THE SECOND SEX. SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR. 1949



Let the radical education commence! The Second Sex came out in 1949, well before the other texts I’ll be looking at, which are mostly from the 70s and 80s. Still, it seems to belong to the second wave, since the first wave had already achieved their goal of women's suffrage at the time de Beauvoir wrote. De Beauvoir wanted more than the vote. She wrote to explain the mechanisms of women’s subordination—for she thought women’s inferior status was not inevitable or innate, but caused by their situation—and her analysis might be seen as the first paving stone in the long and winding path of feminist theory. Let’s take off our hats, then, and respectfully explore The Second Sex.

The Second Sex is exceedingly long. It is 782 pages, in fact. I have skipped over a great deal, including generalisations of women’s lives that I feel are no longer accurate, and de Beauvoir’s existential philosophy, which I disagree with and feel is unnecessary in reconstructing her best arguments. I have tried to extract some of the insights that are both central to her work, and relevant for our feminist education. (All quotes are from the book1). I’m going to make my way through her work in sections:

  1. The Conceptual Binary of Man/Woman
  2. Reproductive Biology

  3. Women as a Class
  4. History
  5. Mythology
  6. Emotional Service
  7. Girls’ Upbringing

  8. Meaning and Purpose in Women’s Lives
  9. Conclusions

1. THE CONCEPTUAL BINARY OF MAN/WOMAN men are human, women are female

“The definitions ‘the man is a male human being, the woman is a female human being’ were asymmetrically mutilated; psychoanalysts in particular define man as a human being but woman as a female: every time she acts like a human being, she is said to be imitating the male.” (p61)


In the Second Sex, Simone De Beauvoir sets out to discover why women have always, historically, been subordinated. She refuses explanations based on the innate character of women, insisting that the “eternal feminine” has never existed and that women’s characters are determined by their situations. She examines material and cultural factors to discover how women’s domination by men came about, and how this state of affairs is perpetuated.

A central thread in her work is the concept of woman as the Other (this is perhaps the one existentialist concept we might recognise and find useful today). De Beauvoir thinks humans have a psychological tendency to think in a Self-Other binary. The two statuses are reciprocal—I see myself as Self and I see you as the Other. For you these positions are of course reversed. But according to de Beauvoir, between men and women there is no reciprocity, no acknowledgement of women’s status as Self. In every culture, men are the positive and the neutral in a distorted dichotomy in which women are only the negative. Men are human, women are female. Men are essential, primary, complete in themselves. Women are additional, secondary, complementary to men. Men have never acknowledged that women are also Self or that we also experience them as Other; they persistently and in bad faith replace our perspectives with their own meaning, needs and intentions. Women’s freedom, then, necessitates that we assert ourselves as full human subjects, and demand that men recognise us as peers.

Is Simone overstating things? Men’s cultural domination may have been more absolute in 1949 than it is today. Today, many men do treat women as peers. But our viewpoints are still frequently ignored or overruled by men’s ideas about us, and many well-meaning men have never been forced to consider their reciprocal “Otherness”—women and men alike still treat men as the default, though we don’t often realise it. (Caroline Criado-Perez’s Invisible Women2 is a revelation on man’s ongoing status as the default human, and what this means for women.)

De Beauvoir decides that men’s material interest in continuing inequality renders them unfit to write impartially about women. Therefore she, de Beauvoir, will do so. She seeks the facts that can explain women’s oppression in biology, economics, history, culture, and upbringing.

2. REPRODUCTIVE BIOLOGY anatomy isn’t destiny, but it matters—a lot

“Certain differences between man and woman will always exist… her relation to her body, to the male body and to the child will never be the same as those man has with his body, with the female body, and with the child.” (p782)

De Beauvoir explains that in all sexually reproducing species, individuals are subservient to the needs of the species. Reproduction is often costly and sometimes fatal to the individual. It’s a good thing we are not bees, because bee reproduction sounds quite dreadful. De Beauvoir writes that human women are heavily burdened by their reproductive role; they are penetrated and then grow an alien life form within them, and later feed their offspring from their own bodies. Women are smaller and weaker than men, and they experience menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation, all of which are physically costly. Men, on the other hand, are relatively free to pursue personal projects without regards to the good of the species, since the male reproductive role—insemination—hardly interferes with a man’s life, his body, or his freedom.

It was interesting for me to be reminded how inconvenient menstruation must have been before modern products were invented. It’s worth noting that even in modern times, periods still keep girls out of school in some countries. I like that de Beauvoir doesn’t downplay how personally and physically costly women’s reproductive role can be—even for those who want to become mothers. Many women seem to think they need to downplay the physical differences between men and women in order to argue for equality or to extract respect from men, but I think this shortchanges us.

“The woman’s body is one of the essential elements of the situation she occupies in this world.” (p49)

De Beauvoir writes that the facts of physical sex are crucially important to women, because each of us experiences and understands the worlds through our bodies. But anatomy is not destiny! Society could be arranged either to lighten women’s physical and reproductive burdens, or to exacerbate them. De Beauvoir contends that men have done the latter, and that this seriously limits women’s ability to participate in public life and pursue their other projects. She says that men justify these arrangements with the excuse that they are “natural”. This is a lie; sexual difference is natural, but society is malleable. Women’s freedom could be greatly enhanced with contraception, abortion, paid maternity leave, childcare, and other solutions.

“Men universally forbid abortion; but they accept it individually as a convenient solution; they can contradict themselves with dizzying cynicism; but woman feels the contradictions in her wounded flesh.”(p545)

De Beauvoir believes there are few subjects on which society is more hypocritical than abortion, and calls men’s arguments on the topic a “monument of bad faith” (p539). She says those people who find the unborn foetus so worthy of life have no interest in it after it is born, and they have little use for the sanctity of life when they send men to war. Instead, the motivation must be found in the “masculine sadism” that refuses any relief of women’s hardships. De Beauvoir says making abortion illegal simply ensures illegal abortions, since no punishment will suffice to prevent women seeking them. She says many men condemn abortion but will hypocritically make exceptions for their lovers if they don’t want to marry them or provide financial support. Such men exalt motherhood and new life as long as it hampers women’s freedoms. When their own freedom is under threat, they will find abortions suddenly justifiable, and even pressure their lover to have one. “In an instant, the man, to keep his freedom and not to handicap his future, in the interest of his job, asks the woman to renounce her female triumph. The child is no longer a priceless treasure: giving birth is no longer a sacred function.” (p545)

Seventy years later, I feel the anti-abortion position is just as hypocritical as it ever was. Very few people who claim the sanctity of life are equally desperate to protect and save the lives of the already-born no matter the cost to other individuals. Many of us could think of one or two anti-choice politicians who chose abortion for their mistresses without any moral agony. I feel “male sadism” is an inadequate explanation, however. Certainly, a profound lack of empathy seems a necessary condition for obliging women to go through unwanted pregnancy and childbirth. But I believe in the USA, for example, politicians have promoted this issue in a cynical bid to distract voters from other issues that could unite them, such as economic inequality. Some people are anti-abortion because they believe this is required by religious piety. Others—men and women both—would perhaps prefer a return to old fashioned roles and rules because they derive feelings of personal worth from fulfilling them.

3. WOMEN AS A CLASS Marxism and the historical materialist explanation of women’s status

The historical materialists, Marx and Engels, have given a little thought to the causes of women’s subordination, and de Beauvoir examines their explanations. Engels thought women’s status is linked to their productive capacities—that is, their ability to work. In hunter gatherer societies, women’s strength was adequate to their share of the work, so they were more or less equal with men. With the invention of farming, techniques and tools like the plough were invented that required men’s strength to operate, so women’s relative productive capacity dropped. This, together with the invention of private property, inspired men to enslave other men to take advantage of their labour, and to enslave women as domestic workers. With industrialisation and the invention of machines, women are once again strong enough to do most work (we can push buttons as well as anyone!), and as soon as we get rid of the last vestiges of capitalist culture and consciousness, Engels thinks women will be equal with men again, as workers. De Beauvoir appreciates Engel’s insights and the historical materialist method of analysis generally. But she objects that women are not merely small workers. Our reproductive capacities are as economically and personally important as our productive capacities. If class were abolished, sex differences would still matter. And it is by no means clear that women would be better off if their reproductive capacities were controlled by the state instead of by husbands.

We should stop and reflect for a moment. Although this section is short, it is hugely important. Understanding women as a sex-based class was a major breakthrough in feminist theory, and it forms a core component of second wave thinking. It’s a shame that modern feminism seems to have returned to an atomistic focus on individual choices and preferences. This “structural blindness” makes it near impossible to identify remaining sex based injustices, let alone describe their causes. Bring back class politics!

4. HISTORY keeping women down since forever

“It is when woman is probably the most emancipated that the inferiority of her sex is proclaimed.” (p105)

De Beauvoir overwhelms the reader with historical examples of societies in which women’s legal rights and economic opportunities were restricted. Women were passed as property from father to husband, children were the father’s property, assets were held and controlled by the men, women had limited economic and legal rights, and men controlled law and wrote culture. De Beauvoir say women's freedom is assailed from two directions: even when women have more legal rights, cultural expectations intensify and they cannot find concrete economic opportunities outside the home. 
Perhaps a good example from after de Beauvoir’s time is the mass return of middle class women to the domestic sphere after the second world war in America, as described in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique3. Women had worked during the war, and many attained university educations. They were not legally forced into the home. Rather, men took back the jobs, women’s economic opportunities shrivelled, and a new cultural exaltation of homemaking arose. An economic-cultural pincer manoeuvre, as it were.

De Beauvoir argues that the invention of marriage required the invention of prostitution. Chaste, monogamous wives were necessary to produce heirs and ensure men didn’t accidentally bequeath their property to someone else's offspring. Prostitutes were to be used for whatever sexual demands couldn’t be met by wives, and to allow men to act out their most depraved and violent desires with impunity. De Beauvoir gives examples from her time of prostitutes being thrown into rivers by university students in the winter, or dumped, naked, in the countryside by buyers. She notes that many women and girls are coerced or manipulated into prostitution: they turn to prostitution as an escape from exploitation as household servants; they continue into prostitution after an early, non-consensual sexual experience makes unwanted sex seem normal to them; their families, husbands or boyfriends force or pressure them into it; they begin because they urgently need cash. But even if they intend to do it only briefly in order to alleviate a temporary financial crisis, women often find themselves controlled, abused, penniless and trapped. But de Beauvoir reminds us that the ultimate cause of prostitution is men’s demand, plus a world in which unemployment and poverty exist.

Having read testimony from modern prostitutes, I don’t think much has changed. Prostituted women and girls are still manipulated, coerced, and desperate. They enter prostitution because of economic desperation, homelessness, manipulation by family and “boyfriends” who are actually professional groomers. They become trapped by drug addiction, threats of violence, economic coercion, and the grinding down of their psyches by physical, sexual and emotional brutality. They are overwhelmingly more likely to be murdered than any other demographic, to say nothing of other, non-fatal assaults. Men do not merely have sex with prostituted women and girls—they hurt and humiliate them in a creative variety of ways that I am unwilling to recreate using the written word. So it seems that a legally and culturally unprotected underclass of women and girls remains useful to satisfy men’s sadism. Of course I don’t mean all men. I mean just enough men to ensure a massive global industry that today contributes significantly to many countries’ economies.



Back to de Beauvoir. She says that although that women’s situation has improved thanks to contraception and participation in paid work, their rights are still slow to accumulate. She argues that women, more than other oppressed groups, have had trouble developing class consciousness, partly because we cannot remember women's freedom before male domination; there is no untouched, male-free women's culture or history to look back on which could illuminate the wrongness of our current situation. In addition, women are “dispersed” amongst men and have closer relationships with fathers and husbands than with other women. They have conflicting class interests, and are not practised at doing politics or advocating for themselves. Finally, as long as society seems hostile to women's independence and success, parents will teach their daughters to expect, hope and prepare for a man to marry and look after them. This is one of the most dangerous obstacles to full equality. “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.” (p159) De Beauvoir points out that women are more complicit in their oppression than any other subordinated group, because they live and make families with men, and benefit from their support in a hostile world.


This is still true, as far as I can tell. Many men and women strive to maintain either traditional or updated gender roles, maybe because they derive some feeling of personal and social value from them, or because they are so familiar as to seem inevitable? Some women today play their expected gender role reluctantly, others enthusiastically. Some defend their performance of femininity as “feminist” or “empowering”, since these words have been diluted to mean any choice a woman makes that she feels good about. If there were no benefit to conformity, no “carrot” to complement the “stick” of patriarchy, male domination would be less stable, I think.

5. MYTHOLOGY femininity and other nonsense that we project onto women

“If the definition given is contradicted by the behaviour of real flesh-and-blood women, it is women who are wrong: it is said not that Femininity is an entity but that women are not feminine: Experiential denials cannot do anything against myth.” (275)

Material factors alone cannot explain women’s subordinate position, since society could have been arranged to lighten her burden and promote her freedom. But it has not. This can only be explained by our values, and de Beauvoir believes values come from the philosophical and psychological tendencies of mankind. She writes that man wants to define himself in comparison with the Other. But the Other can’t be something unconscious and indifferent, like nature. Nor can it be a peer, another man, who makes reciprocal demands on him. Woman is perfect because she is conscious, not indifferent, does not demand reciprocity like other men, and “it seems possible to possess her in the flesh.” Having established woman as the Other, man attaches meaning and symbolism to her.

I’m not an existentialist, and I’m not convinced this explanation of man’s psychological tendencies is correct, but it is undeniable that womanhood attracts a great deal of myth and symbolism. Manhood does, too, in my experience, but De Beauvoir never examines this. Read Michael Kimmel’s Manhood in America4 if you’re interested in a partial history of the shifting mythology of masculinity.

De Beauvoir explains that the mythology of womanhood is difficult to describe, because it is contradictory, serving different needs at different times: “He projects onto her what he desires and fears, what he loves and what he hates.” (p219-220) It is a matter of personal psychology which aspect of the myth any individual man is drawn to. De Beauvoir says women are variously associated with life and death, purity and sin, innocence and scheming. They are nature, flesh, immanence, emotion, where man is culture, spirit, mind, and intellect. The fact that woman gives birth ties her symbolically to nature, and to death, since it is our physical birth into a body of flesh that entails our mortality. Men’s sexual desire for women makes obvious their own fleshly existence and animal nature. Furthermore, Christianity introduces the connection between sin and the flesh. These associations cause fear and hatred of women, especially their sexuality.

De Beauvoir suggests that men aren’t subject to the same requirements of youth and beauty as women, because “normal men do not experience other men as flesh; he has only an abstract solidarity with these autonomous and foreign bodies,” (p184) whereas woman, who exists for man, should disguise all signs of age and mortality. Ideals of female beauty are designed to impose physical limitations on women: “The Chinese woman with bound feet could barely walk, the Hollywood star’s painted nails deprived her of her hands; high heels, corsets, hoops, farthingales and crinolines were meant less to accentuate the woman’s body’s curves than to increase the body’s powerlessness.” (p182) De Beauvoir also examines a few specific authors’ depictions of women. Some of their mythological Woman figures are charming and delightful, others despicable and inferior. Regardless of the exact archetype, however, Woman still exists for man: “The only earthly destiny reserved to the woman equal, child-woman, soul sister, woman-sex and female animal is always man.” (p273)

I think some of these associations have lost a little of their vividness in recent years, but they are by no means forgotten, and I don’t think they have been replaced with something better. Rather, I think that the sexual objectification of women dominates our media environment so completely that little space remains for other myths. A cultural survey would be needed to explore all our current associations with womanhood, but I believe a quick glance at ordinary media would suffice to demonstrate the ubiquity of woman’s portrayal as a sexual object for the pleasure of men. You can’t go out in public or consume media in the privacy of your home without seeing sexually objectified women (or female body parts) being used to sell things or pretty up films. Women are so underrepresented in film that humorous tests exist—like the Bechdel test or the Sexy Lampshade test—that set the bar for women’s representation in film hilariously, impossibly low… and yet many films don’t meet even these sarcastic non-standards. There are, of course, women characters who do more: politics, blowing things up. But just ask yourself how often they are allowed to do this instead of being sex objects and love interests, and how often they are merely permitted to do them them as well.

6. EMOTIONAL SERVICE ego rescue and attention owed

“What an alibi scorn is when it wallows in itself!…. It is sufficient for him to denounce their foolishness to believe he is intelligent, to denounce their cowardice to believe himself brave.” (p230)

De Beauvoir looks at some of the emotional services that Woman, as a mythological other, provides for men. Some men, frightened to compete with other men, revile women in order to shore up their self esteem. A man who doesn’t want to risk comparison with other men can establish his status simply by abhorring women as stupid, weak, immoral, worthless, or whatever. The high status man doesn’t need to posit woman as worthless. He can afford to show everyone respect. But a man of low status needs women to be even lower: “He intends to trample in her the ever possible proof of his own insufficiency; he asks scorn to save him; woman is the ditch in which he throws all the monsters that inhabit him.” (p272)

Another important role women play for individual men is mirror and audience to their merits. Many a man expects women to reflect his personal worth by giving him attention, praise, admiration, and agreement. A woman must have a little freedom in order to create the illusion that she chooses him and acknowledges his merits (it's less convincing when a slave tells you how splendid you are). The problem is that if women have too much freedom, they may use it in an off-label manner: “the hero’s wife listens to his exploits indifferently. The muse yawns, listening to the verses of the poet who dreams of her. Out of boredom, the amazon can refuse combat; and she can also emerge victorious…here is the ransom man pays for having posited himself in bad faith as the sole essential.” (p214)

I think this bad faith expectation is still recognisable in some men today, as is the inferiority complex that seeks relief in scorn. Consider modern “incels”. These self-declared low status men are perpetually enraged because they feel ignored and unnoticed by beautiful women. Then there are “nice guys”; men who think a brief and superficial display of feministy chivalry should be enough to impress the pants off women, but who quickly drop the facade and devolve into apoplectic tantrums when rejected. These men flock together online to share their fury at their unjustly neglected “needs”, and to rail against beautiful women and high-status men. Decent men who see women as peers may be disappointed when they are rejected, but they do not feel shocked and betrayed, or respond with self-righteous vitriol and violence. Incels and “nice guys”, however, behave as though they have fulfilled their part of a bargain that women as a class have agreed to (we haven’t) and that individual women must honour (nope). When women don’t meet their unreasonable expectations, they correct the women and not the expectations. For a treatment of the emotional contract that such men think we have entered into with them, read Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny.5

According to de Beauvoir, another ego service women serve is to display their husbands’ status: “In bourgeois society, one of woman’s assigned roles is to represent: her beauty, her charm, her intelligence and her elegance are outward signs of her husband’s fortune, as is the body of his car. If her is rich, he covers her with furs and jewels. If he is poorer, her boasts of her moral qualities and her housekeeping talents.” (p199) I take it my readers are familiar with the concept of trophy wives, so seventy years later this isn’t completely out of date.

Lastly, De Beauvoir says that two myths have special utility for man. Firstly, Woman as nature gives man an excuse not to create a society that alleviates women’s physiological burden (and in fact to increase it) because that is what nature has intended for them. Thus do manmade injustices masquerade as inevitable. Secondly, Woman as mystery gives men a cover for ignorance; when women are unknowable, there is no reciprocity, and no need for empathy and understanding.

7. GIRLS’ UPBRINGING crushing ambition and encouraging complicity

“Most little girls feel the same indignation and despair when they learn that the accidental conformation of their bodies condemns their tastes and aspirations… the future woman naturally feels indignant about the limitations her sex imposes on her.” (p434)

De Beauvoir spends the remainder of the book looking at girls’ upbringing and women’s lives, as well as the ways in which women seek freedom and meaning despite being trapped in unfulfilling roles. Her work seems specific to middle class housewives, and is sometimes outdated, but there are nevertheless useful insights to extract.

De Beauvoir writes that boys are trained from a young age to be independent. Although painful, this sets them up for a future with more opportunities. Girls, meanwhile, are prevented from climbing, roughhousing, and other physical forms of play and exploration, and this lack creates physical and emotional timidity in them as adults. Girls learn from a young age that history and culture has been created by men, that their future as women will be seriously limited, and that their destiny is to chosen, loved and married by a man. They are encouraged to make themselves pretty and pleasing. They internalise a male perspective of themselves, learning to see themselves as objects. A woman who says she dresses up solely for herself is mistaken, but it would also be a simplification to say women dress up only to please men: “she does not separate man’s desire from the love of her own self.” (p361) By cherishing her appearance, she attempts to reconcile the fact that she spontaneously understands herself as a subject, but is also required to become the object of men’s desires. As their ambitions are discouraged by society, girls are simultaneously tempted with the consolations of being a valuable object—masculine protection, support, and admiration are presented to girls as desirable and necessary. Daydreaming of romance, and excessive focus on appearance are not essential feminine traits, but are the result of girls being discouraged from interacting with the world and achieving mastery of it more directly, without a male intermediary.

De Beauvoir thinks we should actively discourage girls from expecting a future of male support, and require them to seek economic independence. We must do away with marriage as a career. Instead it will be a voluntary relationship between equals, capable of being dissolved by either. It will not be necessary either financially or to avoid the shame of children born out of wedlock. I think this is what marriage now resembles for many women and men in more egalitarian countries, but it also seems undeniable that women are still taught to self-objectify, and that a girl growing up today will be aware that her femaleness could still be a significant disadvantage.

“Puberty has a radically different meaning for the two sexes because it does not announce the same future to them.” (p340)


De Beauvoir writes that adolescent girls experience men looking at them (especially at their breasts) as sexual objects. They are also shamed for their periods. Though all humans experience many unpleasant bodily functions, the period is especially reviled because it is not shared by males: “the human body has many other more repugnant servitudes in men and women: they make the best of them because as they are common to all they do not represent a flaw for anyone.” (p340) (Ah, Simone, happily you lived before the internet and have therefore not had the displeasure of encountering a certain variety of man who is appalled that women are not more like sex dolls, and who is devastated that they, like him, eat burgers and shit in the woods). And though puberty is awkward and distressing for both boys and girls, it is more devastating for girls who justifiable do not want to become women in a sexist society. De Beauvoir also notes that many girls self-harm, and many experience sexual abuse by family friends.

What a grim reminder that things have not changed enough in seventy years. They have changed in some ways, though. I believe girls are now encouraged fairly equally in sport and in school. However, as de Beauvoir noted, girls who are given an education are not exempt from achieving femininity. It is not enough to be human and successful; they must become pretty and pleasing to men, as well. Furthermore, sexual harassment and objectification of adolescent girls are absolutely very common and remain a considerable source of distress for them (and for adult women). Also, given the rising accessibility, ubiquity and normalisation of violent and degrading pornography, I wonder whether adolescence announces a more frightening and unpleasant future to girls today than it did just a few decades ago?

8. MEANING AND PURPOSE IN WOMEN’S LIVES love, devotion, looks… what did I miss?


“The woman feels endowed with a sure and high value; at last she has the right to cherish herself through the love she inspires.” (p703)

De Beauvoir says women are taught that love and devotion to husband and children can justify them and give their lives meaning. But it can’t; we need projects of our own. Dedicating one’s self to another not only fails to justify a woman’s existence, it also places her in a very precarious position. Selfless devotion eventually bores and exasperates her lover or husband: “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.” (p724)

As I said above, I think we see more portrayals of successful working women these days, but we rarely see women who are exempt from the expectations of beauty or the heterosexual destiny of the love story. And mothers continue to share their stories (often anonymously, online) about how they feel expected to sacrifice themselves limitlessly for their families, and how they feel too guilty to get their own needs met.

“If the toilette has so much importance for many women, it is because they are under the illusion that it provides them both with the world and their own self.” (p590)

Some women try to find meaning and justification in attending to their appearance. De Beauvoir writes that they mistake beauty and dressing up as a kind of work that can express their individuality. But men aren’t expected to express their character through their clothing. Women’s clothing objectifies them: impractical and revealing, it hinders their movements and delivers their bodies to public view. While being well-dressed does confer value on a woman, it does so only because she is a valuable object, and it is bought with considerable time, effort, and money. A woman who dresses too modestly is criticised just as one who dresses too revealingly, because she refuses to be an object. Although some women claim to dress up just for themselves, they are in fact encouraged from childhood to objectify themselves and incorporate a male perspective into their own. It’s not empowering to base self-worth on one's appearance, since one remains dependent on the validation of other people. “In an indefinite series of appearances, she will never have entirely won”. (p595)

I believe that beauty standards are scarcely less woman-consuming than they were in 1949. True, we no longer wear corsets, and some wonderful and blessed women have made trousers and sneakers fashionable—at least for some women in some contexts. But modern advertising, tv, social media, filters and photoshopping have made images of perfection ubiquitous and inescapable. If anything, girls and women today are likely to experience more intense anguish about their appearance than they did in 1949. Girls are dieting at younger ages than ever. Hardly any women escape feeling some shame about their bodies. The feelings are so brutal, and so internalised, that some women pay for surgeons to cut and alter their flesh in the pursuit of bodily perfection. They insert foreign bodies into their chests to “enhance” healthy and adequate breasts, and even ask doctors to cut and shape their genitals because they incorrectly believe them to be ugly and wrong (thanks again to pornography). It’s not obvious to me that disordered eating and surgery are superior to corsets and hoops. I don’t know what farthingales are, but they sound positively benign next to labioplasty and anorexia.

“When she is productive and active, she regains her transcendence; she affirms herself concretely as subject in her projects.” (p737)

De Beauvoir considers the women who are privileged enough to have good careers outside the home. She believes work is necessary for women’s liberation, though a class revolution is also needed since most workers are still exploited. Women with better professions are on the right track. But they are still required to achieve femininity, and this hinders them because it entails passivity and deference toward men, and onerous efforts at beauty. Neither is especially compatible with professional success. Meanwhile, masculinity is more compatible with men’s humanity. Men’s clothes are practical, and “need not be original; they are hardly part of his personality,” (p740) whereas woman’s clothing is expected to express something about her as an individual.

De Beauvoir doesn’t think women should have to reject femininity entirely. Men and women are sexed beings, and so femininity is part of women’s humanity. Rather, she thinks that femininity must be made less limiting, less costly, more compatible with success. But this can’t be done on the individual level, since every woman stands in some relation of either compliance or rebellion toward existing standards of femininity: “The individual is not free to shape the idea of femininity at will… neutrality is impossible… the adolescent girl often thinks she can simply scorn convention; but by doing so, she is making a statement; she is creating a new situation involving consequences she will have to assume.” (p740) De Beauvoir doesn't say exactly how the transformation of femininity will happen, but one assumes that it will occur gradually, as more women resist. I believe the women who rebel most vigorously against expectations of femininity are likely to pay a heavy social penalty, but they also open up space into which the rest of us can enter with less resistance. Thank goodness for the first women who wore trousers and went to university!


De Beauvoir says that even if a husband accepts that his wife should work and be his equal (in theory), “most of the time, it is still the woman who pays the price for harmony at home. It seems natural to the man that she run the house and oversee the care and raising of the children alone.” I think this may less true today than in previous times, but studies still show that women do most unpaid house work and care work, even if they also have paid employment. They are also more likely to give up their work to look after a child, or sacrifice their job if the couple needs to move cities for his career.

9. CONCLUSION 782 pages! We solved sexism, right?

“Enough ink has flowed over the quarrel about feminism; it is now almost over: let’s not talk about it any more.” (p3)

So we have skimmed the depths of The Second Sex. We have learned that the evidence against a fixed, innate femininity is abundant. Women are shaped by their situation, and our situation forms around our bodies, economics, law, history and culture. A complex tangle of mechanisms contribute to women’s social inferiority. We are unlike any other subordinated group, because we are not unified but dispersed amongst males, across different economic classes, within a male-dominant culture. We are complicit in reinforcing the standards of femininity, through our own efforts to achieve it and also in the way we raise our children. Femininity offers tempting compensations in the form of being admired, loved, and supported by men. But beauty, passivity and dependence on men are dead ends. Women must choose the harder path toward full freedom and participation in society. This will be achieved when we lighten the burdens of reproduction, ensure concrete economic opportunities for women, and make femininity more compatible with work, public life, and personal projects.

It’s 2020. How far have we come, seventy-one years later, toward shaping a society that supports women’s freedom? Many men and women act as though equality has already been achieved, and there is little left for feminists to analyse or correct. They said the same thing in 1949. Simone de Beauvoir disagreed with them, and so do I.

“This denial is not a liberation for those concerned, but an inauthentic flight. Clearly, no woman can claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex.” (p4)

It seems to me that many of the old myths still hold power over us. Although a wider variety of women’s viewpoints are appearing in every form of media, many films, advertisements and other stories portray sexual and romantic relationships with men as women’s primary destiny, and show women servicing men’s emotional needs and playing support roles. Women who refuse to perform such emotional services as ego-stroking are still subject to disapproval and sometimes violence. Women who are ambitious may be subject to more intense scrutiny and impossible double standards whereby their assertiveness is interpreted as more unpleasant and unacceptable than men's, but friendliness is treated as proof they are incompetent and unprofessional.

Although modern femininity allows women to express a wider range of human interests and characteristics, the requirements of beauty are not reduced but intensified: many women feel intense pressure to have impossibly perfect bodies, faces, hair, makeup and personal style. It seems that film makers, corporations, advertisers, plastic surgeons, pornographers and social media personalities have taken up the creation of feminine myths and beauty standards where priests, philosophers, orators, writers and artists have left off.

How are women doing in material terms? In developed nations, women make up a large part of the workforce, and have more reproductive freedom than in 1949 (not everywhere). But there are few countries where childbearing does not create a significant conflict with one’s career. With the COVID lockdowns of 2020, it is disproportionately women who are dropping their jobs to take care of children as schools close. Feminised poverty, especially in old age, is a major problem even in wealthy nations, as women have lower earning potential over their lifetimes, and are likely to retire with smaller savings or superannuations than men. Women make up considerably less than half of all political representatives in most countries.

There is no country on earth where domestic violence, sexual assault and rape are not obscenely common and do not shape women’s emotional lives (whether they have already experienced assault, or merely have a rational fear of it). Nowhere are these crimes adequately investigated or prosecuted. The sex trade has expanded all over the globe, and the vast majority of women and children involved are coerced, though we are less likely to hear from them than from the tiny minority of high class escorts who do a little “sex work” voluntarily before exiting the industry at will.

So although many individual women are doing reasonably well, women as a class do not have anything like equal wealth, they do not have anything like equal power, and they are not free from physical and sexual violence. And yet, like the post-feminists in 1949 who claimed that there was no problem, we suffer cultural blindness around these issues. We don’t see them, or don’t notice how urgently wrong they are, or perhaps we give up because the problems seem intractable.


Simone de Beauvoir’s gift is the same, and as precious, as it was in 1949. By taking a magnifying class to the mechanisms of women’s subordination, she burns away the blind spot. She reveals the invisible, discovers the artifice and invention layered over our human nature, and exposes the historical contingency of facts that pose as inevitable and eternal. The job of feminist theory today is, in my view, exactly the same as it was seventy years ago. It is to find and describe the mechanisms by which sexual injustice is created and perpetuated, in order that our activism and politics can target them accurately. It is to ask “What circumstances limit women’s freedom, and can she overcome them?”

  1. Beauvoir, Simone de. 2011. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. London: Vintage.

  2. Criado-Perez, Caroline. 2019. Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. New York: Abrams Press.

  3. Friedan, Betty. 2010. The Feminine Mystique. Modern Classics. London: Penguin.

  4. Kimmel, Michael S. 2012. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

  5. Manne, Kate. 2018. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.