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"“One day I wanted to explain myself to myself �� and it struck me with a sort of surprise that the first thing I had to say was ‘I am a woman.’�� —Beauvoir in an interview

The Second Sex begins with the concept of Otherness, using Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave as its basis: Two men struggle for supremacy over each other—even unto death—until one is conquered to become the slave of the stronger master. The slave is reduced to an object in the eyes of the master, a mere instrument of his will. But it’s a hollow victory, because the master desires the recognition of the slave, but, because he doesn’t recognize the slave’s humanity, he can’t have it. Throughout history, as Beauvoir describes it, women have taken no part in this struggle—it’s men who are recognized by other men as human beings, men who become masters or slaves. Man, in his relationship with woman, dreams of being recognized without having to engage in the dialectic. Thus man remains the One. Woman—goddess, virgin, temptress—the Other.

Beauvoir’s history of man’s inhumanity to woman makes horribly fascinating reading:

At the end of the seventeenth century, Lady Winchilsea, a childless noblewoman, attempts the feat of writing; some passages of her work show she had a sensitive and poetic nature; but she was consumed by hatred, anger, and fear:

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,
Such an intruder on the rights of men,
Such a presumptuous creature is esteemed,
The fault by no virtue can be redeemed.

Almost all her work is filled with indignation about woman’s condition. The Duchess of Newcastle’s case is similar; also a noblewoman, she creates a scandal by writing. “Women live like cockroaches or owls, they die like worms,�� she furiously writes. Insulted and ridiculed, she had to shut herself up in her domain; and in spite of a generous temperament and going half-mad, she produced nothing more than wild imaginings.

Over and over again, Beauvoir compares the treatment of women (somewhat dubiously) to that of other Others, such as Jews and black Americans. The difference is that

[Women] live dispersed among men, tied by homes, work, economic interests, and social conditions to certain men—fathers or husbands—more closely than to other women. As bourgeois women, they are in solidarity with bourgeois men and not with women proletarians; as white women, they are in solidarity with white men and not with black women. The proletariat could plan to massacre the whole ruling class; a fanatic Jew or black could dream of seizing the secret of the atomic bomb and turning all of humanity entirely Jewish or entirely black: but a woman could not even dream of exterminating males. The tie that binds her to her oppressors is unlike any other. The division of the sexes is a biological given, not a moment in human history.

“One is not born,�� Beauvoir famously writes, “but rather becomes, woman�� [On ne naît pas femme : on le devient]. The book analyzes all the elements of this becoming. Formative years, from little girl to old woman. Situations—woman as wife, mother, lover, prostitute�� Beauvoir illustrates the production of the creature described as feminine, with lavish quotations from literature and clinical psychology cases, mostly those of Wilhelm Stekel. She never loses sight of her central thesis, that femininity is a social construct. She justly denounces the way in which “man�� has been equated with “human,�� has monopolized transcendence—which, according to her, is what makes us human—and condemned woman to immanence. She takes it for a fact that transcendence is hierarchically superior to immanence—activity to passivity. “It is not in giving life but in risking his life that man raises himself above the animal.�� This is why, ever since the cave age, “superiority has been granted not to the sex that gives birth but to the one that kills.��

Here’s Beauvoir on pregnancy:

When she feels the child in her heavy belly or when she presses it against her swollen breasts, the mother accomplishes the fusion she sought in the arms of the male, and that is refused as soon as it is granted. She is no longer an object subjugated by a subject; nor is she any longer a subject anguished by her freedom, she is this ambivalent reality: life. Her body is finally her own since it is the child’s that belongs to her. Society recognizes this possession in her and endows it with a sacred character. She can display her breast that was previously an erotic object, it is a source of life: to such an extent that pious paintings show the Virgin Mary uncovering her breast and begging her Son to save humanity. Alienated in her body and her social dignity, the mother has the pacifying illusion of feeling she is a being in itself, a ready-made value.

But this is only an illusion. Because she does not really make the child: it is made in her; her flesh only engenders flesh: she is incapable of founding an existence that will have to found itself; creations that spring from freedom posit the object as a value and endow it with a necessity: in the maternal breast, the child is unjustified, it is still only a gratuitous proliferation, a raw fact whose contingence is symmetrical with that of death. The mother can have her reasons for wanting a child, but she cannot give to this other—who tomorrow is going to be—his own raisons d’être; she engenders him in the generality of his body, not in the specificity of his existence.

“Her body has been given a destination that transcends it��; “she is the prey of the species.�� “Day after day a polyp born of her flesh and foreign to it is going to fatten in her.�� Etc. But men—men stride out of their caves wielding their clubs in their fists, or sally forth to battle like the dawn breaking over the horizon. I’m half-kidding, of course. The important thing is that Beauvoir demonstrates that woman was made, which means that she can remake herself. “Her destiny is not fixed in eternity.�� It’s true, a certain “feminine charm�� risks turning to dust. But it’s also true that “by doing away with slave markets, we destroyed those great plantations lined with azaleas and camellias, we dismantled the whole delicate Southern civilization; old lace was put away in the attics of time along with the pure timbres of the Sistine castrati.�� Beauvoir explains how much happier men and women will be in a world where sexual inequality is eliminated.

Let us beware lest our lack of imagination impoverish the future; the future is only an abstraction for us; each of us secretly laments the absence in it of what was; but tomorrow’s humankind will live the future in its flesh and in its freedom; that future will be its present, and humankind will in turn prefer it; new carnal and affective relations of which we cannot conceive will be born between the sexes: friendships, rivalries, complicities, chaste or sexual companionships that past centuries would not have dreamed of are already appearing. For example, nothing seems more questionable to me than a catchphrase that dooms the new world to uniformity and then to boredom. I do not see an absence of boredom in this world of ours nor that freedom has ever created uniformity.

Highly recommended despite my reservations."