The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  The importance of sexuality, and therefore ordinarily of woman, in both pathological and normal behavior is well-known. Other objects can also be feminized; because woman is certainly to a large extent man’s invention, he could also invent her in the male body: in homosexuality, sexual division is maintained. But ordinarily Woman is sought in feminine beings. Through her, through the best and the worst of her, man learns happiness, suffering, vice and virtue, lust, renunciation, devotion, and tyranny, and learns about himself; she is play and adventure, but also contest; she is the triumph of victory and, more bitter, of failure overcome; she is the giddiness of loss, the fascination of damnation, of death. There is a world of significations that exist only through woman; she is the substance of men’s actions and feelings, the embodiment of all the values that seek their freedom. It is understandable that even if he were condemned to the cruelest disavowals, man would not want to relinquish a dream containing all other dreams.

  Here, then, is why woman has a double and deceptive image: she is everything he craves and everything he does not attain. She is the wise mediator between auspicious Nature and man; and she is the temptation of Nature, untamed against all reason. She is the carnal embodiment of all moral values and their opposites, from good to bad; she is the stuff of action and its obstacle, man’s grasp on the world and his failure; as such she is the source of all man’s reflection on his existence and all expression he can give of it; however, she works to divert him from himself, to make him sink into silence and death. As his servant and companion, man expects her also to be his public and his judge, to confirm him in his being; but she opposes him with her indifference, even with her mockery and her laughter. He projects onto her what he desires and fears, what he loves and what he hates. And if it is difficult to say anything about her, it is because man seeks himself entirely in her and because she is All. But she is All in that which is inessential: she is wholly the Other. And as other she is also other than herself, other than what is expected of her. Being all, she is never exactly this that she should be; she is everlasting disappointment, the very disappointment of existence that never successfully attains or reconciles itself with the totality of existents.

  1. “Woman is not the useless repetition of man but the enchanted space where the living alliance of man and nature occurs. If she disappeared, men would be alone, foreigners without passports in a glacial world. She is earth itself carried to life’s summit, the earth become sensitive and joyful; and without her, for man, earth is mute and dead,” wrote Michel Carrouges in “Les pouvoirs de la femme” (Woman’s Powers), Cahiers du Sud, no. 292 (1948).

  2. Stages on Life’s Way.

  3. “Of Gaea sing I, Mother firm of all, the eldest one, who feedeth life on earth, whichever walk on land or swim the seas, or fly,” says a Homeric hymn. Aeschylus also glorifies the earth that “gives birth to all beings, nourishes them, and then receives the fertilized germ once again.”

  4. “To the letter the woman is Isis, fertile nature. She is the river and the bed of the river, the root and the rose, the earth and the cherry tree, the vine and the grape” (M. Carrouges, “Woman’s Powers”).

  5. See our study on Montherlant, the epitome of this attitude, a little further on.

  6. Demeter is the archetype of the mater dolorosa. But other goddesses—Ishtar and Artemis—are cruel. Kali is holding a blood-filled skull. “The heads of your newly killed sons hang from your neck like a necklace … Your figure is beautiful like rain clouds, your feet are soiled with blood,” says a Hindu poem.

  7. Metamorphoses of the Libido.

  8. The difference between mystical and mythical beliefs and individuals’ lived convictions is apparent in the following fact: Lévi-Strauss points out that “young Winnebago Indians visit their mistresses and take advantage of the privacy of the prescribed isolation of these women during their menstrual period.”

  9. A doctor from the Cher region pointed out to me that women in that situation are banned from going into the mushroom beds. The question as to whether there is any basis for these preconceived ideas is still discussed today. Dr. Binet’s only fact supporting them is an observation by Schink (cited by Vignes). Schink supposedly saw flowers wilt in an indisposed servant’s hands; yeast cakes made by this woman supposedly rose only three centimeters instead of the five they usually rose. In any case, these facts are pretty feeble and poorly established when considering the importance and universality of the obviously mystical beliefs they come from.

  10. Quoted in Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship.

  11. The moon is a source of fertility; it is seen as the “master of women”; it is often believed that the moon, in the form of a man or a snake, couples with women. The snake is an epiphany of the moon; it molts and regenerates, it is immortal, it is a power that distributes fertility and science; it watches over holy sources, the Tree of Life, the Fountain of Youth, and so on, but it is also the snake that takes immortality away from man. It is said that it couples with women. Persian and rabbinical traditions claim that menstruation is due to the first woman’s intercourse with the snake.

  12. Rabelais called the male sex “the worker of nature.” The religious and historical origin of the phallus-plowshare–woman-furrow association has already been pointed out.

  13. The power in combat attributed to the virgin comes from this: the Valkyries and Joan of Arc, for example.

  14. The sentence by Samivel, quoted by Bachelard in Earth and Reveries of Will, is telling: “I had ceased, little by little, to regard the mountains crouching in a circle at my feet as foes to vanquish, as females to trample underfoot, or trophies to provide myself and others proof of my own worth.” The mountain/woman ambivalence comes across in the common idea of “foes to vanquish,” “trophies,” and “proof of my own worth.”

  This reciprocity can be seen, for example, in these two poems by Senghor:

  Naked woman, dark woman

  Ripe fruit with firm flesh, dark raptures of

  black wine, Mouth that gives music to my mouth

  Savanna of clear horizons, savanna quivering to the fervent caress

  Of the East Wind …

  And:

  Oho! Congo, lying on your bed of forests, queen of subdued Africa.

  May the mountain phalluses hold high your pavilion

  For you are woman by my head, by my tongue, You are woman by my belly.

  15. “Hottentot women, in whom steatopygia is neither as developed nor as consistent as in Bushman women, think this body type is aesthetically pleasing and starting in childhood massage their daughters’ buttocks to develop them. Likewise, the artificial fattening of women, a real stuffing by two means, immobility and abundant ingestion of specific foods, especially milk, is found in various regions of Africa. It is still practiced by rich Arab and Jewish city dwellers in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco” (Luquet, “Vénus des cavernes,” Journal de Psychologie, 1934).

  * Most likely: Post coitum omne animal triste. (“All animals are sad after sex.”)—TRANS.

  16. For example, in Prévert’s ballet Le rendez-vous and in Cocteau’s Le jeune homme et la mort (The Young Man and Death), Death is represented as a beloved young girl.

  17. Until the end of the twelfth century theologians—except Saint Anselm—thought, according to Saint Augustine’s doctrine, that original sin was implied in the law of generation itself. “Concupiscence is a vice … human flesh born from it is sinful flesh,” wrote Saint Augustine. And Saint Thomas: “Since sin, the union of the sexes, when accompanied by concupiscence, transmits original sin to the child.”

  * “A temple built over a sewer.”—TRANS.

  † “We are born between shit and piss.”—TRANS.

  18. We demonstrated that the myth of the praying mantis has no biological basis.

  19. This explains the privileged place she holds, for example, in Claudel’s work (see pp. 237–246).

  20. One ought to quote Michel Leiris’s poem “La mèr
e” (The Mother) in its entirety. Here are some typical passages:

  The mother in black, mauve, violet—robber of nights—that’s the sorceress whose hidden industry brings you into the world, the one who rocks you, coddles you, coffins you, when she doesn’t abandon her curled-up body—one last little toy—into your hands, that lay it nicely into the coffin …

  The mother—blind statue, fate set up in the middle of the inviolate sanctuary—she’s nature caressing you, the wind censing you, the whole world that penetrates you, lifts you sky-high (borne on multiple spires) and rots you …

  The mother—young or old, beautiful or ugly, merciful or obstinate—it’s the caricature, the monster jealous woman, the fallen Prototype—assuming the Idea (a wrinkled Pythia perched on the tripod of her austere capital letter)—is but a parody of quick, light, iridescent thoughts …

  The mother—hip round or dry, breast atremble or firm—is the decline promised to all women right from the start, the progressive crumbling of the rock that sparkles beneath the menstrual flood, the slow burying—under the sand of the old desert—of the luxuriant caravan heaped with beauty.

  The mother—angel of spying death, of the embracing universe, of the love time’s wave throws back—she’s the shell with its senseless graphics (a sure sign of poison) to toss into the deep pools, generator of circles for the oblivious waters.

  The mother—somber puddle, eternally in mourning for everything and ourselves—she is the misty pestilence that shimmers and bursts, expanding its great bestial shadow (shame of flesh and milk) bubble by bubble, a stiff veil that a bolt of lightning as yet unborn ought to rend …

  Will it ever occur to any of these innocent bitches to drag themselves barefoot through the centuries as pardon for this crime: having given birth to us? [Translated by Beverley Bie Brahic.—TRANS.]

  21. See note 15, this page.

  22. It is allegoric in Claudel’s shameful recent poem, where Indochina is called “That yellow girl”; it is affectionate, by contrast, in the verses of the black poet [Guy Tirolien]:

  Soul of the black country where the elders sleep

  live and speak

  tonight

  in the uneasy strength along your hollow loins.

  23. Jotted down at the theater.

  * Translated by James Lawler.—TRANS.

  24. Philology is rather mysterious on this question; all linguists recognize that the distribution of concrete words into gender is purely accidental. Yet in French most entities are feminine: beauty and loyalty, for example. And in German, most imported foreign words, others, are feminine: die Bar, for instance.

  25. It goes without saying that they, of course, demonstrate intellectual qualities perfectly identical to those of men.

  26. American detective novels—or American-style ones—are a striking example. Peter Cheyney’s heroes, for instance, are always grappling with an extremely dangerous woman, unmanageable for anyone but them: after a duel that unfolds all through the novel, she is finally overcome by Campion or Callaghan and falls into his arms.

  27. La condition humaine (Man’s Fate).

  28. “Man created woman—but what out of? Out of a rib of his God, of his ‘ideal’ ” (Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols).

  29. In Vino Veritas.

  30. As we have seen, it was the theme of many lamentations in Greece and during the Middle Ages.

  31. Marcel Schwob poetically renders this myth in Le livre de Monelle (The Book of Monelle):

  I will speak to you of the Little Women of Pleasure that you may know of the beginning … For you see, these little women call out to you … they utter a cry of compassion, and they hold your hand in their emaciated hands. They only understand you when you are unhappy; they can cry with you and console you … None of them may stay long with you. They would be too sad and too ashamed to remain. When you no longer weep, you have no need of them. They teach you the lesson they have learned from you, then they flee. They come through the cold and the rain to kiss your brow, to brush their lips across your eyes, to drive from you the terror and the sadness that you know … You must not think of what they do in the shadows.

  32. Stendhal is a striking example.

  | CHAPTER 2 |

  In order to confirm this analysis of the feminine myth, as it is collectively presented, we will look at the singular and syncretic form it takes on in certain writers. The attitude to women seems typical in, among others, Montherlant, D. H. Lawrence, Claudel, Breton, and Stendhal.

  I. MONTHERLANT OR THE BREAD OF DISGUST

  Montherlant belongs to the long male tradition of adopting the arrogant Manichaeism of Pythagoras. Following Nietzsche, he belives that the Eternal Feminine was exalted only during periods of weakness and that the hero has to rise up against the Magna Mater. As a specialist in heroism, he has undertaken the task of dislodging her. Woman is night, disorder, and immanence. “These convulsive shadows are nothing more than ‘the feminine in its pure state,’ ” he writes about Mme Tolstoy.1 The stupidity and baseness of men today, he thinks, give a positive image of feminine deficiencies: the feminine instinct, feminine intuition, and women’s clairvoyance are spoken about, while their absence of logic, stubborn ignorance, and inability to grasp the real should be denounced; they are neither good observers nor psychologists; they neither know how to see things nor understand human beings; their mystery is a trap, their unfathomable treasures have the depth of nothingness; they have nothing to give man and can only harm him. For Montherlant the mother is the first major enemy; in L’exil (Exile), an early play of his, he depicts a mother who keeps her son from enlisting; in Les Olympiques, the teenager who wants to devote himself to sport is barred by his mother’s fearful egotism; in Les célibataires (The Bachelors) and in Les jeunes filles (The Girls), the mother is vilified. Her crime is to want to keep her son locked up forever in her womb’s depths; she mutilates him to make him her own and thus to fill up the sterile vacuum of her being; she is the worst educator; she cuts the child’s wings; she pulls him back from the heights he aspires to; she turns him into a moron and diminishes him. These reproaches are not without some basis. But it is clear from the explicit criticisms that Montherlant addresses to woman-mother that what he hates in her is his own birth. He thinks he is God; he wants to be God: because he is male, because he is a “superior man,” because he is Montherlant. A god is not engendered; his body, if he has one, is a will molded in hard and disciplined muscles, not in flesh mutely inhabited by life and death; this flesh that he repudiates is perishable, contingent, and vulnerable and is his mother’s fault. “The only part of Achilles’ body that was vulnerable was the part his mother had held.”2

  Montherlant never wanted to assume the human condition; what he calls his pride is, from the beginning, a panicked flight from the risks contained in a freedom engaged in the world through flesh; he claims to affirm freedom but to refuse engagement; without ties, without roots, he dreams he is a subjectivity majestically withdrawn upon itself; the memory of his carnal origins disturbs this dream, and he resorts to a familiar process: instead of prevailing over it, he repudiates it.

  For Montherlant, the woman lover is just as harmful as the mother; she prevents man from resurrecting the god in himself; woman’s lot, he says, is life in its most immediate form, woman lives on feelings, she wallows in immanence; she has a mania for happiness: she wants to trap man in it; she does not experience the élan of her transcendence, she does not have the sense of grandeur; she loves her lover in his weakness and not in his strength, in his troubles and not in his joys; she would like him defenseless, so unhappy as to try to convince him of his misery regardless of any proof to the contrary. He surpasses and thus escapes her: she means to reduce him to her size to take him over. Because she needs him, she is not self-sufficient; she is a parasite. Through Dominique’s eyes, Montherlant portrayed the promenading women of Ranelagh, women “hanging on their lovers’ arms like beings without backbones, like big disguised slugs”;3 except
for sportswomen, women are incomplete beings, doomed to slavery; soft and lacking muscle, they have no grasp on the world; thus they fiercely work to annex a lover or, even better, a husband. Montherlant, to my knowledge, did not use the praying mantis myth, but the content is there: for woman, to love is to devour; she pretends to give of herself, and she takes. He quotes Mme Tolstoy’s cry: “I live through him, for him; I demand the same thing for myself,” and he denounces the dangers of such a furious love; he finds a terrible truth in Ecclesiastes: A man who wants to hurt you is better than a woman who wants to help you. He invokes Lyautey’s experience: “A man of mine who marries is reduced to half a man.” He deems marriage to be even worse for a “superior man”; it is a ridiculous conformism to bourgeois values; could you imagine saying: “Mrs. Aeschylus,” or “I’m having dinner at the Dantes’ ”? A great man’s prestige is weakened; and even more, marriage shatters the hero’s magnificent solitude; he “needs not to be distracted from his own self.”4