Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex II

Posted: Wed, Mar 4, 2026

Today

• Questions on the first response paper? [10 min]
• Loose ends [10 min]
• The famous sentence
• What now? [save 20 min]

The sentence that set the world on fire

“On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.” [Elsa]

• 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.”
  • 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”).

In-class activity

Focusing on the chapter on love (pp. 683–708), which passages invite a social constructivist reading and which invite an existentialist reading? In what ways is Beauvoir the social constructivist different from Beauvoir the existentialist?

N.B. Beauvoir is describing the world in order to critique it; she is not endorsing the status quo.

Beauvoir the political lesbian??

Heterosexuality is not merely required of women; it is what being a woman means by dominant definition.

• The 1968 Linda LeClair scandal: It is unbecoming of a woman not to conform to rules of heterosexuality.
  • Compare: It is wrong for an Instagram influencer to steal another’s idea; it is not unbecoming of them as an Instagram influencer in the same way plagiarism is unbecoming of a scholar.
• Barnard’s role as guardians of our daughters in loco parentis
• Dress codes & curfew rules

Heterosexual love is sold to women as a path to salvation/transcendence, but it’s a scam. [Maria]

• Men have access to freedom, and so the woman chooses to use herself as an offering, to serve a man, and hope that he will free her.
• For the woman to love (heterosexually) is for her to be desired by men, to be loved by men, to be fucked by men, … , to devote “everything she is, everything she has, every second of her life” to him, to “los[e] herself in him”[Bobby vs. Shania & Joselyn]
• So then “when the male is not using this object that she is for him, she is absolutely nothing”—“boredom.”
• But ultimately men are interested in other consciousnesses, not things; love requires lovers to see and treat each other as equals.
• Also, men are not gods and cannot set women free (“You shouldn’t believe in Prince Charming. Men are just poor things.”).

The problem: Being a free human being is incompatible with being a woman (pp. 5–6, 723–25).

• But I am powerless to change the social definition of womanhood, and I still need to live my life—and I still want to be free.

Lesbian love is between equals.

• Being a lesbian isn’t a natural perversion; lesbians are just like “normal” women except that lesbians respond to the situation/circumstances of women’s immanence not by worshipping men but rejecting them.
• Indeed, given “the limitations her sex imposes on her,” the right question to ask “is not why she rejects them: the real problem is rather to understand why she accepts them” (p. 422).
• The lesbian appears “masculine” (e.g., wearing plain pants rather than flowery dresses) because they are actually most human, except that humanity is socially constructed as masculine.