The Second Sex

"This is a huge work and I wonder how many women now actually read it. What’s fundamental to it is that Simone de Beauvoir is the first person to make the distinction between sex and gender. We might be physically different but the idea of the feminine and the masculine is a cultural thing. You’re born a woman, but actually you become the woman that the culture you live in expects you to be. In making that distinction between sex and gender – gender being what’s forced on you by the society in which you live, and sex being your biological being – she drew attention to how much of what she thought women had to contend with was actually something that society imposed and not in any sense innate. It’s a vast work with many different aspects, but one thing she focuses on is childbirth. Rather naively, I think, from our 21st century perspective, she thought that as long as contraception was available, so that women could have sexual lives without conceiving if they didn’t want to, it would all be all right. She also thought excellent free childcare would improve women’s situation, and that if both those things happened, men and women could compete on an equal footing. Absolutely. Having a family isn’t quite like that and in part that is still a cultural issue. It still seems to be more difficult for men to vary their career paths than women and women still do the bulk of childcare. But I think it was an immensely influential and important book. It went on to the Catholic index because of her views on abortion, but it did open up all sorts of really important debates that take off in the 1950s and 60s. Although there are so many ironies – she wrote this extraordinary and wonderful work in the 1940s, yet in the 1960s, in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover legal case, the chief prosecutor said, “Is this a book you would want your servants or your wife to read?” So during the so-called swinging sixties, there were still people around who thought that women should be prevented from reading a novel! I haven’t actually read it and I ought to read it to see whether this is actually the case. But I do sometimes wonder, with the power of advertising now, whether there aren’t vast numbers of books which, if they were given that sort of publicity, would also be read very widely. To some extent we like reading what other people are reading, so we can talk about our reading. I’m not sure that is the case. There are images from the 18th century of women reading novels with their hands under their skirts, so this type of thing has been around for a very long time. I think the relationship between erotic excitement and the novel goes back a very long way. They are certainly more varied for the privileged amongst us. If you live in Europe or North America, for instance, you have access to almost everything. You can buy second-hand books over the web or new books that are discounted. Having said that, I think sometimes we don’t make the most of that choice and tend to get stuck in a genre and that we should experiment a bit more with the things we read. Of course, we shouldn’t forget there are 800 million illiterates in the world and two thirds of them are women. I am trying to give some support to Book Aid International, a UK charity which promotes literacy in sub-Saharan Africa, because I was shocked at the extent of the illiteracy. So when we talk about readers’ habits there couldn’t be a bigger difference between those of us who are the most privileged women readers and those who are the least privileged."

"She asserts that women are made, not born. Her arguments are very interesting and it is interesting to consider her views. But I have watched my three-year-old grandchildren – twins, a girl and a boy – since they first emerged from the womb, and they have been raised the same, yet the boy started saying ‘car, car, car’ and the girl started saying ‘pink, pink, pink’. They are three years old, but Darwin is fiercely masculine and Beatrice is fiercely feminine. Watching them grow, I doubt Simone de Beauvoir’s point. I don’t think we’re making her a girly-girl; I think she came out of the womb a girly-girl. Darwin is very interesting because he loves putting babies to bed. He lines the babies up in a row, the dolls and toys, and he says, ‘Now I will read to them.’ He’s mad for cars and trains, but he understands that boys can put babies to bed and read to them. Their daddy reads to them and is the model for what daddies do. This book was viciously attacked, like many classics, when it first appeared. The French literary world is incredibly sexist and here was one of their darlings pointing out how much they discriminate. It’s just like Tahrir Square in Egypt – freedom is for everyone, but not for women. Simone de Beauvoir pointed that out in a million ways. It is a seminal text for feminists to read, even for the sake of arguing with it. She deals with the sexism that still exists in the literary world. The irony of it is that women are the ones who read novels. If you sit on an airplane, the women are reading novels while the men are reading business books. So it’s ridiculous. And the guys who write for the TLS! When Fear of Flying came out, Martin Amis, Paul Theroux all those literary chaps ganged up on me and wrote the most horrible things. Remember that when Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre, one of the reviewers wrote, ‘I would not hire Jane Eyre as a governess.’ This is how women’s fiction is received. Well, they’re defending their territory. They believe the world belongs to them; they believe the phallic pencil belongs to them; but more than all of that, remember that, for centuries, male writers wanted women to be their muses. They don’t want us competing. Ha! Well, when you’re 15 you know you can get anything from men. I have to say that goes on in our lives until we’re at least 40. When led by their cocks, men are so incredibly foolish, which is sad because they do sometimes go for women who rob them blind. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I’m sure you still look beautiful and I’m a great believer in doing everything you can to continue to look beautiful, but you have to understand that the most important thing a woman has is confidence. If you are gorgeous but have no confidence in yourself, then it doesn’t look good. I mean it. The most important thing is to know your own worth. How old are your kids now? That’s so true of many boys. It’s hard to be a woman and it’s hard to be a man. Both are true. It’s hard to be a human being."

"This was published in 1949, and it was so controversial when it was released that the Vatican banned it because it gave so many details about women’s experiences and women’s bodies. Beauvoir argued that we need to be free from oppression in order to be free to live and love authentically. The problem is that women, throughout most of history, have been subordinate to men. Not because of any particular struggle, but because women have accepted the story that it is in their best interest and that their highest destiny is to get married, to be a mother and housewife, and to raise children – all under the guise of love. “All too often marriage has been a socially acceptable form of slavery” Marriage has been marketed to women as being of such importance that women came to be defined by whether and to whom they were married, but all too often it has been a socially acceptable form of slavery: housekeeping in return for financial guardianship. The existential problem is that it imposes roles on women that they did not actively choose. If they’re forced into it, it’s oppression, and if they go along with it blindly, then they’re evading the existential responsibility for being agents in their own lives. It was a critique of romantic love, but also a critique of those who find their meaning in life second-hand through other people rather than creating it themselves. So that can be through romantic love, like people who define themselves through their partners. But there are other ways that people can use love to escape being what Beauvoir called ‘sovereign subjects’ – through narcissism, mysticism, and motherhood. For example, the ideal of maternal love is supposed to involve self-sacrifice: the greater the sacrifice, the more ideal the mother. If a mother turns herself into being a slave to her children, deriving all meaning in her life from them at the expense of her own projects, then that presents a potential existential problem. No, of course it’s okay to love your children and be proud of them. However, I do think she underestimated the meaning that children do bring to parents’ lives. Beauvoir did not have children, and I sometimes wonder if her philosophy would have been different if she had. Yet, her point was that if children become the only meaning in a person’s life, then that’s a problem. One of the things Beauvoir didn’t go into was that sometimes people take some time out to do that sort of thing, and then go back to their other projects. Beauvoir was writing in the 1940s when fewer women were in the workforce, but she makes an excellent point: she wrote The Second Sex almost 70 years ago, but we’re still seeing statistics that show women’s careers suffer much more than men’s when they have children. Now, economic independence isn’t the only path to freedom, but she was right that it can make it easier. Beauvoir was well aware that existentialism had a reputation for being negative, but I think her vision of authentic love is positive – and it applies to all kinds of love, not only romantic. She says: “Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms; each lover would then experience himself as himself and as the other: neither would abdicate his transcendence, they would not mutilate themselves; together they would both reveal values and ends in the world. For each of them, love would be the revelation of self through the gift of self and the enrichment of the universe.” In romantic love, an ideal relationship is where lovers are able freely to choose one another rather than coming together out of a dependent or weak situation, or from a desire to possess one another. Yes in Being and Nothingness , Sartre implies that there isn’t really any way out of that vicious cycle; but Beauvoir’s philosophy is a direct response to that. She thought we could overcome it with generosity and equality. Also, Sartre later came closer to Beauvoir’s way of thinking and conceded that he might have missed something about reciprocal recognition of freedoms. In Notebooks for an Ethics he says that maybe authentic love is possible. Maybe we can “rejoice” in others without trying to possess them. However, he wasn’t entirely convinced because he also suggests that to overcome sadism and masochism might be to overcome love itself."

"This is the classic—I couldn’t not include The Second Sex, especially because it’s one of the reasons that Beauvoir has been misunderstood in the English-speaking world. Despite the fact that it’s the source of a lot of her fame, the first translation of The Second Sex in 1953 was published by a zoologist by the name of H M Parshley. He cut 15% of the material in the book and much of that was women speaking in their own voices about their experience. He didn’t have philosophical French; he didn’t understand existentialism. Also, at the time it was published, Blanche Knopf, who made the deal with Parshley to translate it, thought that existentialism was a dead duck. She tried to get him to tone it down because she thought it was a passing fad. So, for well over 50 years, when people read The Second Sex in English, they were only reading 85% of it and they weren’t even reading it with Beauvoir’s philosophical emphases in place. She did read it and said that it was very upsetting that so much of what was important to her should be omitted. It seems clear that she felt she had little choice in the matter of how it came out. Yes, it came out in 2009 in the UK and 2010 in the US. What Beauvoir did in The Second Sex —which was originally published in two volumes in 1949—was to set out the facts and myths about what it means to be a woman in the first volume. She looked at what biology, history and literature had to say about what it meant to be a woman and she came to the conclusion that these things really only gave people a definition of what it meant to be a woman from the standpoint of men. Nobody had ever asked to her satisfaction the question of what it means to be a woman to women themselves. “Beauvoir said, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”” In the second volume, she turns to consider the lived experience of women, and she organized the volume in the stages of a woman’s life. She modified a phrase from a now-forgotten French philosopher, Alfred Fouillée, who said, “One is not born, but rather becomes, free.” He was interested in the philosophical debates between freedom and determinism. He thought that freedom was a special kind of concept, because if you want to be free, your desire to be free can override other desires. For example, if you want to be free from an addiction to cigarettes, that can override the desire for the cigarettes themselves. Beauvoir said, at the beginning of the second volume, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” She thought there were significant ways in which women’s education encouraged them not to become themselves—to subordinate themselves to men’s desires. So, she looked at childhood and many experiences common to female bodies to try to understand from women’s own voices how they experience the myths that men had made of them. In terms of methodology, she did both. She didn’t always say explicitly that that was what she was doing. She quoted a lot from women in their own voices. She needed to do that when talking about experiences like motherhood, which she hadn’t had herself. She combed through written records of women’s experiences, which was very difficult because one of the features of women’s oppression was that they did not have the means or the education to record their experiences in the same quantity or quality that men did. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . She also drew on her own experience. It’s one of the things that’s been fascinating as a biographer, rereading The Second Sex as she describes experiences that definitely happened to her or close friends and contemporaries without directly attributing them to people. In some cases, they are quite distinctive experiences that make them easily recognizable. What she was trying to do was to let women give voice to their own dissatisfaction. There’s a metaphor that she frequently uses, that women are too frequently reduced to being seen by men and they self-objectify themselves to try to conform to the desirable ideals that men have of them. She wanted women to be able to become ‘the eye that sees’—that is to say that they see the world and that what they see should shape it. Yes, and one of the things that’s fascinating about Beauvoir’s analysis is that she wrote it in a period when French philosophers were starting to do the phenomenology of the body for the first time. So, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in 1943 and 1945 dedicated chapters of philosophy to analyzing the experience of embodiment. “Coming of age unfortunately means becoming an object” Beauvoir explicitly criticizes both of them. She says that in the feminine condition, the experience of puberty for women always involves recognizing that you are already objectified. You become what she calls ‘prey’ because there’s so much sexual objectification of women. Coming of age unfortunately means becoming an object. Yes, there are lots of reasons to object to it. It’s definitely of its time in significant respects. The chapter on biology is clearly written in 1949. Her methodology was inspired, in part, by a Swedish sociologist called Gunnar Myrdal. He had written a book called The American Dilemma, analyzing the situation with respect to race in America in the 1940s. Myrdal said that there was a principle of cumulation which is importantly distinct from a vicious cycle. What happens when you have a principle of cumulation is that people are systematically oppressed. Then they’re judged to be incapable of performing to the same level as the non-oppressed as a matter of nature. So people make nature judgments on the basis of contingent historical situations. Yes, it’s similar. He thought this was the dynamic at work in America with respect to race. The hopeful element of this is that the situation can change as people have access to better opportunities. Beauvoir incorporated analogies between race and sex in her analysis in ways that some people now find problematic. The book has also been called a village study of Parisian intellectual life because she’s generalizing from the experience of women she knew and privileged women writers, who could leave a record of their lives, to speak for womankind. But I don’t think she does that. There are cases where I wish she were more measured in her claims, but it’s a very important part of her argument that the situation of every woman is different. She doesn’t just think the situation of all women in Paris in 1949 is identical. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Of course, your access to money and support and relationships and all the other kinds of resources that humans need to flourish is going to affect your possibilities in the world. But in addition to acknowledging the variation that exists between individual women’s situations, she thought there were some structural problems that needed to be addressed."