The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  When Anna was about three years old she began to question her parents about where babies come from; Anna had heard that children are “little angels.” She first seemed to think that when people die, they go to heaven and are reincarnated as babies. At age four she had a little brother; she hadn’t seemed to notice her mother’s pregnancy but when she saw her the day after the birth, she looked at her “with something like a mixture of embarrassment and suspicion” and finally asked her, “Aren’t you going to die now?” She was sent to her grandmother’s for some time; when she came back, a nurse had arrived and was installed near the bed; she at first hated her but then she amused herself playing nurse; she was jealous of her brother: she sniggered, made up stories, disobeyed and threatened to go back to her grandmother’s; she often accused her mother of not telling the truth, because she suspected her of lying about the infant’s birth; feeling obscurely that there was a difference between “having” a child as a nurse and having one as a mother, she asked her mother: “Shall I be a different woman from you?” She got into the habit of yelling for her parents during the night; and as the earthquake of Messina was much talked about she made it the pretext of her anxieties; she constantly asked questions about it. One day, she asked outright: “Why is Sophie younger than I? Where was Freddie before? Was he in heaven and what was he doing there?” Her mother decided she ought to explain that the little brother grew inside her stomach like plants in the earth. Anna was enchanted with this idea. Then she asked: “But did he come all by himself?” “Yes.” “But he can’t walk yet!” “He crawled out.” “Did he come out here (pointing to her chest), or did he come out of your mouth?” Without waiting for an answer, she said she knew it was the stork that had brought it; but in the evening she suddenly said: “My brother is in Italy;24 he has a house made of cloth and glass and it doesn’t fall down”; and she was no longer interested in the earthquake and asked to see photos of the eruption. She spoke again of the stork to her dolls but without much conviction. Soon however, she had new curiosities. Seeing her father in bed: “Why are you in bed? Have you got a plant in your inside too?” She had a dream; she dreamed of Noah’s Ark: “And underneath, there was a lid which opened and all the little animals fell out”; in fact, her Noah’s Ark opened by the roof: At this time, she again had nightmares: one could guess that she was wondering about the father’s role. A pregnant woman having visited her mother, the next day her mother saw Anna put a doll under her skirts and take it out slowly, saying: “Look, the baby is coming out, now it is all out.” Some time later, eating an orange, she said: “I’ll swallow it all down into my stomach, and then I shall get a baby.” One morning, her father was in the bathroom, she jumped on his bed, lay flat on her face, and flailed with her legs, crying out, “Look, is that what Papa does?” For five months she seemed to forget her preoccupations and then she began to mistrust her father: she thought he wanted to drown her, etc. One day she was happily sowing seeds in the earth with the gardener, and she asked her father: “How did the eyes grow into the head? And the hair?” The father explained that they were already there from the beginning and grew with the head. Then, she asked: “But how did Fritz get into Mama? Who stuck him in? And who stuck you into your mama? Where did he come out?” Her father said, smiling, “What do you think?” So she pointed to his sexual organs: “Did he come out from there?” “Well, yes.” “But how did he get into Mama? Did someone sow the seed?” So the father explained that it is the father who gives the seed. She seemed totally satisfied and the next day she teased her mother: “Papa told me that Fritz was a little angel and was brought down from heaven by the stork.” She was much calmer than before; she had, though, a dream in which she saw gardeners urinating, her father among them; she also dreamed, after seeing the gardener plane a drawer, that he was planing her genitals; she was obviously preoccupied with knowing the father’s exact role. It seems that, almost completely enlightened at the age of five, she did not experience any other disturbance.*

  This story is characteristic, although very often the little girl is less precisely inquisitive about the role played by the father, or the parents are much more evasive on this point. Many little girls hide cushions under their pinafores to play at being pregnant, or else they walk around with their doll in the folds of their skirts and let it fall into the cradle, or they give it their breast. Boys, like girls, admire the mystery of motherhood; all children have an “in depth” imagination that makes them sense secret riches inside things; they are all sensitive to the miracle of “nesting,” dolls that contain other, smaller dolls, boxes containing other boxes, vignettes identically reproduced in reduced form; they are all enchanted when a bud is unfolded before their eyes, when they are shown a chick in its shell or the surprise of “Japanese flowers” in a bowl of water. One little boy, upon opening an Easter egg full of little sugar eggs, exclaimed with delight: “Oh! A mummy!” Having a child emerge from a woman’s stomach is beautiful, like a magic trick. The mother seems endowed with wonderful fairy powers. Many boys bemoan that such a privilege is denied them; if, later, they take eggs from nests, stamp on young plants, if they destroy life around them with a kind of rage, it is out of revenge at not being able to hatch life, while the little girl is enchanted with the thought of creating it one day.

  In addition to this hope made concrete by playing with dolls, a housewife’s life also provides the little girl with possibilities of affirming herself. A great part of housework can be accomplished by a very young child; a boy is usually exempted from it; but his sister is allowed, even asked, to sweep, dust, peel vegetables, wash a newborn, watch the stew. In particular, the older sister often participates in maternal chores; either for convenience or because of hostility and sadism, the mother unloads many of her functions onto her; she is then prematurely integrated into the universe of the serious; feeling her importance will help her assume her femininity; but she is deprived of the happy gratuitousness, the carefree childhood; a woman before her time, she understands too soon what limits this specificity imposes on a human being; she enters adolescence as an adult, which gives her story a unique character. The overburdened child can prematurely be a slave, condemned to a joyless existence. But, if no more than an effort equal to her is demanded, she experiences the pride of feeling efficient like a grown person and is delighted to feel solidarity with adults. This solidarity is possible for the child because there is not much distance between the child and the housewife. A man specialized in his profession is separated from the infant stage by years of training; paternal activities are profoundly mysterious for the little boy; the man he will be later is barely sketched in him. On the contrary, the mother’s activities are accessible to the little girl. “She’s already a little woman,” say her parents, and often she is considered more precocious than the boy: in fact, if she is closer to the adult stage, it is because this stage traditionally remains more infantile for the majority of women. The fact is that she feels precocious, she is flattered to play the role of “little mother” to the younger ones; she easily becomes important, she speaks reason, she gives orders, she takes on superior airs with her brothers, who are still closed in the baby circle, she talks to her mother on an equal footing.

  In spite of these compensations, she does not accept her assigned destiny without regret; growing up, she envies boys their virility. Sometimes parents and grandparents poorly hide the fact that they would have preferred a male offspring to a female; or else they show more affection to the brother than to the sister: research shows that the majority of parents wish to have sons rather than daughters. Boys are spoken to with more seriousness and more esteem, and more rights are granted them; they themselves treat girls with contempt, they play among themselves and exclude girls from their group, they insult them: they call them names like “piss pots,” thus evoking girls’ secret childhood humiliations. In France, in coeducational schools, the boys’ caste deliberately oppresses and persecutes the girls’. But girls are reprimanded if th
ey want to compete or fight with them. They doubly envy singularly boyish activities: they have a spontaneous desire to affirm their power over the world, and they protest against the inferior situation they are condemned to. They suffer in being forbidden to climb trees, ladders, and roofs, among other activities. Adler observes that the notions of high and low have great importance, the idea of spatial elevation implying a spiritual superiority, as can be seen in numerous heroic myths; to attain a peak or a summit is to emerge beyond the given world as sovereign subject; between boys, it is frequently a pretext for challenge. The little girl, to whom exploits are forbidden and who sits under a tree or by a cliff and sees the triumphant boys above her, feels herself, body and soul, inferior. And the same is true if she is left behind in a race or a jumping competition, or if she is thrown to the ground in a fight or simply pushed to the side.

  The more the child matures, the more his universe expands and masculine superiority asserts itself. Very often, identification with the mother no longer seems a satisfactory solution. If the little girl at first accepts her feminine vocation, it is not that she means to abdicate: on the contrary, it is to rule; she wants to be a matron because matrons’ society seems privileged to her; but when her acquaintances, studies, amusements, and reading material tear her away from the maternal circle, she realizes that it is not women but men who are the masters of the world. It is this revelation—far more than the discovery of the penis—that imperiously modifies her consciousness of herself.

  She first discovers the hierarchy of the sexes in the family experience; little by little she understands that the father’s authority is not the one felt most in daily life, but it is the sovereign one; it has all the more impact for not being wasted on trifling matters; even though the mother reigns over the household, she is clever enough to put the father’s will first; at important moments, she makes demands, rewards, and punishes in his name. The father’s life is surrounded by mysterious prestige: the hours he spends in the home, the room where he works, the objects around him, his occupations, his habits, have a sacred character. It is he who feeds the family, is the one in charge and the head. Usually he works outside the home, and it is through him that the household communicates with the rest of the world: he is the embodiment of this adventurous, immense, difficult, and marvelous world; he is transcendence, he is God.25 This is what the child feels physically in the power of his arms that lift her, in the strength of his body that she huddles against. The mother loses her place of honor to him just as Isis once did to Ra and the earth to the sun. But for the child, her situation is deeply altered: she was intended one day to become a woman like her all-powerful mother; she will never be the sovereign father; the bond that attached her to her mother was an active emulation; from her father she can only passively expect esteem. The boy grasps paternal superiority through a feeling of rivalry, whereas the girl endures it with impotent admiration. I have already stated that what Freud called the “Electra complex” is not, as he maintains, a sexual desire; it is a deep abdication of the subject who consents to be object in submission and adoration. If the father shows tenderness for his daughter, she feels her existence magnificently justified; she is endowed with all the merits that others have to acquire the hard way; she is fulfilled and deified. It may be that she nostalgically searches for this plenitude and peace her whole life. If she is refused love, she can feel guilty and condemned forever; or else she can seek self-esteem elsewhere and become indifferent—even hostile—to her father. Besides, the father is not the only one to hold the keys to the world: all men normally share virile prestige; there is no reason to consider them father “substitutes.” It is implicitly as men that grandfathers, older brothers, uncles, girlfriends’ fathers, friends of the family, professors, priests, or doctors fascinate a little girl. The emotional consideration that adult women show the Man would be enough to perch him on a pedestal.26

  Everything helps to confirm this hierarchy in the little girl’s eyes. Her historical and literary culture, the songs and legends she is raised on, are an exaltation of the man. Men made Greece, the Roman Empire, France, and all countries, they discovered the earth and invented the tools to develop it, they governed it, peopled it with statues, paintings, and books. Children’s literature, mythology, tales, and stories reflect the myths created by men’s pride and desires: the little girl discovers the world and reads her destiny through the eyes of men. Male superiority is overwhelming: Perseus, Hercules, David, Achilles, Lancelot, Duguesclin, Bayard, Napoleon—so many men for one Joan of Arc; and behind her stands the great male figure of Saint Michael the archangel! Nothing is more boring than books retracing the lives of famous women: they are very pale figures next to those of the great men; and most are immersed in the shadows of some male hero. Eve was not created for herself but as Adam’s companion and drawn from his side; in the Bible few women are noteworthy for their actions: Ruth merely found herself a husband. Esther gained the Jews’ grace by kneeling before Ahasuerus, and even then she was only a docile instrument in Mordecai’s hands; Judith was bolder, but she too obeyed the priests and her exploit has a dubious aftertaste: it could not be compared to the pure and shining triumph of young David. Mythology’s goddesses are frivolous or capricious, and they all tremble before Jupiter; while Prometheus magnificently steals the fire from the sky, Pandora opens the box of catastrophes. There are a few sorceresses, some old women who wield formidable power in stories. Among them is “The Garden of Paradise” by Andersen, in which the figure of the mother of the winds recalls that of the primitive Great Goddess: her four enormous sons fearfully obey her; she beats and encloses them in bags when they behave badly. But they are not attractive characters. More seductive are the fairies, mermaids, and nymphs who escape male domination; but their existence is dubious and barely individualized; they are involved in the human world without having their own destiny: the day Andersen’s little mermaid becomes a woman, she experiences the yoke of love and suffering that is her lot. In contemporary accounts as in ancient legends, the man is the privileged hero. Mme de Ségur’s books are a curious exception: they describe a matriarchal society where the husband plays a ridiculous character when he is not absent; but usually the image of the father is, as in the real world, surrounded by glory. It is under the aegis of the father sanctified by his absence that the feminine dramas of Little Women take place. In adventure stories it is boys who go around the world, travel as sailors on boats, subsist on breadfruit in the jungle. All important events happen because of men. Reality confirms these novels and legends. If the little girl reads the newspapers, if she listens to adult conversation, she notices that today, as in the past, men lead the world. The heads of state, generals, explorers, musicians, and painters she admires are men; it is men who make her heart beat with enthusiasm.

  That prestige is reflected in the supernatural world. Generally, as a result of the role religion plays in women’s lives, the little girl, more dominated by the mother than the boy, is also more subjected to religious influences. And in Western religions, God the Father is a man, an old man endowed with a specifically virile attribute, luxuriant white beard.27 For Christians, Christ is even more concretely a man of flesh and blood with a long blond beard. Angels have no sex, according to theologians; but they have masculine names and are shown as handsome young men. God’s emissaries on earth—the pope, the bishop whose ring is kissed, the priest who says Mass, the preacher, the person one kneels before in the secrecy of the confessional—these are men. For a pious little girl, relations with the eternal Father are analogous to those she maintains with her earthly father; as they take place on an imaginary level, she experiences an even more total surrender. The Catholic religion, among others, exercises on her the most troubling of influences.28 The Virgin welcomes the angel’s words on her knees. “I am the handmaiden of the Lord,” she answers. Mary Magdalene is prostrate at Christ’s feet, and she washes them with her long womanly hair. Women saints declare their love to a radiant Ch
rist on their knees. On his knees, surrounded by the odor of incense, the child gives himself up to God’s and the angels’ gaze: a man’s gaze. There are many analogies between erotic and mystical language as spoken by women; for example, Saint Thérèse writes of the child Jesus: