The Second Sex (French: Le Deuxième Sexe) is a 1949 book by the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir. One of her best-known books, it deals with the treatment of women throughout history and is often regarded as a major work of feminist philosophy and the starting point of second-wave feminism. Beauvoir researched and wrote the book in about 14 months when she was 38 years old published it in two volumes and some chapters first appeared in Les Temps modernes.The Vatican placed it on its List of Prohibited Books.
Part One "Destiny" has three chapters. The first, "Biological Data", describes the relationship of ovum to sperm in various creatures (fish, insects, mammals), leading up to the human being. She describes women's subordination to the species in terms of reproduction, compares the physiology of men and women, and ultimately declares that values cannot be based on physiology and that the facts of biology must be viewed in light of the ontological, economic, social, and physiological context.In chapter 2 "The Psychoanalytical Point of View", Beauvoir first expounds the theories of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. She then rejects them both, for example, finding that a study of eroticism in the context of perception goes beyond the capabilities of the psychoanalytic framework. In chapter 3 "The Point of View of Historical Materialism", Beauvoir relates The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State by Friedrich Engels but ultimately finds it lacking any basis or reasons for its claims to assign "the great historical defeat of the female sex" to the invention of bronze and the emergence of private property. She quotes Engels, "for now we know nothing about it" and rejects him because he "dodges" the answers.
Part Two "History" has five chapters which are unnamed in the unabridged, second translation. According to Beauvoir, two factors explain the evolution of women's condition: participation in production and freedom from reproductive slavery. In chapter 1, Beauvoir states the problem that motherhood left woman "riveted to her body" like an animal and made it possible for men to dominate her and Nature. In chapter 2, she describes man's gradual domination of women, starting with the statue of a female Great Goddess found in Susa, and eventually the opinion of ancient Greeks like Pythagoras who wrote, "There is a good principle that created order, light and man and a bad principle that created chaos, darkness and woman." Men succeed in the world by transcendence, but immanence is the lot of women. In chapter 3, explaining inheritance historically, Beauvoir says men oppress women when they seek to perpetuate the family and keep patrimony intact. A comparison follows of women's situation in ancient Greece with Rome. In Greece, with exceptions like Sparta where there were no restraints on women's freedom, women are treated almost like slaves. Menander writes, "Woman is a pain that never goes away." In Rome because men were still the masters, women enjoyed more rights but, still discriminated against on the basis of their gender, had only empty freedom.
In chapter 4, Beauvoir says that with the exception of German tradition, Christianity and its clergy served to subordinate women, quoting Paul the Apostle, Ambrose, and John Chrysostom (who wrote, "Of all the wild animals, none can be found as harmful as women.")She also describes prostitution and the changes in dynamics brought about by courtly love that occurred about the twelfth century.Beauvoir then describes from the early fifteenth century "great Italian ladies and courtesans" and singles out the Spaniard Teresa of Ávila as successfully raising "herself as high as a man."Through the nineteenth century women's legal status remained unchanged but individuals (like Marguerite de Navarre) excelled by writing and acting. Some men like Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Molière, the Marquis de Condorcet, and François Poullain de la Barre helped women's status through their works. In chapter 5, Beauvoir finds fault with the Napoleonic Code and criticizes Auguste Comte and Honoré de Balzac. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is described as an antifeminist who valued a woman at 8/27th the value of a man. The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century gave women an escape from their homes but they were paid little for their work. Beauvoir then traces the growth of trade unions and participation by women. She then examines the spread of birth control methods from ancient Egypt to the twentieth century, and then touches on the history of abortion.She then relates the history of women's suffrage in France, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany and the U.S.S.R. Beauvoir writes that women who have finally begun to feel at home on the earth like Rosa Luxemburg and Marie Curie "brilliantly demonstrate that it is not women's inferiority that has determined their historical insignificance: it is their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority".
Part Three "Myths" has three chapters. Chapter 1 is a long, wide-ranging presentation about the "everlasting disappointment" of women for the most part from a male heterosexual's point of view. It covers female menstruation, virginity, and female sexuality including copulation, marriage, motherhood, and prostitution. To illustrate man's experience of the "horror of feminine fertility", Beauvoir quotes the British Medical Journal of 1878 in which a member of the British Medical Association writes, "It is an indisputable fact that meat goes bad when touched by menstruating women." She quotes poetry by André Breton, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Michel Leiris, Paul Verlaine, Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Valéry, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and William Shakespeare (Hamlet) along with other novels, philosophers, and films (Citizen Kane).Beauvoir writes on the last page of the chapter that sexual division is maintained in homosexuality, presumably to indicate that she thinks her work applies to all humans.
Chapter 2 examines the bodies of work of five example writers, in six sections, Montherlant or the Bread of Disgust, D. H. Lawrence or Phallic Pride, Claudel or the Handmaiden of the Lord, Breton or Poetry, Stendhal or Romancing the Real, and an unnamed summary. Beauvoir writes that these "examples show that the great collective myths are reflected in each singular writer"."Feminine devotion is demanded as a duty by Montherlant and Lawrence; less arrogant, Claudel, Breton, and Stendhal admire it as a generous choice...." She finds that woman is "the privileged Other", that Other is defined in the "way the One chooses to posit himself",and:"But the only earthly destiny reserved to the woman equal, child-woman, soul sister, woman-sex, and female animal is always man."
The chapter closes with the thought, "The absence or insignificance of the female element in a body of work is symptomatic... it loses importance in a period like ours in which each individual's particular problems are of secondary import."
In Chapter 3, Beauvoir says that "mystery" is prominent among men's myths about women.She also says mystery is not confined by sex to women but instead by situation, and that it pertains to any slave.She thinks it disappeared, for example, during the eighteenth century when men however briefly considered women to be peers.To close Part One, she quotes Arthur Rimbaud who writes that hopefully one day, women can become fully human beings when man gives her her freedom.
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