The Second Sex was considered a revolutionary text when it was written. The content was such that only a bold author would dare to publicize a book of that nature, and Simone de Beauvoir took that challenge. It wasn’t an easy book for her to write. But with thorough research and meticulous care, she has produced one of the most comprehensive feminist texts that helped inaugurate the second-wave feminism.
“One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.”
This is Simone’s argument. She firmly states that gender is a social construction rather than a biological reality. It’s the limited resources and choices that society accords to women that decapitate her and reduce her role to a secondary position. To back up her point, she examines women’s position from biological, psychological, mythological, sociological, historical, literary, and philosophical perspectives as well as through lived experience as a child, young girl, married woman, mother, etc., using extracts from various researchers to prove her argument.
Simone admits that biologically, pregnancy, giving birth, and menstruation can limit women’s capacity to serve the species to the extent of men, but refuses to accept this limitation as the true cause for women being the second sex. It’s the domestic role that is fixed on women by society, and its continuous prejudice and blindness to see women’s potential beyond the domestic threshold is what restricts women to the secondary role. Simone is quite satirical about the society’s hypocritical acceptance that men are more needed for the future progress of the world when it’s women who procreate, saying that throughout humanity, superiority has been granted not to the sex that gives birth but to the one that kills.
However, Simone’s strongest attack on women’s position comes through her existentialist philosophy. She points out that in our patriarchal society, man is defined as a subject and woman as the object. The man is the “one”, the absolute being, whereas the woman is the “other”, the inessential being. Men, as subjects, hold the power to create the future (transcendence), while women, as objects, are limited to a passive, stagnant, and repetitive state of domesticity (immanence). Simone saw that economic and social emancipation as the only way to women’s metamorphosis from immanence to transcendence.
Female oppression is unproductive and negative to society. Simone proves this painstakingly with evidence. The ideal solution is to treat both sexes as equals at the same time, understanding the inequalities within equality.
“If men were content to love a peer instead of a slave, as indeed some men do who are without either arrogance or an inferiority complex…,” she writes.
There is something important one should remember when reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This comprehensive text was written in 1949 and depicted women’s position at the time, so some of it can feel dated. Women have made more progress since that time. Yet, most of her psychological observations about women are true even today. One can clearly see that women are still far behind the “peer” status Simone envisioned. And that makes all her observations and arguments valid and interesting. Simone also probes thoroughly into male psychology, in addition to female psychology, since all arguments in favour of women’s emancipation are relative to the male. I found that quite educational.
The Second Sex is an important feminist work. And Simone is quite thorough in her arguments, heavily backing them with evidence from various sources. Nevertheless, reading the text was not easy at all. It took me nearly one and a half months to get through it. The grim reality of women’s position, repetitively stressed, was not something easy to stomach as a woman. I had to take a considerable number of breaks to charge my batteries. All the same, it was a worthy read.
Rating: 4/5
