The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  In spite of everything, some of these groups attain positive results. In the United States, the influence of venerated “Moms” is strong; this is explained by the leisure time their parasitic existence leaves them: and this is why it is harmful. “Knowing nothing about medicine, art, science, religion, law, sanitation,” says Philip Wylie, speaking of the American Mom, “she seldom has any especial interest in what, exactly, she is doing as a member of any of these endless organizations, so long as it is something.”4 Their effort is not integrated into a coherent and constructive plan, it does not aim at objective ends: imperiously, it tends only to show their tastes and prejudices or to serve their interests. They play a considerable role in the domain of culture, for example: it is they who buy the most books; but they read as one plays the game of solitaire; literature takes its meaning and dignity when it is addressed to individuals committed to projects, when it helps them surpass themselves toward greater horizons; it must be integrated into the movement of human transcendence; instead, woman devalues books and works of art by swallowing them into her immanence; a painting becomes a knickknack, music an old song, a novel a reverie as useless as crocheted antimacassars. It is American women who are responsible for the degradation of best sellers: these books are only intended to please, and worse to please idle women who need escape. As for their activities in general, Philip Wylie defines them like this:

  They frighten politicians to sniveling servility and they terrify pastors; they bother bank presidents and they pulverize school boards. Mom has many such organizations, the real purpose of which is to compel an abject compliance of her environs to her personal desires … she drives out of the town and the state, if possible, all young harlots … she causes bus lines to run where they are convenient for her rather than for workers … throws prodigious fairs and parties for charity and gives the proceeds … to the janitor to buy the committee some beer for its headache on the morning after … clubs afford mom an infinite opportunity for nosing into other people’s business.

  There is much truth in this aggressive satire. Not being specialized in politics or economics or any technical discipline, old women have no concrete hold on society; they are unaware of the problems action poses; they are incapable of elaborating a constructive program. Their morality is abstract and formal, like Kant’s imperatives; they issue prohibitions instead of trying to discover the paths of progress; they do not positively try to create new situations; they attack what already exists in order to do away with the evil in it; this explains why they are always forming coalitions against something—against alcohol, prostitution, or pornography—they do not understand that a purely negative effort is doomed to be unsuccessful, as evidenced by the failure of prohibition in America or the law in France voted by Marthe Richard. As long as woman remains a parasite, she cannot effectively participate in the building of a better world.

  It does happen that in spite of everything, some women entirely committed to a cause truly have an impact; these women are not merely seeking to keep themselves busy, they have ends in view; autonomous producers, they escape from the parasitic category we are considering here: but this conversion is rare. In their private or public activities, most women do not aim for a goal that can be reached but for a way to keep busy: and no occupation is meaningful if it is only a pastime. Many of them suffer from this; with a life already behind them, they feel the same distress as adolescent boys whose lives have not yet opened up; nothing is calling them, around them both is a desert; faced with any action, they murmur: What’s the use? But the adolescent boy is drawn, willingly or not, into a man’s existence that reveals responsibilities, goals, and values; he is thrown into the world, he takes a stand, he becomes committed. If it is suggested to the older woman that she begin to move toward the future, she responds sadly: it’s too late. It is not that her time is limited from here on: a woman is made to retire very early; but she lacks the drive, confidence, hope, and anger that would allow her to discover new goals in her own life. She takes refuge in the routine that has always been her lot; she makes repetition her system, she throws herself into household obsessions; she becomes more deeply religious; she becomes rigidly stoic, like Mme de Charrière. She becomes brittle, indifferent, egotistical.

  The old woman often finds serenity toward the end of her life when she has given up the fight, when death’s approach frees her from anxiety about the future. Her husband was often older than she, she witnesses his decline with silent complacency: it is her revenge; if he dies first, she cheerfully bears the mourning; it has often been observed that men are far more overwhelmed by being widowed late in life: they profit more from marriage than women do, and particularly in their old age, because then the universe is concentrated within the limits of the home; the present does not spill over into the future: it is their wife who assures their monotonous rhythm and reigns over them; when he loses his public functions, man becomes totally useless; woman continues at least to run the home; she is necessary to her husband, whereas he is only a nuisance. Women are proud of their independence, they finally begin to view the world through their own eyes; they realize they have been duped and mystified their whole lives; now lucid and wary, they often attain a delicious cynicism. In particular, the woman who “has lived” has a knowledge of men that no man shares: for she has seen not their public image but the contingent individual that every one of them lets show in the absence of their counterparts; she also knows women, who only show themselves in their spontaneity to other women: she knows what happens behind the scenes. But even if her experience allows her to denounce mystifications and lies, it is not enough to reveal the truth to her. Whether she is amused or bitter, the old woman’s wisdom still remains completely negative: it is contestation, accusation, refusal; it is sterile. In her thoughts as in her acts, the highest form of freedom a woman-parasite can have is stoic defiance or skeptical irony. At no time in her life does she succeed in being both effective and independent.

  1. Cf. Volume I, Chapter 1. [In Part One, “Destiny.”—TRANS.]

  2. In August 1925, a sixty-year-old bourgeois woman from the North, Mme Lefebvre, who lived with her husband and her children, killed her daughter-in-law, six months pregnant, during a car trip while her son was driving. Condemned to death and then pardoned, she spent the rest of her life in a reformatory where she showed no remorse; she believed God approved of her when she killed her daughter-in-law “as one kills a weed, a bad seed, as one kills a savage beast.” The only savagery she gave as proof was that the young woman one day said to her: “You have me now, so you now have to take me into account.” It was when she suspected her daughter-in-law’s pregnancy that she bought a revolver, supposedly to defend herself against robbers. After her menopause, she was desperately attached to her maternity: for twelve years she had suffered from malaises that manifested themselves symbolically in an imaginary pregnancy.

  3. “The City Coat of Arms.”

  4. Generation of Vipers.

  | CHAPTER 10 |

  Woman’s Situation and Character

  We can now understand why, from ancient Greece to today, there are so many common features in the indictments against woman; her condition has remained the same throughout superficial changes, and this condition defines what is called the woman’s “character”: she “wallows in immanence,” she is argumentative, she is cautious and petty, she does not have the sense either of truth or of accuracy, she lacks morality, she is vulgarly self-serving, selfish, she is a liar and an actress. There is some truth in all these affirmations. But the types of behaviors denounced are not dictated to woman by her hormones or predestined in her brain’s compartments: they are suggested in negative form by her situation. We will attempt to take a synthetic point of view of her situation, necessarily leading to some repetition, but making it possible to grasp the Eternal Feminine in her economic, social, and historical conditioning as a whole.

  The “feminine world” is sometimes contrasted with the masculine
universe, but it must be reiterated that women have never formed an autonomous and closed society; they are integrated into the group governed by males, where they occupy a subordinate position; they are united by a mechanical solidarity only insofar as they are similar: they do not share that organic solidarity upon which any unified community is founded; they have always endeavored—in the period of the Eleusinian mysteries just like today in clubs, salons, and recreation rooms—to band together to assert a “counter-universe,” but it is still within the masculine universe that they frame it. And this is where the paradox of their situation comes in: they belong both to the male world and to a sphere in which this world is challenged; enclosed in this sphere, involved in the male world, they cannot peacefully establish themselves anywhere. Their docility is always accompanied by refusal, their refusal by acceptance; this is similar to the girl’s attitude; but it is more difficult to maintain because it is no longer simply a question of the adult woman dreaming her life through symbols, but of living it.

  The woman herself recognizes that the universe as a whole is masculine; it is men who have shaped it and ruled it and who still today dominate it; as for her, she does not consider herself responsible for it; it is understood that she is inferior and dependent; she has not learned the lessons of violence, she has never emerged as a subject in front of other members of the group; enclosed in her flesh, in her home, she grasps herself as passive opposite to these human-faced gods who set goals and standards. In this sense there is truth in the saying that condemns her to remaining “an eternal child”; it has also been said of workers, black slaves, and colonized natives that they were “big children” as long as they were not threatening; that meant they had to accept without argument the truths and laws that other men gave them. Woman’s lot is obedience and respect. She has no grasp, even in thought, on this reality that involves her. It is an opaque presence in her eyes. That means she has not learned the technology that would enable her to dominate matter; as for her, she is not fighting with matter but with life, and life cannot be mastered by tools: one can only submit to its secret laws. The world does not appear to the woman as a “set of tools” halfway between her will and her goals, as Heidegger defines it: on the contrary, it is a stubborn, indomitable resistance; it is dominated by fate and run through with mysterious caprices. No mathematics can make an equation out of this mystery of a spot of blood that changes into a human being in the mother’s womb, no machine can rush it or slow it down; she experiences the resistance of a duration that the most ingenious machines fail to divide or multiply; she experiences it in her flesh that is subjected to the rhythm of the moon, and that the years first ripen and then corrode. Daily cooking teaches her patience and passivity; it is alchemy; one must obey fire, water, “wait for the sugar to melt,” the dough to rise, and also the clothes to dry, the fruit to ripen. Housework comes close to a technical activity; but it is too rudimentary, too monotonous, to convince the woman of the laws of mechanical causality. Besides, even in this area, things are capricious; there is material that “revives” and material that does not “revive” in the wash, spots that come out and others that persist, objects that break on their own, dust that grows like plants. Woman’s mentality perpetuates that of agricultural civilizations that worship the earth’s magical qualities: she believes in magic. Her passive eroticism reveals her desire not as will and aggression but as an attraction similar to that which makes the dowser’s pendulum quiver; the mere presence of her flesh makes the male sex swell and rise; why should hidden water not make the dowser’s wand jump? She feels surrounded by waves, radiation, fluid; she believes in telepathy, astrology, divination, Mesmer’s baquet, theosophy, table turning, mind readers, and healers; she introduces primitive superstitions into religion—candles, exvotos, and such—she embodies ancient spirits of nature in the saints—this one protects travelers, that one women who have just given birth, another one finds lost objects—and of course no marvel surprises her. Her attitude will be that of conjuration and prayer; to obtain a certain result, she will follow certain time-tested rites. It is easy to understand why she is ruled by routine; time has no dimension of novelty for her, it is not a creative spring; because she is doomed to repetition, she does not see in the future anything but a duplication of the past; if one knows the word and the recipe, duration is allied with the powers of fecundity: but this too obeys the rhythm of months and seasons; the cycle of each pregnancy, of each flowering, reproduces the preceding one identically; in this circular movement, time’s sole becoming is slow degradation: it eats at furniture and clothes just as it disfigures the face; fertile powers are destroyed little by little by the flight of years. So the woman does not trust this force driven to destroy.

  Not only is she unaware of what real action is, that is able to change the face of the world, but she is lost in the middle of this world as in the heart of an immense and confused mass. She does not know how to use masculine logic well. Stendhal noted that she handles it as skillfully as man if she has to. But it is an instrument she does not often have the occasion to use. A syllogism is not useful in making mayonnaise or calming a child’s tears; masculine reasoning is not relevant to the reality she experiences. And in the man’s world, since she does not do anything, her thinking, as it does not flow into any project, is no different from a dream; she does not have the sense of truth, because she lacks efficacy; she struggles only by means of images and words: that is why she accepts the most contradictory assertions without a problem; she does not care about clarifying the mysteries of a sphere, which in any case is beyond her scope; she settles for horribly vague knowledge when it concerns her: she confuses parties, opinions, places, people, and events; there is a strange jumble in her head. But after all, seeing clearly is not her business: she was taught to accept masculine authority; she thus forgoes criticizing, examining, and judging for herself. She leaves it to the superior caste. This is why the masculine world seems to be a transcendent reality, an absolute to her. “Men make gods,” says Frazer, “and women worship them.” Men cannot kneel with total conviction in front of idols they themselves have created, but when women come across these imposing statues on their path, they cannot imagine any hand making them, and they meekly bow down before them.1 They specifically like Law and Order to be embodied in a chief. In all Olympus, there is one sovereign god; the prestigious virile essence must be gathered in one archetype of which father, husband, and lovers are merely vague reflections. It is somewhat humorous to say that their worship of this great totem is sexual; what is true is that women fully realize their infantile dream of abdication and prostration. In France, the generals Boulanger, Pétain, and de Gaulle have always had the support of women;2 one remembers the purple prose of L’Humanité’s women journalists when writing about Tito and his beautiful uniform. The general or the dictator—eagle eye, prominent chin—is the celestial father the serious universe demands, the absolute guarantor of all values. The respect women grant to heroes and to the masculine world’s laws stems from their powerlessness and ignorance; they acknowledge these laws not through judgment but through an act of faith: faith draws its fanatical power from the fact that it is not knowledge: it is blind, passionate, stubborn, and stupid; what it puts forward is done unconditionally, against reason, against history, against all refutation. This stubborn reverence can take two forms depending on circumstances: sometimes it is the content of the law and sometimes the empty form alone that the woman passionately abides by. If she belongs to the privileged elite that profits from the given social order, she wants it unshakable, and she is seen as intransigent. The man knows he can reconstruct other institutions, another ethics, another code; grasping himself as transcendence, he also envisages history as a becoming; even the most conservative knows that some change is inevitable and that he has to adapt his action and thinking to it; as the woman does not participate in history, she does not understand its necessities; she mistrusts the future and wants to stop time. If the idols
her father, brothers, and husband propose are knocked down, she cannot imagine any way of repopulating the heavens; she is determined to defend them. Among the Southerners during the Civil War, no one was as passionately in favor of slavery as the women; in England during the Boer War, and in France against the Commune, it was the women who were the most enraged; they seek to compensate for their inaction by the force of the feelings they display; in victory they are as wild as hyenas against the beaten enemy; in defeat, they bitterly refuse any arrangement; as their ideas are only attitudes, they do not mind defending the most outdated causes: they can be legitimists in 1914, tsarists in 1949. Sometimes the man smilingly encourages them: it pleases him to see his measured opinions reflected in a fanatical form; but sometimes he is also bothered by the stupid and stubborn way his own ideas are transformed.