The Second Sex (French: Le Deuxième Sexe, 1949) is one of the best known works of French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir wrote the book after attempting to write about herself. The first thing she wrote was that she was a woman, but she realized that she needed to define what a woman was, which became the intent of the book. It is a work on the treatment of women throughout history and often regarded as a major feminist work. In it she argues that women throughout history have been defined as the "other" sex, an aberration from the "normal" male sex.[1]
Judith Butler says that de Beauvoir's formulation that "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman",[2] distinguishes the terms 'sex' and 'gender'. Butler says that the book suggests that 'gender' is an aspect of identity which is "gradually acquired". Butler sees The Second Sex as potentially providing a radical understanding of gender.[3]
Toril Moi points out that the current English translations of The Second Sex are poor.[4] The publication rights to the book are owned by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc and according to Moi although the publishers are aware of the problems with the English text they insist that there really is no need for a new translation.
The current state of the debate about women and feminism is unsatisfactory, and there is a need for clarification of its basic terms. The biological and social sciences have discredited the idea of fixed essences like ‘femininity’. Yet the concept of ‘woman’, as opposed to ‘man’, is obviously not an empty one, for women exist and have their own specific situation in the world. This situation, however, is defined and judged in relation to that of men. Man is that which is absolute or positive: woman that which is relative or negative. Man is the centre of things, the Subject: woman the Other. Anthropological evidence shows that alterity is a basic category of human thought. The human subject can assert itself only in opposition to something else that is characterised as object, as inessential, as other.
But a reciprocal assertion on the part of the other usually has to be acknowledged. Women must, therefore, have failed to contest men’s sovereignty, must have submitted to it. Yet women are not in a minority. Nor is their dependence the result of an historical event or process, since they have never constituted a coherent group. Although matters are now improving, women’s economic and social status is still markedly inferior to men’s, but the temptation to allow men to continue shouldering responsibility for everything is great. In short, women have not asserted themselves because the means of doing so have been denied them; because they have not tried to exploit men’s dependence upon them; and because they have often been content to play a secondary role.
Yet this does not explain how men gained the ascendancy in the first place. The justifications that men have adduced in different historical periods are all suspect. But although extreme antifeminist positions are no longer typical, men cannot be expected simply to give up their privileges. Mostly, they are half-sincere in their views, having no first-hand experience of what the discrimination against women amounts to. Equally, however, polemical arguments by feminists are often beside the point: the whole question of whether women are superior or inferior to men should be dropped.
Because many of the feminist battles have already been won, certain women who have gained from this are probably now in the best position to elucidate the situation of women in an objective way. Le Deuxième Sexe is intended as a contribution towards this process of understanding the present and what the future holds. It is necessarily based upon the author’s own values and these can be openly acknowledged. Neither the general good nor the happiness of the individual will be taken as the decisive criterion when the book is judging institutions. The perspective will be that of existentialist morality, which holds that the only justification of existence is an individual’s striving for ‘transcendence’ through freely-chosen projects; the constant reaching-out towards an open future, towards other free human beings. Freedom and existence are degraded whenever transcendence dissolves into ‘immanence’; that is, when the future closes in on the individual and possibilities of development and extension are reduced. Imposed from without, such immanence constitutes oppression, but any individual consenting to immanence is morally at fault. Women’s situation is distinguished by the fact that, in spite of their fundamental nature as subjects seeking transcendence, they are actually encouraged and pressed to consider themselves as the Other, as objects condemned to immanence by the transcendent male. The book will ask how women can develop as independent beings in these circumstances, and what chances they have of realising their freedom.
These questions can only be asked on the assumption that women are not pre-destined or pre-determined physiologically, psychologically, or by economic factors. The first task, therefore, is to examine the biological, psychoanalytical and Marxist views of women
Great progress was made by psychoanalysis in its recognition that mental life is the realm of significance and does not correspond to biology or physiology. But the vagueness and confusions in the whole system of psychoanalysis make criticism of it necessary and difficult.
Freud superimposed his account of women upon his account of men, seeing the development of women’s libido as being more complex than that of men’s, since it involved one extra genital stage. Women were therefore regarded as more prone to neuroses. The Electra complex was seen more complicated than the Oedipus complex, but was a derivative of it. However, penis envy cannot be explained on Freudian terms, but only by the prevalence of value-judgements that give priority to virility. And the Electra complex is an inadequate account of women’s sexuality, failing to acknowledge that women have to relate to a sex that has sovereignty in society.
Adler saw sexuality as just one aspect of the personality as a whole, which was dominated by a struggle betwen a desire for power and an inferiority complex. He saw women’s inferiority complex as arising out of their recognition of male dominance in society, making their attitude to their femininity a complex and tortured one. Freud, Adler and all psychoanalysts believe in mental causality, in determinism. Women are said to undergo their destiny passively: they either strain against their femininity and become neurotic, or they submit to their role as wives and mothers and live happily. Yet empirical evidence does not obviously support this theory, so that psychoanalysts are obliged to complicate and modify it endlessly. Refusing the concepts of choice and value, they are obliged to take for granted certain unexplained facts. Psychoanalysis is unable to explain the link between sexuality and morality, between individual and society.
In humans, sexuality (like work, war, play, art) is an aspect of a more fundamental metaphysical search for being. The individual’s choice, bringing together a variety of activities, can only be explained ontologically. In spite of its rejection of choice, psychoanalysis is fertile, because human freedom is exercised within certain constants. Thus boys commonly take the penis as an incarnation of their transcendence, while girls, who do not have the possibility of alienating themselves in one single part of their body, tend to turn their whole body into an object. But there is no determinism or destiny here: different societies use and value objects in different ways. Freud admitted that he could not explain the origins of the male supremacy that had led to phallicism.
Sexual desire in women is, basically, a synthesis of attraction and repulsion. It can be understood only in relation to other fundamental ways in which humans perceive and react to objects. Furthermore, women choose freely between transcendence and alienation. Psychoanalysis can only talk in terms of of relating ‘normally’ to the past, but the problem for women lies in opening up possibilities for the future, for transcendence. They must choose between asserting their freedom and accepting the role of object and of Other that is assigned to them. They must choose their own values in a world with an economic and social structure already embodying values.
