The Second Sex
Le Deuxième Sexe — Beauvoir's existentialist analysis of woman as the Other, in two volumes
Tradition: French existentialism / philosophical feminism
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman — the founding text of philosophical feminism, applying existentialist freedom to the situation of women
The Second Sex is the founding work of twentieth-century philosophical feminism and one of the most consequential works of French existentialism. Across two volumes — "Facts and Myths" and "Lived Experience" — Beauvoir applies the existentialist analysis of freedom, situation, and the Other to the historical, biological, psychoanalytic, economic, and lived dimensions of being a woman. The central thesis is that woman has been constituted as the Other to man — not the second sex in some natural order, but the Other in a long historical-social-philosophical structure that the existentialist analysis of freedom now permits us to see, and which women can refuse. The book's extraordinary breadth — biology, history, literature, lived phenomenology, ethics — and the rigour of its existentialist analysis make it inseparable from twentieth-century feminist theory in every later wave.
Author
Editions cited
- The Second Sex (Constance Borde & Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Knopf, 2010 — first complete English ed.)
- The Second Sex (H. M. Parshley, Knopf, 1953 — abridged but long-standard)
School Embodiments
The Second Sex is the most extensive application of Sartrean existentialism to a single concrete social situation. Beauvoir's analysis of freedom, bad faith, the Other, and the body presupposes Being and Nothingness while extending it decisively.
"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." (The Second Sex, opening of Book II)
Beauvoir's analyses of the lived body, of immanence and transcendence, and of the situation of woman as embodied subject are sustained phenomenological investigations in dialogue with Merleau-Ponty.
"To be a woman would be to be the object, the Other, and the Other remains the subject in the heart of his renunciation." (Second Sex, vol. 2, on lived experience)
A typological resonance: Beauvoir's analysis of woman's situation in terms of historical oppression and the possibility of collective transformation shaped later feminist liberation theologies (Ruether, Schüssler Fiorenza, Mercy Amba Oduyoye), even where they reject her atheism.
"To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man." (The Second Sex, Introduction)
Beauvoir explicitly engages and partially absorbs Marxist analysis of woman's economic situation, while criticising what she sees as its reductionism. The chapter on the historical materialist viewpoint is a model of philosophical engagement and revision.
"The truth is that just as for the matchless biology of Bergson the absolute distinction of work and leisure is unintelligible, so is it for historical materialism." (Second Sex, vol. 1, on the historical materialist viewpoint)
The famous formula "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" is the canonical philosophical statement of gender as socially constructed rather than biologically given.
"No biological, psychological, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on in society." (The Second Sex, vol. 2)
Twentieth-century French feminism (Irigaray, Cixous, Wittig) and Anglo-American gender theory (Butler) both read Beauvoir as their major precursor — sometimes by extension, sometimes by critique.
"Humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him." (Second Sex, Introduction)
Beauvoir is a thoroughgoing atheist; the framework of The Second Sex is naturalist in its refusal to appeal to any metaphysical order outside human historical situations.
"The destiny that traditional society has assigned to woman is not the truth." (Second Sex, vol. 2 conclusion)
Continental-philosophical tradition.
Internal Tensions
The Second Sex is famously long, occasionally inconsistent, and built up from many sources. Beauvoir's position on femininity has been criticised in opposite directions — too pro-masculine in her assumption that transcendence is better than immanence (Toril Moi, against early Anglophone critics), or insufficiently attentive to differences among women (later intersectional feminism: bell hooks, Audre Lorde). Beauvoir's relation to Sartre — the philosophical collaboration, the ambiguous credit — has also been reconsidered in the more recent scholarly literature, with Beauvoir now generally recognised as a philosopher in her own right rather than as a Sartrean disciple.
I. Time
Time is the medium of becoming. The famous "one becomes a woman" formula is irreducibly temporal: girlhood, adolescence, marriage, maternity, ageing are analysed as lived temporal phases in which the situation of woman is progressively constituted. Time is real, relational in Beauvoir's strong existentialist sense, linear, uni-directional.
Attributes
II. Space
Space is the field of lived bodily experience — the home as the woman's assigned space, the public as the man's. Beauvoir's phenomenology of space (vol. 2) is one of the earliest feminist accounts of the spatial organisation of patriarchy.
Attributes
III. Matter
The first part of vol. 1 ("Destiny") takes biological matter seriously — Beauvoir gives the most extensive philosophical engagement with female biology in any major work of philosophy before the 1970s — without reducing the situation of woman to biological fact. Matter is real and substantival; its meaning is socially and existentially mediated.
Attributes
IV. Observer
The Beauvoirian observer is the embodied, plural, situated subject — never an abstract consciousness but always a body in a historical world. Agency is active: the central existential claim is that woman is free and can refuse the role assigned by patriarchal structures, though the situation makes this freedom hard. The metaphysical agency is None; Beauvoir is an atheist. Moral authority is constructed — values are forged, not discovered in an antecedent moral order.
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V. Energy
Not theorised philosophically. Standard background.
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VI. Information
Patriarchal myth-systems constitute woman as Other across history; vol. 1's long chapters on biology, history, and myths analyse these as a relational informational structure that is not natural but socially produced. Personal information is not conserved across death; Beauvoir shares Sartre's framework on mortality.
Attributes
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Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How The Second Sex resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 6 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.
6 mainstream positions
Matter · 7 dilemmas, all mainstream
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.