The second sex

The Second Sex (French: Le Deuxième Sexe) is a 1949 book by the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir. One of her best-known books, it deals with the treatment of women throughout history and is often regarded as a major work of feminist philosophy and the starting point ofsecond-wave feminism.

History

According to Beauvoir, two factors explain the evolution of women's condition: participation in production and freedom from reproductive slavery , Beauvoir states the problem that motherhood left woman "riveted to her body" like an animal and made it possible for men to dominate her and Nature , she describes man's gradual domination of women, starting with the statue of a female Great Goddess found in Susa, and eventually the opinion of ancient Greeks like Pythagoras who wrote, "There is a good principle that created order, light and man and a bad principle that created chaos, darkness and woman." Men succeed in the world by transcendence, but immanence is the lot of women, explaining inheritance historically, Beauvoir says men oppress women when they seek to perpetuate the family and keep patrimony intact. A comparison follows of women's situation in ancient Greece with Rome. In Greece, with exceptions like Sparta where there were no restraints on women's freedom, women are treated almost like slaves. Menander writes, "Woman is a pain that never goes away." In Rome because men were still the masters, women enjoyed more rights but, still discriminated against on the basis of their gender, had only empty freedom.

Beauvoir says that with the exception of German tradition, Christianity and its clergy served to subordinate women, quoting Paul the Apostle, Ambrose, and John Chrysostom (who wrote, "Of all the wild animals, none can be found as harmful as women.") She also describes prostitution and the changes in dynamics brought about by courtly love that occurred about the twelfth century. Beauvoir then describes from the early fifteenth century "great Italian ladies and courtesans" and singles out the Spaniard Teresa of Ávila as successfully raising "herself as high as a man."^[ Through the nineteenth century women's legal status remained unchanged but individuals  excelled by writing and acting. Some men like Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa,Molière, the Marquis de Condorcet, and François Poullain de la Barre helped women's status through their works. TheIndustrial Revolution of the nineteenth century gave women an escape from their homes but they were paid little for their work. Beauvoir then traces the growth of trade unions and participation by women. She then examines the spread of birth control methods from ancient Egypt to the twentieth century, and then touches on the history ofabortion. She then relates the history of women's suffrage in France, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany and the U.S.S.R. Beauvoir writes that women who have finally begun to feel at home on the earth like Rosa Luxemburg and Marie Curie "brilliantly demonstrate that it is not women's inferiority that has determined their historical insignificance: it is their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority".

Myths

"Myths" has three chapters. Chapter one is a long, wide-ranging presentation about the "everlasting disappointment" of women for the most part from a male heterosexual's point of view. It covers femalemenstruation, virginity, and female sexuality including copulation, marriage, motherhood, and prostitution. To illustrate man's experience of the "horror of feminine fertility", Beauvoir quotes the British Medical Journal of 1878 in which a member of the British Medical Association writes, "It is an indisputable fact that meat goes bad when touched by menstruating women." She quotes poetry by André Breton, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Michel Leiris, Paul Verlaine,Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Valéry, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and William Shakespeare (Hamlet) along with other novels, philosophers, and films (Citizen Kane)Beauvoir writes on the last page of the chapter that sexual division is maintained in homosexuality, presumably to indicate that she thinks her work applies to all humans

Chapter two examines the bodies of work of five example writers, in six sections, Montherlant or the Bread of Disgust, D. H. Lawrence or Phallic Pride, Claudel or the Handmaiden of the Lord, Breton or Poetry, Stendhal or Romancing the Real, and an unnamed summary. Beauvoir writes that these "examples show that the great collective myths are reflected in each singular writer" "Feminine devotion is demanded as a duty by Montherlant and Lawrence; less arrogant, Claudel, Breton, and Stendhal admire it as a generous choice...."^[  She finds that woman is "the privileged Other", that Other is defined in the "way the One chooses to posit himself",and:

"But the only earthly destiny reserved to the woman equal, child-woman, soul sister, woman-sex, and female animal is always man."

The chapter closes with the thought, "The absence or insignificance of the female element in a body of work is symptomatic... it loses importance in a period like ours in which each individual's particular problems are of secondary import."

In Chapter three, Beauvoir says that "mystery" is prominent among men's myths about women. She also says mystery is not confined by sex to women but instead by situation, and that it pertains to any slave. She thinks it disappeared, for example, during the eighteenth century when men however briefly considered women to be peers. To close Part One, she quotes Arthur Rimbaud who writes that hopefully one day, women can become fully human beings when man gives her her freedom.

Formative Years

Part One has four chapters. In chapter one  "Childhood", sometimes quoting Colette Audry, Helene Deutsch, Thyde Monnier, and Dr. W. Liepmann Beauvoir presents a child's life beginning with birth and attachment to maternal flesh.She contrasts a girl's upbringing with a boy's, who at age 3 or 4 is told he is a "little man".   A girl is taught to be a woman and her "feminine" destiny is imposed on her by her teachers and society. She has, for example, no innate "maternal instinct".  A girl comes to believe in and to worship a male god and to create imaginary adult lovers. The discovery of sex is a "phenomenon as painful as weaning" and she views it with disgust. When she discovers that men, not women, are the masters of the world the revelation "imperiously modifies her consciousness of herself". Beauvoir concludes this chapter with a description of puberty and starting menstruation as well as the way girls imagine sex with a man.

In chapter two "The Girl", Beauvoir describes ways that girls in their late teens accept their "femininity". Girls might do this by running away from home, through fascination with the disgusting, by following nature, or by stealing.Chapter three "Sexual Initiation" is a description of sexual relations with men. Along with numbers of psychiatrists, Beauvoir believed that the repercussions of the first of these experiences informs a woman's whole life. Chapter four "The Lesbian" is a description of sexual relations with women, which Beauvoir believed that society thought was a "forbidden path"^]She wrote that "homosexuality is no more a deliberate perversion than a fatal curse^]

Situation

"Situation" has six chapters. In chapter five "The Married Woman" Beauvoir demonstrates her negative thoughts about marriage saying that "to ask two spouses bound by practical, social and moral ties to satisfy each other sexually for their whole lives is pure absurdity"  Beauvoir says a woman finds her dignity only in accepting her vassalage which is bed "service" and housework "service".A woman is weaned away from her family and finds only "disappointment" on the day after her wedding. Beauvoir points out various inequalities between a wife and husband (in, for example, age) and finds they pass the time not in love but in "conjugal love".She thinks that marriage "almost always destroys woman. She states that the issue of abortion is not an issue of morality but of “masculine sadism” toward woman. The following fourteen pages describe pregnancy. Pregnancy is viewed as both a gift and a curse to woman. In this new creation of a new life the woman loses her Self, seeing herself as "no longer anything...[but] a passive instrument" When she arrives at children, Beauvoir continues in negative mode with, "maternal sadomasochism creates guilt feelings for the daughter that will express themselves in sadomasochistic behavior toward her own children, without end". She finishes with an appeal for socialist child rearing practices, "in a properly organized society where the child would in great part be taken charge of by the group".

Then "Social Life", Beauvoir describes a woman's clothes, her girlfriends and her relationships with priests, doctors, famous performers, and lovers concluding that "adultery, friendships, and social life are but diversions within married life". She also thinks, "marriage, by frustrating women's erotic satisfaction, denies them the freedom and individuality of their feelings, drives them to adultery".

"Woman's Situation and Character", Beauvoir says a woman knows how to be as active, effective and silent as a man She says Stendhal said that woman handles masculine logic "as skillfully as man if she has to"But her situation keeps her being useful, preparing food, clothes, and lodging. She worries because she does not doanything, she complains, she cries, and she may threaten suicide. She protests but doesn't escape her lotShe may achieve happiness in "Harmony" and the "Good" as illustrated by Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield She is the target of religion Beauvoir thinks it is pointless to try to decide whether woman is superior or inferior, and that it is obvious that the man's situation is "infinitely preferable" She writes, "for woman there is no other way out than to work for her liberation"

The Second Sex is:

primarily a middle-class document, so distorted by autobiographical influences that the individual problems of the writer herself may assume an exaggerated importance in her discussion of femininity

Classicist David M. Halperin writes that Beauvoir gives an idealized account of sexual relations between women, suggesting that they reveal with particular clarity the mutuality of erotic responsiveness that characterizes women's eroticism

Literary scholar Camille Paglia praised The Second Sex, calling it "brilliant" and "the supreme work of modern feminism."

The Second Sex as one of the influences on her 1990 work of literary criticism Sexual Personae, writes that most modern feminists do not realize the extent to which their work has simply repeated or qualified its arguments Millett commented in 1989 that she did not realize the extent to which she was indebted to Beauvoir when she wrote Sexual Politics.

Sexual Politics is a 1969 book by Kate Millett. Based on her PhDdissertation, it is a classic feminist text, said to be "the first book of academic feminist literary criticism", and "one of the first feminist books of this decade to raise nationwide male ire".

Sexual Politics was an important theoretical touchstone for the second wave feminism of the 1970s. It was also extremely controversial. Norman Mailer, whose work, especially his 1965 novel An American Dream, had been criticised by Millett, wrote the article “The Prisoner of Sex” in Harper's Magazine in response, attacking Millett's claims and defending Miller and Lawrence, and later extensively attacked her writings in his non-fiction book of the same name. Richard Webster writes that Millett's "analysis of the reactionary character of psychoanalysis" was inspired bySimone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. Juliet Mitchell argues that Millett, like many other feminists, misread Freud and misunderstood the implications of psychoanalytic theory for feminism.