ABSTRACT
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is widely regarded as the founding text of the modern feminist movement. In this work, Beauvoir combines her extensive reading in philosophy and literary texts with insights drawn from the French existentialist philosopher (and her lifelong partner), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), to offer a view of woman as “the Other,” a being defined not in her own right, but only as one who is regarded negatively in relation to man. “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute. She is the Other.”2 Throughout this text, and the philosophical writings and novels that surround it in her authorship, Beauvoir expresses a philosophical and ethical perspective based on the existentialist philosophy she shared with Jean-Paul Sartre. According to this, the human condition is marked by ambiguity. Each of us, regardless of our sex, plays out “[t]he same drama of flesh and spirit, and of finitude and transcendence.”3 As expressed in her well-known assertion, “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman,”4 Beauvoir contends that femininity is not a given of biology, but rather a situation produced by “civilization as a whole”5:
1 The French original reads: “Quel malheur que d’être femme! et pourtant le pire malheur quand on est femme est au fond de ne pas comprendre que c’en est un.”—Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe, vols. 1-2, Paris: Gallimard 1949, vol. 2, p. 7. (English translation: The Second Sex, trans. by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2010, p. 277.) 2 Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe, vol. 1, p. 15. (The Second Sex, p. 6.) 3 Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe, vol. 2, p. 573. (The Second Sex, p. 763.)
what singularly defines the situation of woman is that being, like all other humans, an autonomous freedom, she discovers and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as Other....Woman’s drama lies in this conflict between the fundamental claim of every subject, which always posits itself as essential; and the demands of a situation that constitutes her as inessential.6
