The Second Sex

Although the future frightens her, the present dissatisfies her; she hesitates to become woman; she frets at still being only a child; she has already left her past; she is not yet committed to a new life. She is occupied, but she does not do anything; because she does not do anything, she has nothing, she is nothing. She tries to fill this void by playacting and mystifications. She is criticized for being devious, a liar, and troublesome. The truth is she is doomed to secrets and lies. At sixteen, a woman has already gone through disturbing experiences: puberty, menstrual periods, awakening of sexuality, first arousals, first passions, fears, disgust, and ambiguous experiences: she has hidden all these things in her heart; she has learned to guard her secrets preciously. The mere fact of having to hide her sanitary napkins and of concealing her periods inclines her to lies.

The eternal feminine” corresponds to “the black soul” or “the Jewish character.” However, the Jewish problem on the whole is very different from the two others: for the anti-Semite, the Jew is more an enemy than an inferior, and no place on this earth is recognized as his own; it would be preferable to see him annihilated. But there are deep analogies between the situations of women and blacks: both are liberated today from the same paternalism, and the former master caste wants to keep them “in their place,” that is, the place chosen for them; in both cases, they praise, more or less sincerely, the virtues of the “good black,” the carefree, childlike, merry soul of the resigned black, and the woman who is a “true woman”—frivolous, infantile, irresponsible, the woman subjugated to man.

To a reader of this new translation—a young feminist perhaps, for whom the very title may seem as quaint as a pair of bloomers—I would suggest that the best way to appreciate The Second Sex is to read it in the spirit it was written: as a deep and urgent personal meditation on a true hope that, as she will probably discover, is still elusive for many of us: to become, in every sense, one’s own woman.

One is not born, but rather becomes, woman

The Second Sex has been called a “feminist bible,”

In parthenogenesis, the virgin egg develops in embryonic form without male intervention. The male plays no role or only a secondary one: unfertilized honeybee eggs subdivide and produce drones; in the case of aphids, males are absent for a number of generations, and the unfertilized eggs produce females.

Males and females are two types of individuals who are differentiated within one species for the purposes of reproduction; they can be defined only correlatively. But it has to be pointed out first that the very meaning of division of the species into two sexes is not clear.

Woman is losing herself, woman is lost.”

The article by Michel Carrouges on this theme in Cahiers du Sud, no. 292, is significant. He writes with indignation: “If only there were no feminine myth but only bands of cooks, matrons, prostitutes, and bluestockings with functions of pleasure or utility!” So, according to him, woman has no existence for herself; he only takes into account her function in the male world. Her finality is in man; in fact, it is possible to prefer her poetic “function” to all others. The exact question is why she should be defined in relation to the man.

For example, man declares that he does not find his wife in any way diminished just because she does not have a profession: work in the home is just as noble and so on. Yet at the first argument he remonstrates, “You wouldn’t be able to earn a living without me.”