The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  In fact, it is not really a question of a new start; she discovers no goals in the world toward which she could project herself in a free and effective movement. Her agitation is more eccentric, incoherent, and useless because it only serves as symbolic compensation for past errors and failures. Among other things and before it is too late, the woman will try to realize all her childhood and adolescent desires: this one goes back to the piano, that one begins to sculpt, to write, to travel; she takes up skiing, foreign languages. She welcomes everything she had refused until then—again before it is too late. She admits her repugnance for a husband she had previously tolerated, and she becomes frigid in his arms; or by contrast, she abandons herself to the passions she repressed; she overwhelms the husband with her demands; she goes back to practicing masturbation, which she had given up since childhood. Her homosexual tendencies—which are latent in almost all women—come out. The subject often carries them over to her daughter; but sometimes unusual feelings arise for a woman friend. In his work Sex, Life, and Faith, Rom Landau tells the following story, confided to him by the person herself:

  Mrs. X., a woman in the late forties, married for over twenty-five years, mother of three grown-up children, occupied a prominent position in … the social and charitable activities of the town in which she lived. Mrs. X. met a woman in London some ten years her junior who, like herself, was a leading social worker. The two … became friends. Miss Y. invited Mrs. X. to stay as her guest during her next visit to London, and Mrs. X.… accepted. During the second evening of her visit—Mrs. X. assured me repeatedly that she had not the least idea how it happened—she suddenly found herself passionately embracing her hostess, and subsequently she spent the whole night with her … she was terrified … and left London the same day … Never in her life had she read or heard anything about homosexuality and had had no idea that “such things” existed … she could do nothing to stifle her ever-growing feelings for Miss Y.… For the first time in her life she found [her husband’s] caresses unwelcome, even his routine kiss … Finally, she decided to revisit Miss Y. and “clear up” the situation … she only found herself more deeply involved in it; … to be with her filled her with a delight that she had never experienced before … she was troubled by a profound sin-consciousness, and was anxious to discover whether there was a “scientific explanation” of her state and any moral justification for it.

  In this case, the subject gave in to a spontaneous drive and was herself deeply disconcerted by it. But often the woman deliberately seeks to live the romances she has not experienced and that soon she will no longer be able to experience. She leaves her home, both because it seems unworthy of her and because she desires solitude as well as the chance to seek adventure. If she finds it, she throws herself into it greedily. Thus, in this story by Stekel:

  Mrs. B.Z. was forty years old, had three children and twenty years of married life behind her when she began to think she was misunderstood, that she had wasted her life; she took up various new activities among which was going skiing in the mountains; there she met a thirty-year-old man and became his mistress; but soon after, he fell in love with Mrs. B.Z.’s daughter … she agreed to their marriage so as to keep her lover near her; there was an unacknowledged but very strong homosexual love between mother and daughter, which partially explains this decision. Nevertheless, the situation soon became intolerable, the lover sometimes leaving the mother’s bed during the night to be with the daughter. Mrs. B.Z.… attempted suicide. It was then—she was forty-six—that she was treated by Stekel. She decided to break it off and while her daughter gave up her marriage plans Mrs. B.Z.… then became an exemplary wife and fell into piousness.

  A woman influenced by a tradition of decency and honesty does not always follow through with action. But her dreams are peopled with erotic fantasies that she calls up during waking hours as well; she manifests an exalted and sensual tenderness to her children; she cultivates incestuous obsessions with her son; she secretly falls in love with one young man after another; like an adolescent girl, she is haunted by ideas of rape; she also feels the attraction of prostitution; the ambivalence of her desires and fears produces an anxiety that sometimes leads to neuroses: she scandalizes her family and friends by bizarre behavior that in fact merely expresses her imaginary life.

  The boundary between the imaginary and the real is even less distinct in this troubled period than during puberty. One of the most salient characteristics in the aging woman is the feeling of depersonalization that makes her lose all objective landmarks. People in good health who have come close to death also say they have felt a curious impression of doubling; when one feels oneself to be consciousness, activity, and freedom, the passive object affected by fate seems necessarily like another: I am not the one run over by a car; I am not the old woman the mirror shows me. The woman who “never felt so young” and who never saw herself so old is not able to reconcile these two aspects of herself; time passes and diminishes her in dreams. So reality fades and becomes less important: likewise, she can no longer tell herself apart from the illusion. The woman relies on interior proof rather than on this strange world where time proceeds in reverse, where her double no longer resembles her, where events have betrayed her. She is thus inclined to ecstasies, visions, and deliriums. And since love is even more than ever her essential preoccupation, it is understandable that she lets herself go to the illusion that she is loved. Nine out of ten erotomaniacs are women; and they are almost all between forty and fifty years old.

  However, not everyone is able to cross over the wall of reality so boldly. Deprived of all human love, even in their dreams, many women seek relief in God; the flirt, the lover, and the dissolute become pious around menopause. The vague ideas of destiny, secrecy, and misunderstood personality of woman in her autumn years find a rational unity in religion. The devotee considers her wasted life as a test sent by the Lord; in her unhappiness, her soul has drawn exceptional advantages from misfortune, making her worthy of being visited by the grace of God; she will readily believe that heaven sends her illuminations or even—like Mme Krüdener—that it imperiously entrusts her with a mission. As she has more or less lost the sense of reality during this crisis, the woman is open to any suggestion: any spiritual guide is in a strong position to wield power over her soul. She will also enthusiastically accept more questionable authorities; she is an obvious prey for religious sects, spirits, prophets, faith healers, and any charlatan. Not only has she lost all critical sense by losing contact with the given world, but she is also desperate for a definitive truth: she has to have the remedy, the formula, the key, that will suddenly save her by saving the universe. She scorns more than ever a logic that obviously could not possibly apply to her own case; the only arguments that seem convincing to her are those that are particularly destined for her: revelations, inspirations, messages, signs, or even miracles begin to appear around her. Her discoveries sometimes draw her into paths of action: she throws herself into schemes, undertakings, and adventures whose idea is whispered to her by some adviser or inner voices. Sometimes, she simply deems herself the holder of the truth and absolute wisdom. Whether she is active or contemplative, her attitude is accompanied by feverish exaltation. The crisis of menopause brutally cuts feminine life into two: it is this discontinuity that gives woman the illusion of a “new life”; it is an other time opening before her: she approaches it with the fervor of a convert; she is converted to love, life, God, art, and humanity: she loses and magnifies herself in these entities. She is dead and resuscitated, she views the earth with a gaze that has pierced the secrets of the beyond, and she thinks she is flying toward uncharted heights.

  Yet the earth does not change; the summits remain out of reach; the messages received—even in blinding clarity—are hard to decipher; the inner lights go out; what remains before the mirror is a woman one day older than yesterday. Doleful hours of depression follow moments of fervor. The body determines this rhythm since a reduction in hormona
l secretions is offset by a hyperactive hypophysis; but it is above all the psychological state that orders this alternation. For the agitation, illusions, and fervor are merely a defense against the inevitability of what has been. Once again, anxiety grabs the throat of the one whose life is already finished, even though death is not imminent. Instead of fighting against despair, she often chooses to intoxicate herself with it. She rehashes grievances, regrets, and recriminations; she imagines that her neighbors and family are engaging in dark machinations; if she has a sister or woman friend of her age who is associated with her life, they may construct persecution fantasies together. But above all she becomes morbidly jealous of her husband: she is jealous of his friends, his sisters, his job; and rightly or wrongly, she accuses some rival of being responsible for all her problems. Cases of pathological jealousy mostly occur between fifty and fifty-five years of age.

  The problems of menopause will last—sometimes until death—if the woman does not decide to let herself grow old; if she does not have any resources other than the use of her charms, she will fight tooth and nail to maintain them; she will also fight with rage if her sex drives remain alive. This is not unusual. Princess Metternich was asked at what age a woman stops being tormented by the flesh. “I don’t know,” she said, “I’m only sixty-five.” Marriage, which Montaigne thought provided “little relief” for woman, becomes a more and more inadequate solution as a woman gets older; she often pays for the resistance and coldness of her youth in maturity; when she finally begins to experience the fevers of desire, her husband has been resigned to her indifference for a long time: he has found a solution for himself. Stripped of her attraction by habit and time, the wife seldom has the opportunity to awaken the conjugal flame. Vexed, determined to “live her life,” she will have fewer scruples than before—if she ever had any—in taking lovers; but there again they have to let themselves be taken: it is a manhunt. She deploys a thousand ruses: feigning to offer herself, she imposes herself; she uses charm, friendship, and gratitude as traps. It is not only out of a desire for fresh flesh that she goes after young men: they are the only ones from whom she can hope for this disinterested tenderness the adolescent male can sometimes feel for a maternal mistress; she has become aggressive and domineering: Léa is fulfilled by Chéri’s docility as well as by his beauty. Once she reached her forties, Mme de Staël chose pages whom she overwhelmed with her prestige; and a shy man, a novice, is also easier to capture. When seduction and intrigue really prove useless, there is still one resource: paying. The tale of the little knife, popular in the Middle Ages, illustrates these insatiable ogresses’ fate: a young woman, as thanks for her favors, asked each of her lovers for a little knife, which she kept in a cupboard; the day came when the cupboard was full: but it was then that the lovers began to demand from her a little knife after each night of love; the cupboard was soon emptied; all the little knives had been returned: others had to be bought. Some women take a cynical view of the situation: they have had their moment; now it is their turn to “return the little knives.” Money in their eyes can even play the opposite—but equally purifying—role of the one it plays for the courtesan: it changes the male into an instrument and provides woman with the erotic freedom that her young pride used to deny her. But more romantic than lucid, the mistress-benefactress often attempts to buy a mirage of tenderness, admiration, and respect; she even persuades herself that she gives for the pleasure of giving, without being asked: here too a young man is the perfect choice because a woman can pride herself on maternal generosity toward him; and then there is a little of this “mystery” the man also asks of the woman he “helps” so that this crude deal is thus camouflaged as enigma. But it is rare for this bad faith to be moderate for long; the battle of the sexes changes into a duel between exploiter and exploited where woman, disappointed and ridiculed, risks suffering cruel defeats. If she is prudent, she will resign herself to “disarming,” without waiting too long, even if all her passions are not yet spent.

  From the day woman agrees to grow old, her situation changes. Until then, she was still young, determined to fight against an evil that mysteriously made her ugly and deformed her; now she becomes a different being, asexual but complete: an elderly woman. It may be thought that the change-of-life crisis is then finished. But one must not conclude that it will be easy to live from then on. When she has given up the fight against the inevitability of time, another combat opens: she has to keep a place on earth.

  Woman frees herself from her chains in her autumn and winter years; she uses the pretext of her age to escape burdensome chores; she knows her husband too well to let herself still be intimidated by him, she avoids his embraces, she carves out—in friendship, indifference, or hostility—a real life of her own alongside him; if he declines more quickly than she, she takes the lead in the couple. She can also allow herself to disdain fashion and public opinion; she refuses social obligations, diets, and beauty treatment: like Léa, whom Chéri finds liberated from dressmakers, corset makers, and hairdressers, and happily settled down indulging herself in food. As for her children, they are old enough not to need her, they get married, they leave home. Relieved of her duties, she finally discovers her freedom. Unfortunately, every woman’s history repeats the fact we have observed throughout the history of woman: she discovers this freedom when she can find nothing more to do with it. This repetition has nothing coincidental about it: patriarchal society has made all feminine functions servile; woman escapes slavery only when she loses all productivity. At fifty, she is in full possession of her strength, she feels rich in experience; this is the age when man rises to the highest positions, the most important jobs: and as for her, she is forced into retirement. She has only been taught to devote herself, and there is no one who requires her devotion anymore. Useless, unjustified, she contemplates these long years without promise she still has to live and murmurs: “No one needs me!”