Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Posted: Wed, Nov 19, 2025

Beauvoir’s Famous Question: What Is a Woman Anyway?

Is it even a question? “Very simple, say those who like simple answers: She is a womb, an ovary; she is a female” (p. 21).

  • But this can’t be right: It fails to explain how we in fact think and talk about womanhood (p. 3).
  • Rather, being a woman has to do with this “femininity” business: “So not every female human being is necessarily a woman; she must take part in this mysterious and endangered reality known as femininity” (p. 3).
    • What does she mean by this?
    • “Must”: Moral requirement vs. necessary condition.

Is it a significant question?

  • Think about: Would a man go about answering “what is a man” the same way a woman would go about answering “what is a woman”?
  • Asking the question enables one to see the relation between man and human as a particularity misrepresenting a universality: “He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other” (p. 6).
    • Focusing on the paragraph on pp. 5–6, what do you think Beauvoir means when she characterizes woman as the Other? What does it mean to be the Other Sex?

How did this happen?

  • Trick question! Women’s subordination “is not the consequence of an event or a becoming, it did not happen” (p. 8, her emphasis); it is ahistorical.
    • Women are—and have always been—the Other.
    • Did it not happen though? Notice how Beauvoir implicit codes women as white and bourgeois, whereas Black people, proletarians, Jewish people, and Indigenous people are presumed to be male.
  • But women are also not the Other because of biology.
    • Even sexual reproductive does not require a binary system of sex categorization (pp. 21ff).
    • Biological facts “do not carry their meaning in themselves” (p. 46); what matters is the meaning that we ascribe to biology.
  • Beauvoir’s answer: “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.”
    • Literal translation: “One is not born woman; one becomes it.”
    • Popular translation: “Women are made, not born.”
    • Parshley translation: “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.”
    • Borde & Malovany-Chevallier translation: “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.”

Beauvoir: The Social Constructivist vs. the Existentialist

The social constructivist reading: Gender is the social meaning of sex understood as reproductive biology.

  • To become a woman is to be socialized into the (social) institution of womanhood.
  • Womanhood as an institution exists prior to the self; the self is inducted into it.
  • B & M-C: “ ‘Woman’ in English used alone without an article captures woman as an institution, a concept, femininity as determined and defined by society, culture, history.”
    • Even if one is sympathetic to the social constructivist reading, does it really make sense to say any particular individual becomes woman the social institution?

The existentialist reading: Gender is an individual’s response to sex as a situation.

  • Existence precedes essence: Womanhood is not a given, but an active, situated process of creation, of becoming; it is an individual’s (sometimes-idiosyncratic) response to the (anatomical, relational, social, political etc.) situation in which they find themselves.
  • Bonnie Mann explains that “to ‘become’ a woman is not the same as to be made into one, as if one were exclusively a passive object being acted on by external social forces. . . . To ‘become’ is to actively take up one’s social condition in a way that is, at least potentially, spontaneous, creative and free. . . . On this view, Beauvoir could never be understood to have claimed that ‘women are made not born.’ ”
    • ~Bell’s account of authentic gender.

Let’s work through two examples:

  • Peeing standing up (pp. 286–87)
  • The doll (pp. 292–94)

What are some passages that invite a social constructivist reading? Which passages seem to invite an existentialist reading? Does it matter how we read Beauvoir?