The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  This social significance of the toilette allows woman to express her attitude to society by the way she dresses; subject to the established order, she confers on herself a discreet and tasteful personality; many nuances are possible: she will make herself fragile, childlike, mysterious, candid, austere, gay, poised, a little daring, self-effacing, as she chooses. Or, on the contrary, she will affirm her rejection of conventions by her originality. It is striking that in many novels the “liberated” woman distinguishes herself by an audacity in dressing that emphasizes her character as sex object, and thus of dependence: so in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, the young divorced woman with an adventuresome past and a bold heart is first presented with a plunging décolletage; the whiff of scandal she provokes becomes the tangible reflection of her scorn for conformity. Thus the young girl will enjoy dressing as a woman, the older woman as a little girl, the courtesan as a sophisticated woman of the world, and the woman of the world as a vamp. Even if every woman dresses according to her status, there is still play in it. Artifice like art is situated in the imagination. Not only do girdle, bra, hair dyes, and makeup disguise body and face; but as soon as she is “dressed up,” the least sophisticated woman is not concerned with perception: she is like a painting, a statue, like an actor on stage, an analogon through which is suggested an absent subject who is her character but is not she. It is this confusion with an unreal object—necessary, perfect like a hero in a novel, like a portrait or a bust—that flatters her; she strives to alienate herself in it and so to appear frozen, justified to herself.

  Page by page we see Marie Bashkirtseff in Ecrits intimes (Intimate Writings) endlessly remaking her image. She does not spare us any of her dresses: for each new outfit, she believes she is an other and she adores herself anew:

  I took one of Mama’s great shawls, I made a slit for my head, and I sewed up the two sides. This shawl that falls in classic folds gives me an Oriental, biblical, strange look.

  I go to the Laferrières’, and in just three hours Caroline makes me a dress in which I look as if I’m enveloped in a cloud. This is a piece of English crepe that she drapes over me, making me thin, elegant, and long.

  Enveloped in a warm wool dress hanging in harmonious folds, a character out of Lefebvre who knows so well how to draw these lithe and young bodies in modest fabrics.

  This refrain is repeated day after day: “I was charming in black … In gray, I was charming … I was in white, charming.”

  Mme de Noailles, who also accorded much importance to her dress, speaks sadly in her Memoirs of the crisis of a failed dress:

  I loved the vividness of the colours, their daring contrast, a dress seemed like a landscape, the beginning of adventure. Just as I was putting on the dress made by unsure hands, I suffered from all the defects I saw.

  If the toilette has so much importance for many women, it is because they are under the illusion that it provides them both with the world and with their own self. A German novel, The Artificial Silk Girl,5 tells the story of a poor girl’s passion for a vair coat; sensually she loved the caressing warmth of it, the furry tenderness; in precious skins it is her transfigured self she cherishes; she finally possesses the beauty of the world she had never embraced and the radiant destiny that had never been hers:

  And then I saw a coat hanging from a hook, a fur so soft, so smooth, so tender, so gray, so shy: I felt like kissing it I loved it so much. It looked like consolation and All Saints’ Day and total safety, like the sky. It was genuine vair. Silently, I took off my raincoat and put on the vair. This fur was like a diamond on my skin that loved it and what one loves, one doesn’t give it back once one has it. Inside, a Moroccan crepe lining, pure silk, with hand embroidery. The coat enveloped me and spoke more than I to Hubert’s heart … I am so elegant in this fur. It is like the rare man who would make me precious through his love for me. This coat wants me and I want it: we have each other.

  As woman is an object, it is obvious that how she is adorned and dressed affects her intrinsic value. It is not pure frivolousness for her to attach so much importance to silk stockings, gloves, and a hat: keeping her rank is an imperious obligation. In America, a great part of the working woman’s budget is devoted to beauty care and clothes; in France, this expense is lighter; nevertheless, a woman is all the more respected if she “presents well”; the more she needs to find work, the more useful it is to look well-off: elegance is a weapon, a sign, a banner of respect, a letter of recommendation.

  It is a servitude; the values it confers have a price; they sometimes have such a high price that a detective catches a socialite or an actress shoplifting perfumes, silk stockings, or underwear. Many women prostitute themselves or “get help” in order to keep themselves well dressed; it is their clothes that determine their need for money. Being well dressed also requires time and care; it is a chore that is sometimes a source of positive joy: in this area there is also the “discovery of hidden treasures,” trades, ruses, arrangements, and invention; a clever woman can even be creative. Showroom days—especially the sales—are frenetic adventures. A new dress is a celebration in itself. Makeup and hair are substitutes for a work of art. Today, more than before, woman knows the joys of shaping her body by sports, gymnastics, swimming, massage, and diets;6 she decides on her weight, her figure, and her complexion; modern beauty treatments allow her to combine beauty and activity: she has the right to toned muscles, she refuses to put on weight; in physical culture, she affirms herself as subject; this gives her a kind of liberation from her contingent flesh; but this liberation easily lapses back into dependence. The Hollywood star triumphs over nature: but she finds herself a passive object in the producer’s hands.

  Next to these victories in which woman rightly takes delight, taking care of one’s appearance implies—like household tasks—a fight against time, because her body too is an object eroded by time. Colette Audry describes this fight, comparable to the one the housewife engages against dust:

  Already it was no longer the compact flesh of youth; along her arms and thighs the pattern of her muscles showed through a layer of fat and slightly flabby skin. Upset, she once again changed her schedule: her day would begin with half an hour of gymnastics and in the evening, before getting into bed, a quarter of an hour of massage. She took to reading medical books and fashion magazines, to watching her waistline. She prepared fruit juices, took a laxative from time to time, and did the dishes with rubber gloves. Her two concerns—rejuvenating her body and refurbishing her home—finally became one so that one day she would reach a kind of steadiness, a kind of dead center … the world would be as if stopped, suspended outside of aging and decay … At the swimming pool, she now took serious lessons to improve her style, and the beauty magazines kept her breathless with infinitely renewed recipes. Ginger Rogers confides to us: “I brush my hair one hundred strokes every morning, it takes exactly two and a half minutes and I have silky hair …” How to get thinner ankles: stand on your toes every day, thirty times in a row, without putting your heels down, this exercise only takes a minute; what is a minute in a day? Another time it is an oil bath for nails, lemon paste for hands, crushed strawberries on cheeks.7

  Routine, here again, turns beauty care and wardrobe maintenance into chores. The horror of degradation that all living change involves in some cold or frustrated women arouses a horror of life itself: they seek to preserve themselves as others preserve furniture or jam; this negative stubbornness makes them enemies of their own existence and hostile to others: good meals damage their figures, wine spoils their complexions, smiling too much gives you wrinkles, the sun hurts the skin, rest makes you lethargic, work wears you out, love gives you circles under your eyes, kisses make your cheeks red, caresses deform your breasts, embraces shrivel the flesh, pregnancies disfigure your face and body; you know how young mothers angrily push away the child marveling at their ball gown. “Don’t touch me, your hands are all sticky, you’re going to get me dirty”; the appearance-
conscious rejects her husband’s or lover’s ardor with the same rebuffs. Just as one covers furniture with loose covers, she would like to withdraw from men, the world, time. But none of these precautions prevents the appearance of gray hair and crow’s-feet. Starting from youth, woman knows this destiny is inevitable. And, regardless of her vigilance, she is a victim of accidents: a drop of wine falls on her dress, a cigarette burns it; and so the creature of luxury and parties who smilingly struts about the living room disappears: she turns into the serious and hard housewife; suddenly one discovers that her toilette was not a bouquet of flowers, fireworks, a gratuitous and perishable splendor destined to generously light up an instant: it is an asset, capital, an investment, it demands sacrifices; its loss is an irreparable disaster. Stains, holes, dresses that are failures, and ruined perms are far more serious catastrophes than a burned roast or a broken vase: because the coquettish woman is not only alienated in things, she wants to be a thing, and without an intermediary she feels insecure in the world. The relations she maintains with her dressmaker and milliner, her impatience, her demands, are manifestations of her seriousness and insecurity. A successful dress creates in her the character of her dreams; but in a soiled, ruined outfit, she feels demeaned.

  Marie Bashkirtseff writes: “My mood, my manners, the expression on my face, everything depended on my dress.” And then: “Either you have to go around naked, or you have to dress according to your body, taste, and character. When they are not right, I feel gauche, common, and therefore humiliated. What happens to the mood and mind? They think about clothes and so one becomes stupid, boring, and one does not know what to do with oneself.”

  Many women prefer to miss a party than go badly dressed, even if they are not going to be noticed.

  However, although some women affirm “I dress for myself only,” we have seen that even in narcissism the gaze of the other is involved. Only in asylums do the fashion-conscious stubbornly keep their faith in absent gazes; normally, they demand witnesses. After ten years of marriage, Sophia Tolstoy writes:

  I want people to admire me and say how pretty I am, and I want Lyova to see and hear them too … I hate people who tell me I am beautiful. I never believed them … what would be the point of it? My darling little Petya loves his old nanny just as much as he would love a great beauty … I am having my hair curled today, and have been happily imagining how nice it will look, even though nobody will see me and it is quite unnecessary. I adore ribbons, and I would like a new leather belt—and now I have written this I feel like crying.

  Husbands do not perform this role well. Here again the husband’s demands are duplicitous. If his wife is too attractive, he becomes jealous; but every husband is more or less King Candaules; he wants his wife to make him proud; for her to be elegant, pretty, or at least “presentable”; if not, he will humorously tell her these words of Pére Ubu: “You are quite ugly today! Is it because we are expecting company?” In marriage, as we have seen, erotic and social values are not very compatible; such antagonism is reflected in this situation. The wife who accentuates her sexual attraction is considered vulgar in her husband’s eyes; he criticizes this boldness that would seduce him in an unknown woman, and this criticism kills all desire for her; if his wife dresses decently, he approves but coldly: he does not find her attractive and vaguely reproaches her for it. Because of that, he rarely looks at her on his own account: he inspects her through the eyes of others. “What will they say about her?” He does not see clearly because he projects his spousal point of view onto others. Nothing is more irritating for a woman than to see him appreciate in another the dresses or way of dressing he criticizes in her. Naturally, of course, he is too close to her to see her; her face is immutable for him; nor does he notice her outfits or hairstyle. Even a husband in love or an infatuated lover is often indifferent to a woman’s clothes. If they love her ardently in her nudity, the most attractive adornments merely disguise her; and they will cherish her whether badly dressed, tired, or dazzling. If they no longer love her, the most flattering dresses will be of no avail. Clothes can be an instrument of conquest but not a weapon of defense; their art is to create mirages, they offer the viewer an imaginary object: in the erotic embrace and in daily relations mirages fade; conjugal feelings like physical love exist in the realm of reality. Women do not dress for the loved man. Dorothy Parker, in one of her short stories, describes a young woman who, waiting impatiently for her husband, who is on leave, decides to make herself beautiful to welcome him:

  She bought a new dress; black—he liked black dresses—simple—he liked plain dresses—and so expensive that she would not think of its price …

  “Do you … like my dress?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I always liked that dress on you.”

  It was as if she turned to wood. “This dress,” she said, enunciating with insulting distinctness, “is brand new. I have never had it on before in my life. In case you are interested, I bought it especially for this occasion.”

  “I’m sorry, honey,” he said. “Oh, sure, now I see it’s not the other one at all. I think it’s great. I like you in black.”

  “At moments like this,” she said, “I almost wish I were in it for another reason.”8

  It is often said that women dress to arouse jealousy in other women: this jealousy is really a clear sign of success; but this is not its only aim. Through envious or admiring approbation, woman seeks an absolute affirmation of her beauty, her elegance, her taste: of herself. She dresses to display herself; she displays herself to make herself be. She thus submits herself to a painful dependence; the housewife’s devotion is useful even if it is not recognized; the effort of the fashion-conscious woman is in vain unless consciousness is involved. She is looking for a definitive valorization of herself; it is this attempt at the absolute that makes her quest so exhausting; criticized by only one voice—this hat is not beautiful—she is flattered by a compliment, but a contradiction demolishes her; and as the absolute only manifests itself in an indefinite series of appearances, she will never have entirely won; this is why the fashion-conscious woman is sensitive; it is also why some pretty and much-admired women can be sadly convinced they are neither beautiful nor elegant, that this supreme approbation of an unknown judge is exactly what is missing: they are aiming for an in-itself that is unrealizable. Rare are the gorgeous stylish women who embody in themselves the laws of elegance, whom no one can fault because they are the ones who define success or failure; as long as their reign endures, they can think of themselves as an exemplary success. What is unfortunate is that this success serves nothing and no one.

  Clothes immediately imply going out and receptions, and besides, that is their original intent. The woman parades her new outfit from place to place and invites other women to see her reign over her “interior.” In certain particularly important situations, the husband accompanies her on her “calls”; but most often she fulfills her “social obligations” while he is at work. The implacable ennui weighing on these gatherings has been described hundreds of times. It comes from the fact that these women gathered there by “social obligations” have nothing to say to each other. There is no common interest linking the lawyer’s wife to the doctor’s—and none between Dr. Dupont’s and Dr. Durand’s. It is bad taste in a general conversation to talk of one’s children’s pranks or problems with the help. What is left is discussion of the weather, the latest novel, and a few general ideas borrowed from their husbands. This custom of “calling” is tending to disappear; but the chore of the “call” in various forms survives in France. American women often replace conversation with bridge, which is an advantage only for women who enjoy this game.

  However, social life has more attractive forms than carrying out this idle duty of etiquette. Entertaining is not just welcoming others into one’s own home; it is changing one’s home into an enchanted domain; the social event is both festivity and potlatch. The mistress of the house displays her treasures: silver, ta
ble linen, crystal; she dresses the house with flowers: ephemeral and useless, flowers exemplify the gratuitousness of occasions that mean expenses and luxury; blooming in vases, doomed to a rapid death, flowers are ceremonial bonfires, incense and myrrh, libation, sacrifice. The table is laden with fine food, precious wines; it means satisfying the guests’ needs, it is a question of inventing gracious gifts that anticipate their desires; the meal becomes a mysterious ceremony. Virginia Woolf emphasizes this aspect in this passage from Mrs. Dalloway:

  And so there began a soundless and exquisite passing to and fro through swing doors of aproned white-capped maids, handmaidens not of necessity, but adepts in a mystery or grand deception practiced by hostesses in Mayfair from one-thirty to two, when, with a wave of the hand, the traffic ceases, and there rises instead this profound illusion in the first place about the food—how it is not paid for; and then that the table spreads itself voluntarily with glass and silver, little mats, saucers of red fruit; films of brown cream mask turbot; in casseroles severed chickens swim; coloured, undomestic, the fire burns; and with the wine and the coffee (not paid for) rise jocund visions before musing eyes; gently speculative eyes; eyes to whom life appears musical, mysterious.