corn, and so forth. As she has no time to take care of her health, even during her pregnancies, she loses her shape quickly and is prematurely withered and worn out, sapped by illnesses. She is denied the few occasional compensations man finds in his social life: he goes to the city on Sundays and fair days, meets other men, goes to the café, drinks, plays cards, hunts, and fishes. She stays on the farm and has no leisure. Only the rich peasant women helped by servants or dispensed from field work lead a pleasantly balanced life: they are socially honored and enjoy greater authority in the home without being crushed by labor. But most of the time rural work reduces woman to the condition of a beast of burden.

  The woman shopkeeper, the small-business owner, have always been privileged; they are the only ones since the Middle Ages whose civil capacities have been recognized by the code; women grocers, hoteliers, or tobacconists and dairy women have positions equal to man’s; single or widowed, they have a legal identity of their own; married, they possess the same autonomy as their husbands. They are fortunate in working and living in the same place, and the work is not generally too consuming.

  The situation of the woman worker, employee, secretary, or saleswoman working outside the home is totally different. It is much more difficult to reconcile her job with managing the household (errands, preparation of meals, cleaning, and upkeep of her wardrobe take at least three and a half hours of work a day and six on Sunday; this adds a lot of time to factory or office hours). As for the learned professions, even if women lawyers, doctors, and teachers manage to have some help in their households, the home and children still entail responsibilities and cares that are a serious handicap for them. In America, ingenious technology has simplified housework; but the appearance and elegance demanded of the working woman impose another constraint on her; and she maintains responsibility for the house and children. In addition, the woman who seeks her independence through work has far fewer possibilities than her masculine competitors. Her salary is inferior to man’s in many fields; her job is less specialized and hence doesn’t pay as well as that of a skilled worker; and for the same job, the woman is paid less. Because she is new to the world of males, she has fewer chances of success than they. Men and women alike are loath to work under a woman’s orders; they always give more confidence to a man; if being a woman is not a defect, it is at least a pecularity. If she wants to “get ahead,” it is useful for a woman to make sure she has a man’s support. Men are the ones who take the best places, who hold the most important jobs. It must be emphasized that in economic terms men and women constitute two castes.12

  What determines women’s present situation is the stubborn survival of the most ancient traditions in the new emerging civilization. Hasty observers are wrong to think woman is not up to the possibilities offered her today or even to see only dangerous temptations in these possibilities. The truth is that her situation is tenuous, which makes it very difficult for her to adapt. Factories, offices, and universities are open to women, but marriage is still considered a more honorable career, exempting her from any other participation in collective life. As in primitive civilizations, the amorous act is a service she has the right to be paid for more or less directly. Everywhere but in the U.S.S.R.,13 the modern woman is allowed to use her body as capital. Prostitution is tolerated,14 seduction encouraged. And the married woman can legally make her husband support her; in addition, she is cloaked in much greater social dignity than the unmarried woman. Social customs are far from granting her sexual possibilities on a par with those of the single male, in particular, the unwed mother is an object of scandal, as motherhood is more or less forbidden to her. How could the Cinderella myth not retain its validity? Everything still encourages the girl to expect fortune and happiness from a “Prince Charming” instead of attempting the difficult and uncertain conquest alone. For example, she can hope to attain a higher caste through him, a miracle her whole life’s work will not bring her. But such a hope is harmful because it divides her strength and interests;15 this split is perhaps the most serious handicap for woman. Parents still raise their daughters for marriage rather than promoting their personal development; and the daughter sees so many advantages that she desires it herself; the result is that she is often less specialized, less solidly trained than her brothers, she is less totally committed to her profession; as such, she is doomed to remain inferior in it; and the vicious circle is knotted: this inferiority reinforces her desire to find a husband. Every benefit always has a burden; but if the burden is too heavy, the benefit is no more than a servitude; for most workers today, work is a thankless task: for woman, the chore is not offset by a concrete conquest of her social dignity, freedom of behavior, and economic autonomy; it is understandable that many women workers and employees see no more than an obligation in the right to work from which marriage would deliver them. However, because she has become conscious of self and can emancipate herself from marriage through work, a woman no longer accepts her subjection docilely. What she would hope for is to reconcile family life and profession, something that does not require exhausting acrobatics. Even then, as long as the temptations of facility remain—from the economic inequality that favors certain individuals and the woman’s right to sell herself to one of these privileged people—she needs to expend a greater moral effort than the male to choose the path of independence. It has not been well enough understood that temptation is also an obstacle, and even one of the most dangerous. It is amplified here by a mystification since there will be one winner out of the thousands in the lucky marriage lottery. Today’s period
invites, even obliges women to work; but it lures them with an idyllic and delightful paradise: it raises up the happy few far above those still riveted to this earthly world.

  Men’s economic privilege, their social value, the prestige of marriage, the usefulness of masculine support—all these encourage women to ardently want to please men. They are on the whole still in a state of serfdom. It follows that woman knows and chooses herself not as she exists for herself but as man defines her. She thus has to be described first as men dream of her since her being-for-men is one of the essential factors of her concrete condition.

  * The “baker, the baker’s wife, and the baker’s little boy” refer to King Louis XVI, the queen, and the dauphin, forced by the starving people to leave Versailles for Paris in October 1789.—TRANS.

  * The correct date is 1816.—TRANS.

  * Beauvoir’s calculation.—TRANS.

  1. Truquin, Mémoires et aventures d’un prolétaire (Memoirs and Adventures of a Proletarian in Times of Revolution). Cited from E. Dolléans, Histoire du mouvement ouvrier (History of the Working-Class Movement), Volume 1.

  2. “The earliest known reference to birth-control methods appears to be an Egyptian papyrus from the second millennium B.C., recommending the vaginal application of a bizarre mixture composed of crocodile excrement, honey, natron, and a rubbery substance” (P. Ariès, Histoire des populations françaises [History of French Populations]). Medieval Persian physicians knew of thirty-one recipes, of which only nine were intended for men. Soranus, in the Hadrian era, explains that at the moment of ejaculation, if the woman does not want a child, she should “hold her breath, pull back her body a little so that the sperm cannot penetrate the os uteri, get up immediately, squat down, and make herself sneeze.”

  3. In La précieuse (1656) (The Precious Woman).

  4. “Around 1930 an American firm sold twenty million prophylactics in one year. Fifteen American factories produced a million and a half of them per day” (P. Ariès, Histoire).

  5. “The infant, before being born, is a part of the woman, a kind of organ.”

  6. In Volume II, we will return to the discussion of this view. Let it just be said here that Catholics are far from keeping to the letter of Saint Augustine’s doctrine. The confessor whispers to the young fiancée, on the eve of her wedding, that she can do anything with her husband, as long as “proper” coitus is achieved; positive birth-control practices—including coitus interruptus—are forbidden; but the calendar established by Viennese sexologists can be used, where the act whose only recognized aim is reproduction is carried out on the days conception is impossible for the woman. There are spiritual advisers who even indicate this calendar to their flocks. In fact, there are ample “Christian mothers” who only have two or three children and have nonetheless not interrupted their conjugal relations after the last delivery.

  * From John Stuart Mill, “The Subjection of Women,” as reprinted in Philosophy of Woman, edited by Mary Briody Mahowald.

  * The convention actually took place July 19–20, 1848.—TRANS.

  * That is, President Woodrow Wilson.—TRANS.

  7. Olga Michakova, secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth Organization, stated in 1944 in an interview: “Soviet women should try to make themselves as attractive as nature and good taste permit. After the war, they should dress like women and act feminine … Girls will be told to act and walk like girls, and that is why they will wear skirts that will probably be very tight, making them carry themselves gracefully.”

  8. Cf. Myrdal, An American Dilemma.

  9. Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive (Anti-Semite and Jew).

  10. It is worth noting that out of one thousand statues in Paris (not counting the queens that compose the corbel of the Luxembourg and fulfill a purely architectural role) there are only ten raised to women. Three are devoted to Joan of Arc. The others are Mme de Ségur, George Sand, Sarah Bernhardt, Mme Boucicaut and the baronne de Hirsch, Maria Deraismes, and Rosa Bonheur.

  11. Here too the antifeminists are equivocal. At times, holding abstract liberty to be nothing, they glorify the great concrete role the enslaved woman can play in this world: What more does she want? And other times, they underestimate the fact that negative license does not open any concrete possibilities, and they blame abstractly enfranchised women for not having proven themselves.

  12. In America, great business fortunes often end up in women’s hands: younger than their husbands, women outlive and inherit from them; but they are then older and rarely take the initiative of new investments; they act as usufructuaries rather than owners. It is men who dispose of the capital. In any case, these rich privileged women make up a small minority. In America more than in Europe, it is almost impossible for a woman to reach a top position as a lawyer or doctor.

  13. At least according to official doctrine.

  14. In Anglo-Saxon countries prostitution has never been controlled. Until 1900, American and English common law did not deem it a crime unless it was scandalous and disturbed the peace. Since then, there has been more or less repression, applied with varying degrees of harshness and of success in England and America, whose legislation on this point varies a great deal from one state to the other. In France after a long abolitionist campaign, the April 13, 1946, law ordered brothels to be closed and the fight against procuremat to be reinforced: “Considering that the existence of these brothels is incompatible with the essential principles of human dignity and the role granted to woman in modern society …” Prostitution nevertheless continues to be practiced. Negative and hypocritical measures are obviously not the way the situation can be modified.

  15. Cf. Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers.

  | PART THREE |

  MYTHS

  | CHAPTER 1 |

  History has shown that men have always held all the concrete powers; from patriarchy’s earliest times they have deemed it useful to keep woman in a state of dependence; their codes were set up against her; she was thus concretely established as the Other. This condition served males’ economic interests; but it also suited their ontological and moral ambitions. Once the subject attempts to assert himself, the Other, who limits and denies him, is nonetheless necessary for him: he attains himself only through the reality that he is not. That is why man’s life is never plenitude and rest, it is lack and movement, it is combat. Facing himself, man encounters Nature; he has a hold on it, he tries to appropriate it for himself. But it cannot satisfy him. Either it realizes itself as a purely abstract opposition—it is an obstacle and remains foreign—or it passively submits to man’s desire and allows itself to be assimilated by him; he possesses it only in consuming it, that is, in destroying it. In both cases, he remains alone; he is alone when touching a stone, alone when digesting a piece of fruit. The other is present only if the other is himself present to himself: that is, true alterity is a consciousness separated from my own and identical to it. It is the existence of other men that wrests each man from his immanence and enables him to accomplish the truth of his being, to accomplish himself as transcendence, as flight toward the object, as a project. But this foreign freedom, which confirms my freedom, also enters into conflict with it: this is the tragedy of the unhappy consciousness; each consciousness seeks to posit itself alone as sovereign subject. Each one tries to accomplish itself by reducing the other to slavery. But in work and fear the slave experiences himself as essential, and by a dialectical reversal the master appears the inessential one. The conflict can be overcome by the free recognition of each individual in the other, each one positing both itself and the other as object and as subject in a reciprocal movement. But friendship and generosity, which accomplish this recognition of freedoms concretely, are not easy virtues; they are undoubtedly man’s highest accomplishment; this is where he is in his truth: but this truth is a struggle endlessly begun, endlessly abolished; it demands that man surpass himself at each instant. Put into other words, man attains an authentical
ly moral attitude when he renounces being in order to assume his existence; through this conversion he also renounces all possession, because possession is a way of searching for being; but the conversion by which he attains true wisdom is never finished, it has to be made ceaselessly, it demands constant effort. So much so that, unable to accomplish himself in solitude, man is ceaselessly in jeopardy in his relations with his peers: his life is a difficult enterprise whose success is never assured.

  But he does not like difficulty; he is afraid of danger. He has contradictory aspirations to both life and rest, existence and being; he knows very well that “a restless spirit” is the ransom for his development, that his distance from the object is the ransom for his being present to himself; but he dreams of restfulness in restlessness and of an opaque plenitude that his consciousness would nevertheless still inhabit. This embodied dream is, precisely, woman; she is the perfect intermediary between nature that is foreign to man and the peer who is too identical to him.1 She pits neither the hostile silence of nature nor the hard demand of a reciprocal recognition against him; by a unique privilege she is a consciousness, and yet it seems possible to possess her in the flesh. Thanks to her, there is a way to escape the inexorable dialectic of the master and the slave that springs from the reciprocity of freedoms.

  It has been pointed out that there were not at first free women whom the males then enslaved and that the sexual division has never founded a division into castes. Assimilating the woman to the slave is a mistake; among slaves there were women, but free women have always existed, that is, women invested with religious and social dignity: they accepted man’s sovereignty, and he did not feel threatened by a revolt that could transform him in turn into an object. Woman thus emerged as the inessential who never returned to the essential, as the absolute Other, without reciprocity. All the creation myths express this conviction that is precious to the male, for example, the Genesis legend, which, through Christianity, has spanned Western civilization. Eve was not formed at the same time as man; she was not made either from a different substance or from the same clay that Adam was modeled from: she was drawn from the first male’s flank. Even her birth was not autonomous; God did not spontaneously choose to create her for herself and to be directly worshipped in turn: he destined her for man; he gave her to Adam to save him from loneliness, her spouse is her origin and her finality; she is his complement in the inessential mode. Thus, she appears a privileged prey. She is nature raised to the transparency of consciousness; she is a naturally submissive consciousness. And therein lies the marvelous hope that man has often placed in woman: he hopes to accomplish himself as being through carnally possessing a being while making confirmed in his freedom by a docile freedom. No man would consent to being a woman, but all want there to be women. “Thank God for creating woman.” “Nature is good because it gave men woman.” In these and other similar phrases, man once more asserts arrogantly and naively that his presence in this world is an inevitable fact and a right, that of woman is a simple accident—but a fortunate one. Appearing as the Other, woman appears at the same time as a plenitude of being by opposition to the nothingness of existence that man experiences in itself; the Other, posited as object in the subject’s eyes, is posited as in-itself, thus as being. Woman embodies positively the lack the existent carries in his heart, and man hopes to realize himself by finding himself through her.