ABSTRACT
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex offers a general framework for analyzing not only women’s oppression but also racism and antisemitism. Although many readers continue to find her work relevant today, The Second Sex was published in 1948, just a decade after Havelock Ellis’s death. This chapter argues that Beauvoir’s text, a product of its time, incorporates the racial gender-binary ideal, complete with its troubling racial overtones. Beauvoir is sometimes accused, as so many second-wave feminists have been, of universalizing the experience of privileged White women and understanding women’s situation primarily from this perspective. Whether or not this accusation is fair, this chapter argues that the racial gender-binary ideal, understood in philosophical rather than evolutionary terms, is central to Beauvoir’s text. Her references to indolent oriental male “others” and Eastern women confined to the harem point to a narrative of evolution, more Hegelian than Darwinian, that privileges the midcentury bourgeois, heterosexual European couple as history’s revolutionary subject.
