The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  Even the successes women achieved were cause for new attacks; Les précieuses ridicules (The Pretentious Young Ladies) set public opinion against them; and a bit later Les femmes savants (The Learned Ladies) are applauded. Molière is not, however, woman’s enemy: he vigorously attacks arranged marriages, he demands freedom for young girls in their love lives and respect and independence for the wife. On the other hand, Bossuet does not spare them in his sermons. The first woman, he preaches, is “only a part of Adam and a kind of diminutive. Her mind is about the same size.” Boileau’s satire against women is not much more than an exercise in rhetoric, but it raises an outcry: Pradon, Regnard, and Perrault counterattack violently. La Bruyère and Saint-Evremond take the part of women. The period’s most determined feminist is Poulain de la Barre who in 1673 publishes a Cartesian-inspired work, De l’égalité des deux sexes (The Equality of the Two Sexes). He thinks that since men are stronger, they favor their sex and women accept this dependence out of custom. They never had their chances: in either freedom or education. Thus they cannot be judged by what they did in the past. Nothing indicates their inferiority to men. Anatomy reveals differences, but none of them constitutes a privilege for the male. And Poulain de la Barre concludes with a demand for a solid education for women. Fontenelle writes Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) for women. And while Fénelon, following Mme de Maintenon and Abbot Fleury, puts forward a very limited educational program, the Jansenist academic Rollin wants women to undertake serious studies.

  The eighteenth century is also divided. In 1744, the author of the Controverse sur l’âme de la femme (Controversy over Woman’s Soul) declares that “woman created uniquely for man will cease to be at the end of the world because she will cease to be useful for the object for which she had been created, from which follows necessarily that her soul is not immortal.” In a slightly less radical way, Rousseau is the spokesman of the bourgeoisie and dooms woman to her husband and motherhood. “All the education of women should be relative to men … Woman is made to yield to man and to bear his injustices,” he asserts. However, the democratic and individualist ideal of the eighteenth century is favorable to women; for most philosophers they are human beings equal to those of the strong sex. Voltaire denounces the injustice of their lot. Diderot considers their inferiority largely made by society. “Women, I pity thee!” he writes. He thinks that “in all customs the cruelty of civil laws makes common cause with the cruelty of nature against women. They have been treated as idiot beings.” Montesquieu, paradoxically, believes that women should be subordinate to man in the home but that everything predisposes them to political action. “It is against reason and against nature for women to be mistresses in the house … but not for them to govern an empire.” Helvétius shows that woman’s inferiority is created by the absurdity of her education; d’Alembert is of the same opinion. Economic feminism timidly makes its appearance through a woman, Mme de Ciray.* But it is Mercier almost alone in his Tableau de Paris who rises up against the destitution of women workers and tackles the fundamental question of women’s work. Condorcet wants women to enter political life. He considers them man’s equals and defends them against classic attacks: “Women are said … not to have their own feeling of justice, that they listen to their feelings more than to their conscience… [But] it is not nature, it is education, it is the social existence that causes this difference.” And elsewhere: “The more women have been enslaved by laws, the more dangerous their empire has been … It would lessen if women had less interest in keeping it, if it ceased being for them the sole means of defending themselves and escaping oppression.”

  * Mundium: almost total legal guardianship over women by father and husband.—TRANS.

  * The Songe du verger is a treatise of political doctrine, written first in Latin (1370) and then in French (1378). Title usually kept in French.—TRANS.

  * Lettre de cachet: letter with a seal. It carries an official seal, usually signed by the king of France, authorizing the imprisonment without trial of a named person.—TRANS.

  †“The wife is not exactly a partner, but it is hoped she will become one.”—TRANS.

  1. “Those coming to Sisteron by the Peipin passage, like the Jews, owed a toll of five sols to the ladies of Sainte-Claire” (Bahutaud).

  2. De Reiffenberg, Dictionnaire de la conversation, “Femmes et filles de folles vie” (Dictionary of Conversation, “Women and Girls of the Low Life”). [Translation of Old French by Gabrielle Spiegel.—TRANS.]

  * Querelle des femmes: a literary quarrel traced to Christine de Pizan’s objection to the portrayal of women in the Roman de la Rose, voiced in her Epître au dieu d’amours (1399; Epistle to the God of Love), a debate that helped nurture literary production throughout the early modern period.—TRANS.

  3. “Woman is superior to man, namely: Materially: because Adam was made of clay, Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. In terms of place: because Adam was created outside of paradise, Eve in paradise. In terms of conception: because woman conceived God, something man couldn’t do. In terms of appearance: because Christ after his death appeared to a woman, namely Magdalene. In terms of glorification: because a woman was glorified above the choir of angels, namely blessed Mary.”

  * The correct title is Le champion des dames (c. 1441; The Ladies’ Champion).—TRANS.

  * Beauvoir shortened and paraphrased this quatrain in the French text.—TRANS.

  † Discrepancy: In fact, Mrs. Aphra Behn, dramatist and novelist, lived from 1640 to 1689. —TRANS.

  * This title might be a confusion and combination of Le cabinet satyrique (1618) and Le parnasse des poètes satyriques (1622).—TRANS.

  * The name Ciray is untraceable. Emilie Du Châtelet and Voltaire lived and worked in the Château de Cirey from 1734 to 1749, giving rise to some speculation about the possibility of a misspelling or an erroneous transcription from the original manuscript of the name Ciray. But there is no conclusive evidence of this.—TRANS.

  | CHAPTER 5 |

  The Revolution might have been expected to change the fate of woman. It did nothing of the kind. This bourgeois revolution respected bourgeois institutions and values; and it was waged almost exclusively by men. It must be pointed out that during the entire ancien régime working-class women as a sex enjoyed the most independence. A woman had the right to run a business, and she possessed all the necessary capacities to exercise her trade autonomously. She shared in production as linen maid, laundress, burnisher, shopgirl, and so on; she worked either at home or in small businesses; her material independence allowed her great freedom of behavior: a woman of modest means could go out, go to taverns, and control her own body almost like a man; she is her husband’s partner and his equal. She is oppressed on an economic and not on a sexual level. In the countryside, the peasant woman plays a considerable role in rural labor; she is treated like a servant; often she does not eat at the same table as her husband and sons; she toils harder and the burdens of maternity add to her fatigue. But as in old farming societies, since she is necessary to man, he respects her for it; their goods, interests, and concerns are shared; she enjoys great authority in the home. From within their difficult lives, these women could have asserted themselves as individuals and demanded their rights; but a tradition of timidity and submission weighed on them: the Estates-General cahiers record an insignificant number of feminine claims, limited to “Men should not engage in trades that are the prerogative of women.” And it is true that women are found alongside their men in demonstrations and riots: they are the ones who go to Versailles to find “the baker, the baker’s wife, and the baker’s little boy.”* But it is not the people who led the Revolution and reaped its fruits. As for bourgeois women, a few rallied ardently to the cause of freedom: Mme Roland, Lucile Desmoulins, and Théroigne de Méricourt; one of them, Charlotte Corday, significantly influenced the outcome when she assassinated Marat. There were a few feminist movements. In 1791, Olympe de Gouges
proposed a “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen” equivalent to the “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” demanding that all masculine privileges be abolished. In 1790 the same ideas are found in Motion de la pauvre Javotte (Poor Javotte’s Motion) and in other similar lampoons; but in spite of Condorcet’s support, these efforts are abortive, and Olympe perishes on the scaffold. In addition to L’Impatient, the newspaper she founded, a few other short-lived papers appear. Women’s clubs merge for the most part with men’s and are taken over by them. On Brumaire 28, 1793, when the actress Rose Lacombe, president of the Society of Republican and Revolutionary Women, along with a delegation of women, forces the doors of the Conseil Général, the prosecutor Chaumette pronounces words in the assembly that could be inspired by Saint Paul and Saint Thomas: “Since when are women allowed to renounce their sex and become men?… [Nature] has told woman: Be a woman. Child care, household tasks, sundry motherhood cares, those are your tasks.” Women are banned from entering the Conseil and soon even from the clubs where they had learned their politics. In 1790, the right of the firstborn and masculine privilege were eliminated; girls and boys became equals regarding succession; in 1792 divorce law was established, relaxing strict marital ties; but these were feeble conquests. Bourgeois women were too integrated into the family to find concrete grounds for solidarity with each other; they did not constitute a separate caste capable of forcing their demands: on an economic level, they existed as parasites. Thus, while women could have participated in events in spite of their sex, they were prevented by their class, and those from the agitating class were condemned to stand aside because they were women. When economic power falls into the hands of the workers, it will then be possible for the working woman to gain the capacities that the parasitic woman, noble or bourgeois, never obtained.

  During the liquidation of the Revolution woman enjoys an anarchic freedom. But when society is reorganized, she is rigidly enslaved again. From the feminist point of view, France was ahead of other countries; but for the unfortunate modern French woman, her status was determined during a military dictatorship; the Napoleonic Code, which sealed her fate for a century, greatly held back her emancipation. Like all military leaders, Napoleon wants to see woman solely as a mother; but, heir to a bourgeois revolution, he does not intend to demolish the social structure by giving the mother priority over the wife: he prohibits the querying of paternity; he sets down harsh conditions for the unwed mother and the illegitimate child. Yet the married woman herself does not find recourse in her dignity as mother; the feudal paradox is perpetuated. Girls and wives are deprived of citizens’ rights, prohibiting them from functions such as the practice of law or wardship. But the unmarried woman enjoys her civil role fully while marriage preserves the mundium. Woman owes obedience to her husband; he can have her confined in cases of adultery and obtain a divorce from her; if he kills the guilty wife when caught in the act, he is excusable in the eyes of the law; the husband, on the other hand, receives an infraction only if he brings a concubine into the home, and this is the only ground that would allow his wife to divorce him. Man decides where they will live, and he has many more rights over the children than the mother; and—except in cases where the woman manages a business—his authorization is necessary for her contracts. Marital power is rigorously exercised, both over the wife herself as a person and over her possessions.

  Throughout the nineteenth century, the legal system continues to reinforce the code’s severity, depriving, among other things, the woman of all rights of alienation. In 1826 the Restoration abolishes divorce,* and the 1848 Constitutional Assembly refuses to reestablish it; it does not reappear until 1884, and then it is still difficult to obtain. The bourgeoisie was never more powerful, yet they recognize the dangers implicit in the Industrial Revolution; they assert themselves with nervous authority. The freedom of ideas inherited from the eighteenth century never makes inroads into family moral principles; these remain as they are defined by the early-nineteenth-century reactionary thinkers Joseph de Maistre and Bonald. They base the value of order on divine will and demand a strictly hierarchical society; the family, the indissoluble social cell, will be the microcosm of society. “Man is to woman what woman is to the child”; or “power is to the minister what the minister is to the people,” says Bonald. Thus the husband governs, the wife administers, and the children obey. Divorce is, of course, forbidden; and woman is confined to the home. “Women belong to the family and not to politics, and nature made them for housework and not for public service,” adds Bonald. These hierarchies were respected in the family as described by Le Play in the middle of the century.

  In a slightly different way, Auguste Comte also demands a hierarchy of the sexes; between men and women there are “radical differences, both physical and moral, profoundly separating one from the other, in every species of animal and especially in the human race.” Femininity is a kind of “prolonged childhood” that sets women apart from the “ideal type of the race.” This biological infantilism expresses an intellectual weakness; the role of this purely affective being is that of spouse and housewife, no match for man: “Neither instruction nor education is suitable for her.” As with Bonald, woman is confined to the family, and within this micro society the father governs because woman is “inept in all government even domestic”; she only administers and advises. Her instruction has to be limited. “Women and the proletariat cannot and must not become originators, nor do they wish to.” And Comte foresees society’s evolution as totally eliminating woman’s work outside the family. In the second part of his work, Comte, swayed by his love for Clotilde de Vaux, exalts woman to the point of almost making her a divinity, the emanation of the Great Being; in the temple of Humanity, positivist religion will propose her for the adoration of the people, but only for her morality; man acts, while she loves: she is more deeply altruistic than he. But according to the positivist system, she is still no less confined to the family; divorce is still forbidden for her, and it would even be preferable for her widowhood to last forever; she has no economic or political rights; she is only a wife and an educator.

  Balzac expresses the same ideal in more cynical ways: woman’s destiny, and her only glory, is to make the hearts of men beat, he writes in La physiologie du mariage (The Physiology of Marriage). “Woman is a possession acquired by contract; she is personal property, and the possession of her is as good as a security—indeed, properly speaking, woman is only man’s annexe.” Here he is speaking for the bourgeoisie, which intensified its antifeminism in reaction to eighteenth-century license and threatening progressive ideas. Having brilliantly presented the idea at the beginning of The Physiology of Marriage that this loveless institution forcibly leads the wife to adultery, Balzac exhorts husbands to rein in wives to total subjugation if they want to avoid the ridicule of dishonor. They must be denied training and culture, forbidden to develop their individuality, forced to wear uncomfortable clothing, and encouraged to follow a debilitating dietary regime. The bourgeoisie follows this program exactly, confining women to the kitchen and to housework, jealously watching their behavior; they are enclosed in daily life rituals that hindered all attempts at independence. In return, they are honored and endowed with the most exquisite respect. “The married woman is a slave who must be seated on a throne,” says Balzac; of course men must give in to women in all irrelevant circumstances, yielding them first place; women must not carry heavy burdens as in primitive societies; they are readily spared all painful tasks and worries: at the same time this relieves them of all responsibility. It is hoped that, thus duped, seduced by the ease of their condition, they will accept the role of mother and housewife to which they are being confined. And in fact, most bourgeois women capitulate. As their education and their parasitic situation make them dependent on men, they never dare to voice their claims: those who do are hardly heard. It is easier to put people in chains than to remove them if the chains bring prestige, said George Bernard Shaw. The
bourgeois woman clings to the chains because she clings to her class privileges. It is drilled into her and she believes that women’s liberation would weaken bourgeois society; liberated from the male, she would be condemned to work; while she might regret having her rights to private property subordinated to her husband’s, she would deplore even more having this property abolished; she feels no solidarity with working-class women: she feels closer to her husband than to a woman textile worker. She makes his interests her own.

  Yet these obstinate examples of resistance cannot stop the march of history; the advent of the machine ruins landed property and brings about working-class emancipation and concomitantly that of woman. All forms of socialism, wresting woman from the family, favor her liberation: Plato, aspiring to a communal regime, promised women a similar autonomy to that enjoyed in Sparta. With the utopian socialism of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Cabet is born the utopia of the “free woman.” The Saint-Simonian idea of universal association demands the abolition of all slavery: that of the worker and that of the woman; and it is because women like men are human beings that Saint-Simon, and Leroux, Pecqueur, and Carnot after him, demand their freedom. Unfortunately, this reasonable theory has no credibility in the Saint-Simonian school. Instead, woman is exalted in the name of femininity, the surest way to disserve her. Under the pretext of considering the couple as the basis of social unity, Père Enfantin tries to introduce a woman into each “director-couple” called the priest-couple; he awaits a better world from a woman messiah, and the Compagnons de la Femme embark for the East in search of this female savior. He is influenced by Fourier, who confuses the liberation of woman with the restoration of the flesh; Fourier demands the right of all individuals to follow their passionate attractions; he wants to replace marriage with love; he considers the woman not as a person but only in her amorous functions. And Cabet promises that Icarian communism will bring about complete equality of the sexes, though he accords women a limited participation in politics. In fact, women hold second place in the Saint-Simonian movement: only Claire Bazard, founder and main support for a brief period of the magazine La Femme Nouvelle (The New Woman), plays a relatively important role. Many other minor publications appear later, but their claims are timid; they demand education rather than emancipation for women; Carnot, and later Legouvé, is committed to raising the level of education for women. The idea of the woman partner or the woman as a regenerating force persists throughout the nineteenth century in Victor Hugo. But woman’s cause is discredited by these doctrines that, instead of assimilating her, oppose her to man, emphasizing intuition and emotion instead of reason. The cause is also discredited by some of its partisans’ mistakes. In 1848 women founded clubs and journals; Eugénie Niboyet published La Voix des Femmes (Women’s Voice), a magazine that Cabet worked on. A female delegation went to the city hall to demand “women’s rights” but obtained nothing. In 1849, Jeanne Deroin ran for deputy, and her campaign foundered in ridicule. Ridicule also killed the “Vesuvians” movement and the Bloomerists, who paraded in extravagant costumes. The most intelligent women of the period took no part in these movements: Mme de Staël fought for her own cause rather than her sisters’; George Sand demanded the right for free love but refused to collaborate on La Voix des Femmes; her claims are primarily sentimental. Flora Tristan believed in the people’s redemption through woman; but she is more interested in the emancipation of the working class than that of her own sex. Daniel Stern and Mme de Girardin, however, joined the feminist movement.