The Second Sex

“So not every female human being is necessarily a woman; she must take part in this mysterious and endangered reality known as femininity.”

Here, Beauvoir discusses the attitudes of various social commentators in her introduction. In their view, it is not enough for a human being to be born with female physical characteristics. They treat femininity as something socially constructed, meaning a set of characteristics that are determined and imposed by society.

“He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other.”

This is perhaps the closest Beauvoir comes to giving a concise definition of the Other. As Beauvoir writes, women are not the only group that could be described as the Other. Jewish people, Black people, Indigenous people, and the working class have also been Othered in relation to other groups (6). As in those cases, men set the standard and women are defined according to that standard.

“The perspective we have adopted here is one of existentialist morality. Every subject posits itself as a transcendence concretely, through projects; it accomplishes its freedom only by perpetual surpassing toward other freedoms; there is no other justification for present existence than its expansion toward an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence lapses into immanence, there is degradation of existence into ‘in-itself,’ of freedom into facticity; this fall is a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if this fall is inflicted on the subject, it takes the form of frustration and oppression; in both cases it is an absolute evil.”

Here, Beauvoir explains how her existentialist perspective influences her argument about women’s identity and oppression. Men have fewer obstacles than women preventing them from participating in transcendence, the act of gaining freedom by working toward definite goals. Instead, women often struggle with immanence, a situation where women are denied true freedom and their lives become stagnant.