The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  Being both arrogant and anxious, the woman is often constantly jealous but wrongly so: Juliette Drouet had pangs of suspicion toward all the women who came near Hugo, only forgetting to fear Léonie Biard, who was his mistress for eight years. When unsure, every woman is a rival and a danger. Love kills friendship insofar as the woman in love encloses herself in the universe of the loved man; jealousy exasperates her solitude, thus constricting her dependence even more. But she finds there recourse against boredom; keeping a husband is work; keeping a lover is a kind of vocation. The woman who, lost in happy adoration, neglected her personal appearance begins to worry about it again the moment she senses a threat. Dressing, caring for her home, or social appearances become moments of combat. Fighting is stimulating activity; as long as she is fairly certain to win, the woman warrior finds a poignant pleasure in it. But the tormented fear of defeat transforms the generously consented gift into a humiliating servitude. The man attacks in defense. Even a proud woman is forced to be gentle and passive; maneuvers, prudence, trickery, smiles, charm, and docility are her best weapons. I still see this young woman whose bell I unexpectedly rang; I had just left her two hours before, badly made up, sloppily dressed, her eyes dull; but now she was waiting for him; when she saw me, she put on her ordinary face again, but for an instant I had the time to see her, prepared for him, her face contracted in fear and hypocrisy, ready for any suffering behind her breezy smile; her hair was carefully coiffed, special makeup brightened her cheeks and lips, and she was dressed up in a sparkling white lace blouse. Party clothes, fighting clothes. The masseuse, beauty consultant, and “aesthetician” know how tragically serious their women clients are about treatments that seem useless; new seductions have to be invented for the lover, she has to become that woman he wishes to meet and possess. But all effort is in vain: she will not resurrect in herself that image of the Other that first attracted him, that might attract him to another. There is the same duplicitous and impossible imperative in the lover as in the husband; he wants his mistress absolutely his and yet another; he wants her to be the answer to his dreams and still be different from anything his imagination could invent, a response to his expectations and an unexpected surprise. This contradiction tears the woman apart and dooms her to failure. She tries to model herself on her lover’s desire; many women who bloomed at the beginning of a love affair that reinforced their narcissism become frightening in their maniacal servility when they feel less loved; obsessed and diminished, they irritate their lover; giving herself blindly to him, the woman loses that dimension of freedom that made her fascinating at first. He was looking for his own reflection in her: but if he finds it too faithful, he becomes bored. One of the misfortunes of the woman in love is that her love itself disfigures her, demolishes her; she is no more than this slave, this servant, this too-docile mirror, this too-faithful echo. When she realizes it, her distress reduces her worth even more; she ends up losing all attraction with her tears, demands, and scenes. An existent is what he does; to be, she has to put her trust in a foreign consciousness and give up doing anything. “I only know how to love,” writes Julie de Lespinasse. I who am only love: this title of a novel is the motto of the woman in love;17 she is only love, and when love is deprived of its object, she is nothing.

  Often she understands her mistake; and so she tries to reaffirm her freedom, to find her alterity; she becomes flirtatious. Desired by other men, she interests her blasé lover again: such is the hackneyed theme of many awful novels, absence is sometimes enough to bring back her prestige; Albertine seems insipid when she is present and docile; from afar she becomes mysterious again, and the jealous Proust appreciates her again. But these maneuvers are delicate; if the man sees through them, they only serve to reveal to him how ridiculous his slave’s servitude is. And even their success can be dangerous: because she is his the lover disdains his mistress, but he is attached to her because she is his; is it disdain or is it attachment that an infidelity will kill? It may be that, vexed, the man turns away from the indifferent one: he wants her free, yes; but he wants her given. She knows this risk: it paralyzes her flirtatiousness. It is almost impossible for a woman in love to play this game skillfully; she is too afraid to be caught in her own trap. And insofar as she still reveres her lover, she is loath to dupe him: How can he remain a god in her eyes? If she wins the match, she destroys her idol; if she loses it, she loses herself. There is no salvation.

  A cautious woman in love—but these words clash—tries to convert the lover’s passion into tenderness, friendship, habit; or she tries to attach him with solid ties: a child or marriage; this desire of marriage haunts many liaisons: it is one of security; the clever mistress takes advantage of the generosity of young love to take out insurance on the future: but when she gives herself over to these speculations, she no longer deserves the name of woman in love. For she madly dreams of securing the lover’s freedom forever, but not of destroying it. And this is why, except in the rare case where free commitment lasts a whole life, love-religion leads to catastrophe. With Mora, Mlle de Lespinasse was lucky enough to tire of him first: she tired of him because she had met Guibert, who in return promptly tired of her. The love between Mme d’Agoult and Liszt died of this implacable dialectic: the passion, vitality, and ambition that made Liszt so easy to love destined him to other loves. The Portuguese nun could only be abandoned. The fire that made D’Annunzio so captivating18 had a price: his infidelity. A rupture can deeply mark a man: but in the end, he has his life as man to live. The abandoned woman is nothing, has nothing. If she is asked “How did you live before?” she cannot even remember. She let fall into ashes the world that was hers to adopt a new land from which she is brutally expelled; she gave up all the values she believed in, broke off her friendships; she finds herself without a roof over her head and the desert all around her. How could she begin a new life when outside her lover there is nothing? She takes refuge in delirious imaginings as in former times in the convent; or if she is too reasonable, there is nothing left but to die: very quickly, like Mlle de Lespinasse, or little by little; the agony can last a long time. When a woman has been devoted to a man body and soul for ten or twenty years, when he has remained firmly on the pedestal where she put him, being abandoned is a crushing catastrophe. “What can I do,” asks this forty-year-old woman, “what can I do if Jacques no longer loves me?” She dressed, fixed her hair, and made herself up meticulously; but her hardened face, already undone, could barely arouse a new love; and she herself, after twenty years spent in the shadow of a man, could she ever love another? There are many years still to live at forty. I still see that other woman who kept her beautiful eyes and noble features in spite of a face swollen with suffering and who let her tears flow down her cheeks in public, blind and deaf, without even realizing it. Now the god is telling another the words invented for her; dethroned queen, she no longer knows if she ever reigned over a true kingdom. If the woman is still young, she has the chance of healing; a new love will heal her; sometimes she will give herself to it with somewhat more reserve, realizing that what is not unique cannot be absolute; but often she will be crushed even more violently than the first time because she will have to redeem herself for her past defeat. The failure of absolute love is a productive ordeal only if the woman is capable of taking herself in hand again; separated from Abélard, Héloïse was not a wreck, because, directing an abbey, she constructed an autonomous existence. Colette’s heroines have too much pride and too many resources to let themselves be broken by an amorous disillusion; Renée Néré is saved by her work. And Sido tells her daughter that she was not too worried about her emotional destiny because she knew that Colette was much more than a woman in love. But there are few crimes that bring worse punishment than this generous mistake: to put one’s self entirely in another’s hands.

  Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms; each lover would then experience himself as himself and as the other; neither would abdicate hi
s transcendence, they would not mutilate themselves; together they would both reveal values and ends in the world. For each of them, love would be the revelation of self through the gift of self and the enrichment of the universe. In his work La connaissance de soi (The Discovery of Self),* Georges Gusdorf summarizes precisely what man demands of love:

  Love reveals us to ourselves by making us come out of ourselves. We affirm ourselves by contact with that which is foreign and complementary to us. Love as a form of understanding discovers new heavens and new earths even in the very landscape where we have always lived. Here is the great secret: the world is other, I myself am other. And I am no longer alone in knowing it. Even better: someone taught me this. Woman therefore plays an indispensable and capital role in the consciousness man has of himself.

  This accounts for the importance the young man gives to love’s apprenticeship;19 we have seen how Stendhal and Malraux marvel at the miracle that “I myself am another.” But Gusdorf is wrong to write “and in the same way man represents for the woman an indispensable intermediary of herself to herself,” because today her situation is not the same; man is revealed in the guise of another, but he remains himself, and his new face is integrated into the whole of his personality. It would only be the same for woman if she also existed essentially for-herself; this would imply that she possessed an economic independence, that she projected herself toward her own ends and surpassed herself without intermediary toward the group. Thus equal loves are possible, such as the one Malraux describes between Kyo and May. It can even happen that the woman plays the virile and dominating role like Mme de Warens with Rousseau, Léa with Chéri. But in most cases, the woman knows herself only as other: her for-others merges with her very being; love is not for her an intermediary between self and self, because she does not find herself in her subjective existence; she remains engulfed in this loving woman that man has not only revealed but also created; her salvation depends on this despotic freedom that formed her and can destroy her in an instant. She spends her life trembling in fear of the one who holds her destiny in his hands without completely realizing it and without completely wanting it; she is in danger in an other, an anguished and powerless witness of her own destiny. Tyrant and executioner in spite of himself, this other wears the face of the enemy in spite of her and himself: instead of the sought-after union, the woman in love experiences the bitterest of solitudes; instead of complicity, struggle and often hate. Love, for the woman, is a supreme attempt to overcome the dependence to which she is condemned by assuming it; but even consented to, dependence can only be lived in fear and servility. Men have rivaled each other proclaiming that love is a woman’s supreme accomplishment. “A woman who loves like a woman becomes a more perfect woman,” says Nietzsche; and Balzac: “In the higher order, man’s life is glory, woman’s is love. Woman is equal to man only in making her life a perpetual offering, as his is perpetual action.” But there again is a cruel mystification since what she offers, he cares not at all to accept. Man does not need the unconditional devotion he demands, nor the idolatrous love that flatters his vanity; he only accepts them on the condition that he does not satisfy the demands these attitudes reciprocally imply. He preaches to the woman about giving: and her gifts exasperate him; she finds herself disconcerted by her useless gifts, disconcerted by her vain existence. The day when it will be possible for the woman to love in her strength and not in her weakness, not to escape from herself but to find herself, not out of resignation but to affirm herself, love will become for her as for man the source of life and not a mortal danger. For the time being, love epitomizes in its most moving form the curse that weighs on woman trapped in the feminine universe, the mutilated woman, incapable of being self-sufficient. Innumerable martyrs to love attest to the injustice of a destiny that offers them as ultimate salvation a sterile hell.

  1. Nietzsche’s emphasis.

  2. Also Nietzsche’s emphasis.

  3. Pierre Janet, Obsessions and Psychasthenia.

  * Translated by Beverley Bie Brahic.—TRANS.

  † Colette, The Vagabond.—TRANS.

  4. Mary Webb, The House in Dormer Forest.

  5. Isadora Duncan, My Life.

  6. See, among others, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Through Mellors, Lawrence expresses his horror of women who make him a tool of pleasure.

  7. It is, among others, H. Deutsch’s theory in Psychology of Women.

  8. Cf. Sartre, Being and Nothingness.

  9. That Albertine is an Albert does not change anything; Proust’s attitude here is in any case the masculine attitude.

  10. Je hais les dormeurs (I Hate Sleepers).

  11. The Gay Science.

  12. I have tried to show this in Pyrrhus et Cinéas.

  13. The case is different if the wife has found her autonomy in the marriage; in such a case, love between the two spouses can be a free exchange of two self-sufficient beings.

  14. Fanny Hurst, Back Street.

  15. Rosamond Lehmann, The Weather in the Streets.

  16. This comes to the fore, for example, in Lagache’s work The Nature and Forms of Jealousy. [The correct title of Lagache’s book is La jalousie amoreuse—Jealousy in Love.—TRANS.]

  17. Dominique Rolin, Moi qui ne suis qu’amour.

  18. According to Isadora Duncan.

  * The correct title of the work is La découverte de soi.—TRANS.

  19. See Volume I.

  | CHAPTER 13 |

  The Mystic

  Love has been assigned to woman as her supreme vocation, and when she addresses it to a man, she is seeking God in him: if circumstances deny her human love, if she is disappointed or demanding, she will choose to worship the divinity in God himself. It is true that there are also men who have burned with this flame; but they are rare, and their fervor has been of a highly refined intellectual form. Women, though, who abandon themselves to the delights of celestial marriages are legion: and they experience them in a strangely affective way. Women are accustomed to living on their knees; normally, they expect their salvation to descend from heaven, where males reign; men too are enveloped in clouds: their majesty is revealed from beyond the veils of their bodily presence. The Beloved is always more or less absent; he communicates with her, his worshipper, in ambiguous signs; she only knows his heart by an act of faith; and the more superior to her he seems, the more impenetrable his behavior seems to her. We have seen that in erotomania this faith resisted all refutations. A woman does not need to see or touch to feel the Presence at her side. Whether it be a doctor, a priest, or God, she will find the same incontestable proof; she will welcome as a slave the waves of a love that falls from on high into her heart. Human love and divine love melt into one not because the latter is a sublimation of the former but because the former is also a movement toward a transcendent, toward the absolute. In any case, the woman in love has to save her contingent existence by uniting with the Whole incarnated in a sovereign Person.