The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  One might say M. de Charrière’s life was no livelier than his wife’s: at least he had chosen it; and it seems it suited his mediocrity. If one imagines a man endowed with the exceptional qualities of the Belle de Zuylen, he surely would not be consumed in Colombier’s arid solitude. He would have carved out a place for himself in the world where he would undertake things, fight, act, and live. How many wives swallowed up in marriage have been, in Stendhal’s words, “lost to humanity”! It is said marriage diminishes man: it is often true; but it almost always destroys woman. Marcel Prévost, advocate of marriage, admits it himself:

  How many times have I met after a few months or years of marriage a young woman I had known as a girl and been struck by the ordinariness of her character, the meaninglessness of her life.

  Sophia Tolstoy uses almost the same words six months after her marriage:

  December 23, 1863:* My life is so mundane, and my death. But he has such a rich internal life, talent and immortality.

  A few months earlier, she had uttered another complaint:

  May 9, 1863: You simply cannot be happy just sitting there sewing or playing the piano alone, completely alone, and gradually realizing, or rather becoming convinced that even though your husband may not love you, you are stuck there forever and there you must sit.

  Twelve years later, she writes these words that many women today subscribe to:

  October 22, 1875:† Day after day, month after month, year after year—nothing ever changes. I wake up in the morning and just lie there wondering who will get me up, who is waiting for me. The cook is bound to come in, then the nurse,… so then I get up,… and sit silently darning holes, and then it’s time for the children’s grammar and piano lessons. Then in the evening more darning, with Auntie and Lyovochka playing endless … games of patience.

  Mme Proudhon’s complaint resonates with the same sound. “You have your ideas,” she said to her husband. “And I, when you are at work, when the children are in school, I have nothing.”

  In the first years the wife often lulls herself with illusions, she tries to admire her husband unconditionally, to love him unreservedly, to feel she is indispensable to him and her children; and then her true feelings emerge; she sees her husband can get along without her, that her children are made to break away from her: they are always more or less thankless. The home no longer protects her from her empty freedom; she finds herself alone, abandoned, a subject, and she finds nothing to do with herself. Affections and habits can still be of great help, but not salvation. All sincere women writers have noted this melancholy that inhabits the heart of “thirty-year-old women”; this is a characteristic common to the heroines of Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Parker, and Virginia Woolf. Cécile Sauvage, who sang so gaily of marriage and children at the beginning of her life, later expresses a subtle distress. It is noteworthy that the number of single women who commit suicide, compared with married women, shows that the latter are solidly protected from revulsion against life between twenty and thirty years of age (especially between twenty-five and thirty) but not in the following years. “As for marriage,” writes Halbwachs, “it protects provincial as well as Parisian women until thirty years of age but not after.”49

  The drama of marriage is not that it does not guarantee the wife the promised happiness—there is no guarantee of happiness—it is that it mutilates her; it dooms her to repetition and routine. The first twenty years of a woman’s life are extraordinarily rich; she experiences menstruation, sexuality, marriage, and motherhood; she discovers the world and her destiny. She is mistress of a home at twenty, linked from then on to one man, a child in her arms, now her life is finished forever. Real activity, real work, are the privilege of man: her only occupations are sometimes exhausting but never fulfill her. Renunciation and devotion have been extolled; but it often seems highly futile to devote herself to “the upkeep of any two beings until the end of their lives.” It is all very grand to forget oneself, but one must know for whom and for what. Worst of all is that her devotion itself is exasperating; in her husband’s eyes, it changes into a tyranny from which he tries to escape; and yet it is he who imposes his presence on woman as her supreme, one justification; by marrying her, he obliges her to give herself to him completely; he does not accept the reciprocal obligation, which is to accept this gift. Sophia Tolstoy’s words “I live through him and for him, I demand the same thing for me” are certainly revolting; but Tolstoy demanded she only live for him and through him, an attitude reciprocity alone can justify. It is the husband’s duplicity that dooms the wife to a misfortune of which he later complains to be the victim. Just as he wants her both hot and cold in bed, he claims her totally given and yet weightless; he asks her to fix him to earth and to let him be free, to ensure the daily monotonous repetition and not to bother him, always to be present and never nag him; he wants her entirely for himself and not to belong to him, to live in a couple and to remain alone. Thus, as soon as he marries her, he mystifies her. She spends her life measuring the extent of this betrayal. What D. H. Lawrence says about sexual love is generally valid: the union of two human beings is doomed to failure if it requires an effort for each of them to complete each other, which supposes a primal mutilation; marriage must combine two autonomous existences, not be a withdrawal, an annexation, an escape, a remedy. This is what Nora understands when she decides that before being able to be a wife and mother, she has to be a person.50 The couple should not consider itself a community, a closed cell: instead, the individual as individual has to be integrated into a society in which he can thrive without assistance; he will then be able to create links in pure generosity with another individual equally adapted to the group, links founded on the recognition of two freedoms.

  This balanced couple is not a utopia; such couples exist sometimes even within marriage, more often outside of it; some are united by a great sexual love that leaves them free in their friendships and occupations; others are linked by a friendship that does not hamper their sexual freedom; more rarely there are still others who are both lovers and friends but without seeking in each other their exclusive reason for living. Many nuances are possible in the relations of a man and a woman: in companionship, pleasure, confidence, tenderness, complicity, and love, they can be for each other the most fruitful source of joy, richness, and strength offered to a human being. It is not the individuals who are responsible for the failure of marriage: it is—unlike what Bonald, Comte, and Tolstoy claim—the institution that is perverted at its base. Declaring that a man and a woman who do not even choose each other must meet each other’s needs in all respects, at once, for their whole life, is a monstrosity that necessarily gives rise to hypocrisy, hostility, and unhappiness.

  The traditional form of marriage is changing: but it still constitutes an oppression that both spouses feel in different ways. Considering the abstract rights they enjoy, they are almost equals; they choose each other more freely than before, they can separate much more easily, especially in America, where divorce is commonplace; there is less difference in age and culture between the spouses than previously; the husband more easily acknowledges the autonomy his wife claims; they might even share housework equally; they have the same leisure interests: camping, bicycling, swimming, and so on. She does not spend her days waiting for her spouse’s return: she practices sports, she belongs to associations and clubs, she has outside occupations, sometimes she even has a little job that brings her some money. Many young couples give the impression of perfect equality. But as long as the man has economic responsibility for the couple, it is just an illusion. He is the one who determines the conjugal domicile according to the demands of his job: she follows him from the provinces to Paris, from Paris to the provinces, the colonies, abroad; the standard of living is fixed according to his income; the rhythm of the days, the weeks, and the year is organized on the basis of his occupations; relations and friendships most often depend on his profession. Being more positively integrated than his w
ife into society, he leads the couple in intellectual, political, and moral areas. Divorce is only an abstract possibility for the wife, if she does not have the means to earn her own living: while alimony in America is a heavy burden for the husband, in France the lot of the wife and mother abandoned with a derisory pension is scandalous. But the deep inequality stems from the fact that the husband finds concrete accomplishment in work or action while for the wife in her role as wife, freedom has only a negative form: the situation of American girls, among others, recalls that of the emancipated girls of the Roman decadence. We saw that they had the choice between two types of behavior: some perpetuated the style of life and the virtues of their grandmothers; others spent their time in futile activity; likewise, many American women remain “housewives” in conformity with the traditional model; the others mostly whittle away their energy and time. In France, even if the husband has all the goodwill in the world, the burdens of the home do not weigh on him anymore once the young wife is a mother.

  It is a commonplace to say that in modern households, and especially in the United States, the wife has reduced the husband to slavery. The fact is not new. Since the Greeks, males have complained of Xanthippe’s tyranny; what is true is that the wife intervenes in areas that previously were forbidden to her; I know, for example, of students’ wives who contribute to the success of their man with frenetic determination; they organize their schedules, their diet, they watch over their work; they cut out all distractions, and almost keep them under lock and key. It is also true that man is more defenseless than previously against this despotism; he recognizes his wife’s abstract rights, and he understands that she can concretize them only through him: it is at his own expense that he will compensate for the powerlessness and the sterility the wife is condemned to; to realize an apparent equality in their association, he has to give her more because he possesses more. But precisely because she receives, takes, and demands, she is the poorer. The dialectic of the master and slave has its most concrete application here: in oppressing, one becomes oppressed. Males are in chains by their very sovereignty; it is because they alone earn money that the wife demands checks, because men alone practice a profession that the wife demands that they succeed, because they alone embody transcendence that the wife wants to steal it from them by taking over their projects and successes. And inversely, the tyranny wielded by the woman only manifests her dependence: she knows the success of the couple, its future, its happiness, and its justification, resides in the hands of the other; if she bitterly seeks to subjugate him to her will, it is because she is alienated in him. She makes a weapon of her weakness; but the fact is she is weak. Conjugal slavery is ordinary and irritating for the husband; but it is deeper for the wife; the wife who keeps her husband near her for hours out of boredom irritates him and weighs on him; but in the end, he can do without her more easily than she him; if he leaves her, it is she whose life will be ruined. The big difference is that for the wife, dependence is interiorized; she is a slave even when she conducts herself with apparent freedom, while the husband is essentially autonomous and enchained from the outside. If he has the impression he is the victim, it is because the burdens he bears are more obvious: the wife feeds on him like a parasite; but a parasite is not a triumphant master. In reality, just as biologically males and females are never victims of each other but all together of the species, the spouses together submit to the oppression of an institution they have not created. If it is said men oppress women, the husband reacts indignantly; he feels oppressed: he is; but in fact, it is the masculine code, the society developed by males and in their interest, that has defined the feminine condition in a form that is now for both sexes a source of distress.

  The situation has to be changed in their common interest by prohibiting marriage as a “career” for the woman. Men who declare themselves antifeminist with the excuse that “women are already annoying enough as it is” are not very logical: it is precisely because marriage makes them “praying mantises,” “bloodsuckers,” and “poison” that marriage has to be changed and, as a consequence, the feminine condition in general. Woman weighs so heavily on man because she is forbidden to rely on herself; he will free himself by freeing her, that is, by giving her something to do in this world.

  There are young women who are already trying to win this positive freedom; but seldom do they persevere in their studies or their jobs for long: they know the interests of their work will most often be sacrificed to their husband’s career; their salary will only “help out” at home; they hesitate to commit themselves to undertakings that do not pull them away from conjugal enslavement. Those who do have a serious profession will not draw the same social advantages as men: lawyers’ wives, for example, are entitled to a pension on their husbands’ death; women lawyers are prohibited from paying a corresponding pension to their husbands in case of death. This shows that the woman who works cannot keep the couple at the same level as the man. There are women who find real independence in their profession; but many discover that work “outside” only represents another source of fatigue within the framework of marriage. Moreover and most often, the birth of a child forces them to confine themselves to their role of matron; it is still very difficult to reconcile work and motherhood.

  According to tradition, it is the child who should ensure the wife a concrete autonomy that dispenses her from devoting herself to any other aim. If she is not a complete individual as a wife, she becomes it as a mother: the child is her joy and justification. She reaches sexual and social self-realization through him; it is thus through him that the institution of marriage has meaning and reaches its aim. Let us examine this ultimate step in woman’s development.

  1. See Volume I.

  2. See Volume I.

  3. This evolution took place in a discontinuous manner. It was repeated in Egypt, in Rome, and in modern civilization: see Volume I.

  4. Hence the special character of the young widow in erotic literature.

  5. Cf. Volume I. This thesis is found in Saint Paul, the Church Fathers, Rousseau, Proudhon, Auguste Comte, D. H. Lawrence, and others.

  * In The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia.—TRANS.

  6. Claudine’s House.

  7. Claire Leplae, Les fiancailles (The Engagement).

  * Our translation of “Club des lisières vertes,” source unknown.—TRANS.

  8. Ibid.

  * Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald M. Frame. All Montaigne quotations are from this book.—TRANS.

  9. Of course, the adage “A hole is always a hole” is vulgarly humorous; man does seek something other than brute pleasure; nonetheless, the success of certain “slaughterhouses” is enough to prove a man can find some satisfaction with the first available woman.

  10. There are some, for example, who support the idea that painful childbirth is necessary to awaken the maternal instinct: those who deliver under anesthesia have been known to abandon their fawns. Such alleged facts are at best vague; and a woman is in no way a doe. The truth is that some males are shocked that the burdens of womanhood might be lightened.

  11. Still, in our times, woman’s claim to pleasure incites male anger; a striking document on this subject is Dr. Grémillon’s treatise La vérité sur l’orgasme vénérien de la femme (The Truth About the Genital Orgasm of the Woman). The preface informs us that the author, a World War I hero who saved the lives of fifty-five German prisoners, is a man of the highest moral standing. Taking serious issue with Stekel in Frigidity in Woman, he declares, “The normal and fertile woman does not have a genital orgasm. Many are the mothers (and the best of them) who have never experienced these wondrous spasms … the most latent erogenous zones are not natural but artificial. They are delighted to have them, but they are stigmas of decadence … Tell all that to a man seeking pleasure and he does not care. He wants his depraved partner to have a genital orgasm, and she will have it. If it does not exist, it will be made to exist. Modern woman wants
a man to make her vibrate. To her we answer: Madam, we don’t have the time, and hygiene forbids it!… The creator of erogenous zones works against himself: he creates insatiable women. The female ghoul can tirelessly exhaust innumerable husbands … the ‘zoned’ one becomes a new woman with a new spirit, sometimes a terrible woman capable of crime … there would be no neuroses, no psychoses if we understood that the ‘two-backed beast’ is an act as indifferent as eating, urinating, defecating, or sleeping.”

  * “Increase and multiply.”—TRANS.

  12. In Vino Veritas.

  13. “Some Reflections on Marriage” [in Stages on Life’s Way.—TRANS.].

  14. See “Myths” in Volume I.

  15. “Today, in certain regions of the United States, first-generation immigrants still send the bloody sheet back to the family in Europe as proof of the consummation of the marriage,” says the Kinsey Report.

  16. Claudine’s House.

  17. Conditions of Nervous Anxiety and Their Treatment.

  18. In La nuit remue (Night Moves).

  19. See Stekel’s observations quoted in the previous chapter.

  20. Psychology of Women.

  21. We summarize it following Stekel in Frigidity in Woman.

  22. “On Women.”

  23. La vagabonde (The Vagabond).

  * Beauvoir’s title is mistaken. Lagache’s work on jealousy is called La jalousie amoureuse (Jealousy in Love).—TRANS.

  * Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salomé, August 8, 1903.—TRANS.

  24. The Waves.

  * La terre et les rêveries du repos (Earth and Reveries of Repose), trans. Kenneth Haltman. —TRANS.