Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Posted: Mon, Apr 13, 2026

“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.”
• 1953 Parshley translation: “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.”
• 2011 Borde & Malovany-Chevallier translation: “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.”

So much to say:

• The most popular way of reading Beauvoir as a social constructivist is to make use of the concepts of socialization and gender roles.
  • To become a woman is to be socialized into a feminine (social) role.
  • Womanhood as a gender role 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.”
• The existentialist slogan: “Existence precedes essence.”
  • Beauvoir’s famous question: What is a woman anyway?
  • 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).
  • Womanhood is not a given, but an active, situated process of creation, of becoming; it is an individual’s (sometimes-idiosyncratic) response to the situation they find themselves in (anatomical, relational, social, political etc.).
  • 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.’ ”
• My complaints:
  • It’s not clear to me that Beauvoir has a two-way sex/gender distinction (compare, e.g., pp. 8–9 with p. 23).
  • It’s also not clear to me that Beauvoir critically affirms sex as a biological given: while a biological fact may appear necessary and not up to us, “[i]n truth, nature is no more an immutable given than is historical reality” (think muscles).
  • It’s still not clear to me that Beauvoir thinks of womanhood as a role, rather than a way of life (a “lifestyle”).

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?